The Erasure of Black Queer Influence in Mainstream Music Histories

Mainstream music has always loved a sequin, but not always the hands that sewed it. Aesthetic traces of Black queer genius shimmer across pop culture — scissor-kick splits, falsetto yearning, ballroom house beats, molasses-thick basslines — but their origins are too often reduced to footnotes or erased entirely, instead we hear the echo but not the source. The vogue becomes choreography. The strut becomes branding. The original spirit, once tethered to survival, expression, and defiance, is siphoned off for style points.

It’s easy to sell rebellion when it’s wrapped in gloss. Easier still when its originators have been cropped out of the frame. A Black drag queen’s defiant stomp in a smoky 1980s Harlem ballroom becomes an animated TikTok dance. A basement-recorded SoundCloud loop sampled from a queer producer’s heartbreak track finds its way into a platinum-certified single, stripped of context but dripping with borrowed pain. The mainstream loves to drape itself in the velvet of marginalised brilliance while leaving the garment tags blank.

It’s erasure dressed as evolution, when a pop star flirts with androgyny or dabbles in “queer aesthetics,” it’s hailed as fresh, daring, avant-garde. But the same gestures, when embodied by Black queer artists, were once called dangerous, too much, too weird for radio. And often still are. What was once born from necessity of building new selves in hostile spaces gets flattened into spectacle. The sparkle is kept; the scars are not.

Still, the glitter leaks through. No matter how many times the industry tries to mop it up or bottle it for resale, the pulse returns. In every house remix that makes its way into a runway show, in every breathy pop vocal layered over a beat that once pulsed through a Jersey Club set, there’s an echo of the real thing. Not an accessory, but a legacy. Not a trend, but a truth someone danced into being long before it could be marketable.

Archive: Who Gets Remembered

The archive rewards neatness. Not artistic neatness, but narrative neatness, lives that can be trimmed to fit a documentary arc or a Twitter tribute. Tragedy is palatable if it ends before it starts to complicate. And artists who exist at the intersections — Black, queer, experimental, unclassifiable — rarely get the benefit of preservation. They become anecdotes in someone else’s legend, glossed over in footnotes, remembered mostly in the mouths of those who still spin their records like prayers.

I personally think Little Richard should be carved into the rockface of modern pop, as his scream cracked the sky open and made space for generations of glitter-soaked chaos. But his legacy is so often filtered through the lens of novelty shrunk down to a whoop, a wiggle, a punchline about eyeliner. On the other hand, Sylvester brought gospel to disco and made queerness sound like church, not sin. His falsetto could lift the dust off your soul, and yet he’s too often remembered as “that one disco guy” while his sonic children rake in awards. Whereas Meshell Ndegeocello sculpted entire emotional landscapes with her basslines, her voice molten with intimacy, her presence “too queer, too Black, too honest” for mainstream comfort. They cracked the foundation…yet the canon rarely gives them a scaffold to stand on.

Instead, influence floats untethered. A high-pitched vocal riff finds its way into a new single and is called futuristic; a synth line gets reused in a commercial and becomes quirky. Retro. Campy. These words are often shorthand for “we don’t want to talk about where this came from.” They work like sandpaper — smoothing, rounding, erasing.

The artist becomes aesthetic, and the aesthetic becomes marketable.

History books are fond of angles. The 1980s, as written, tilt toward neon, shoulder pads, and the pop empires of Madonna and Bowie. And yes, I love both. But in downtown New York, there was another story unfolding: one less concerned with palatability and more about survival, reinvention, and communion. Black queer artists weren’t just influencing the sound; they were building the architecture.

Larry Levan was turning clubs into sanctuaries, threading joy and pain into his mixes with the precision of a surgeon. What he did at Paradise Garage wasn’t just revolutionary, it was healing as the club became more than a place to dance, it was where exiled bodies came to be reassembled. Then there was Arthur Russell, not Black but deeply embedded in this exchange, making cello compositions that pulsed like house music and disco songs that unravelled like prayers. Nona Hendryx was bending genre to her will, unfurling Afro-futurist visions before the term had traction. These were not marginal scenes, they were instead central currents in the evolution of music. But centrality, it seems, requires translation into whiteness or straightness or something less messy.

Even posthumous myth-making tends to follow a template. A tragic overdose. A misunderstood genius. A slow climb to respectability. But what of the artists who lived long and kept evolving? What of those whose tragedy wasn’t death, but erasure? And what about the ones who never traded their truth for legibility?

The digital era promised a more democratic archive. It lied. Yes, more music is available, but platforms still prioritise algorithms that feed what’s already been fed. The same five references cycle in every explainer video. The same visuals get moodboarded, stripped of origin, pinned to Pinterest boards called “Vibe.” And when these forgotten pioneers do resurface, it’s often through the filter of someone else’s discovery — framed as a “hidden gem” rather than as someone whose brilliance was deliberately obscured.

But word of mouth remains holy. The crate diggers. The Tumblr historians. The queer Black kids who find themselves in a sample and trace it backward until they feel seen. These informal archivists are the reason any of this survives. Because someone decided to care. To write the name down. To share the link. To play the track loud enough that someone else would ask, “Wait, who’s this?”

Perhaps that’s the thing about memory. It resists deletion when it lives in bodies, and for Black queer music, memory has always been embodied. Felt on dance floors, whispered in verse, worn like armor and soft skin all at once. The archive may forget, but the music never really disappears. It shapeshifts. It slips under the radar and into the bloodstream. And even if you can’t always name the origin, you feel it. In the hips. In the throat. In the ache.

Sound: The Texture of Identity

Sound is not neutral. It holds temperature, memory, and intent. For Black queer artists, sound has often carried what the body couldn’t safely say. A falsetto isn't just a technical register — it's a smoke signal, a shapeshifting gesture of softness and strain. A distorted synth isn’t just texture — it’s breathlessness, it’s a coded resistance, it’s volume where silence was demanded.

Grace Jones didn’t just bend genres; she constructed entire sonic and visual worlds where masculinity and femininity orbited each other like charged magnets. Her basslines slither. Her voice cuts like chrome, sometimes metallic, sometimes warm, always in control even when chaos swirls around her. That’s a manifesto. She sculpted her sound as architecture — glass, steel, velvet. Every note in service of making space where none was given.

Frank Ocean doesn’t sing in clean lines. His chords feel unfinished, sometimes deliberately so. He builds harmonic cul-de-sacs, places where you expect resolution and find instead a kind of exquisite limbo. That’s not indecision. That’s the honesty of being in-between: between genders, between desires, between who you are and who the world demands. His music carries that ache with precision. 

And then there’s Julius Eastman. Minimalism, in his hands, became maximalist. His compositions weren’t cool and removed like the white minimalists of his time. They were blistering. Angry. Opulent in their repetition. He gave his works titles that bit back, like Gay Guerrilla. Not because he wanted controversy, but because those names were his experience, distilled. He dragged truth into rooms where it had been left out. 

Pop music loves to rebrand these textures. A whisper becomes “intimate.” A synth-drenched breakdown becomes “alt-R&B.” A high-pitched croon becomes “genderless aesthetic.” But what gets praised as edgy in one body was survival in another. And when those textures migrate — when they’re lifted, remixed, made glossy — it’s rarely with acknowledgement. The origin dissolves, the pain is forgotten but the shimmer remains.

It’s not that I think contemporary artists are inherently dishonest. Some are reverent, some are curious, some are simply swimming in an ocean they don’t realise was dug by hands bloodied from other battles. But we should be honest about what we hear. The SoundCloud generation didn’t invent emotional abstraction, they inherited it. The coded language of desire, the sonic performance of disassociation, the reverb-soaked sadness… all of it has history.

Just by looking at history, to be Black and queer and make music has never just been about sound. In my opinion, it has been about building something inhabitable. A place to live, however temporarily. You layer vocals not to sound lush, but because one voice alone won’t hold the feeling. You overproduce not to be trendy, but because clarity is dangerous. You write lyrics with holes in them so other people can fall through. You autotune the scream so it doesn’t break the mirror, especially when the world insists your voice shouldn’t exist in the first place. You whisper because no one taught you how to shout without consequence.

Even the idea of genre feels flimsy when placed against these artists. Sylvester wasn’t disco. He was grief in sequins. Grace Jones wasn’t new wave. She was futurism with a whip. Eastman wasn’t classical. He was war. They didn’t just fit into sounds, they stretched them until they could breathe.

That is texture. Not production, but life. Not polish, but pulse.

To speak in metaphor is not always an artistic choice. Sometimes it’s a way to stay alive. And the sounds Black queer artists have gifted the world are full of these codes — layers that shimmer, ache, mock, dream. They weren’t invented to be deconstructed. They were made to be lived in. 

Therefore, my question is when will mainstream media stop reducing them to influence, and instead calling them what they are: foundations?

We build on them whether we admit it or not, so the least we can do is remember the hands that shaped the sound.

Appropriation: Aesthetic Without Accountability

It’s no secret that pop culture knows how to dress up, it’s an expert in the art of borrowing without memory. However, when it comes to Black queer aesthetics, the borrowing is compulsive. Vogue hands. Deep house breakdowns. Genderless falsettos over retro synths. It's all there — in the music videos, in the stage choreo, in the cover art moodboards. The moves are remembered. Again, the makers are not.

Pop’s appetite is in some ways carnivorous, it devours. An aesthetic catches fire, and suddenly it's everywhere, siphoned off the ballroom floor, and spat out in a Calvin Klein ad. What began in survival ends up in a Spotify algorithm. The beat hits, the pose snaps, the voice cracks beautifully on a sad lyric, and something crucial gets lost in the smoothness of it all. There’s no room for the mess of origin…just the gloss of use.

For instance, a white pop girl vogues in a video. You scroll through the comments and it's all fire emojis and “iconic.” No mention of the House of Xtravaganza. No trace of Dorian Corey, of Willi Ninja, of the fact that vogueing was a language. A body talking back when mouths were silenced. It was a way to hold space, not just snatch it. There’s a difference.

An indie darling loops a funk riff, layers on a falsetto, presses record. It sells as ‘vintage' or ‘new soul'. Meanwhile, the lineage — those disco church choirs, those smoky house clubs that bled into dawn, those drag queens mixing gospel harmonies with electro synths — goes unspoken. They call it a revival. It never died. It was just pushed underground, away from the playlists with label budgets.

I personally think the SoundCloud era offered something wild and liberating. Black queer kids could upload music from their bedrooms, skip the gatekeepers, speak in their own tongues. No PR package, no genre compromise. For a moment, it felt like new ground. But that same open field also became a resource mine. Producers scrolling through tags, harvesting samples. Designers digging through sounds for ‘mood’. Queerness turned aesthetic package. Race erased through layering. Credit, as usual, optional.

Post-2010s alt-R&B is thick with the ghosts of Black queer vocal styling. Crooned confessions floating over textured synths; lyrics about heartbreak delivered with both fragility and erotic charge. People called it “genderless” or “experimental,” and that word — genderless — became a shield. As if you could strip the politics out of a sound. As if voice wasn’t already a battlefield. Frank Ocean writes about love with the ache of a man who has loved men. When someone borrows that tone without acknowledging that tension, it’s not homage. It’s theatre, and the credits roll without the right names.

The drag raceification of queer Black aesthetics has been especially efficient. A catchphrase goes viral. A walk gets copied. A beat drops and everyone claps on cue. But the cultural memory stops at RuPaul. Ballroom culture which is traditionally an entire galaxy of artistry, ritual, shade, and survival gets flattened into a punchline or a lip sync, and the cadence of a category walk becomes branding. But who still walks the balls in Queens at 3am? Who still needs that space to exist, not just entertain?

Meanwhile, house-inspired EDM blares from festival speakers, and the people dance like it's all new. Larry Levan becomes a footnote. Black queer DJs, producers, and club architects get name-dropped in niche documentaries but remain invisible to the crowds moving to their rhythms. The source becomes texture. The pain gets lacquered.

Of course, there is no “pure” way to make art, as borrowing from what has been done before is part of creation, and culture evolves through touch and remix. But the issue is always power. Who gets paid. Who gets remembered. Who gets to build a career off someone else's inheritance while pretending it's all invention. Who gets quoted, and who gets misfiled under “influence.”

The kitchen metaphor holds. Black queer artists have been cooking with scraps for decades — mixing gospel and synths, protest and perfume, confession and costume. In contrast, what gets served to the masses too often lacks seasoning. It forgets who kept the stove lit. Who boiled grief until it sounded like gold.

Aesthetic is not neutral.
Sound carries origin.
And origin matters.

Borrow if you must, but credit.
Study.
Learn the names.
Learn the stakes.
Understand that for some, the song wasn’t a trend.
It was breath.
It was defiance.
It was the only way to exist loudly without being buried quietly.

Memory, when it comes to culture, is not just about honour. It’s about repair.

Economics: Who Profits?

There’s the song, and then there’s the business that sells it. A beat can pulse through a thousand festival speakers, become the sound of a summer, and still not pay the hands that created its DNA. Black queer artists have been shaping soundscapes for decades — often invisibly, often without institutional support, often through sheer will. Yet the profit rarely trickles back to the root.

The music industry is allergic to risk until someone else proves the concept. A Black queer artist releases something new and raw, perhaps also a bit strange and electric. It lives on Bandcamp, goes viral in niche corners, ripples through club circuits. Then it gets diluted. Repackaged. A more palatable face picks it up. Someone with label backing and industry polish. The sound remains, but the name changes. And the originator gets left in the underground, still mixing their own tracks, still DM-ing venues for slots, still building a life around what others are building brands off of.

Influence becomes currency. But credit remains spiritual. Grace Jones didn’t just push boundaries, she swallowed them whole. She made and unmade pop culture before it knew what to do with her. The sharp angles, the genderless silhouettes, the tension between control and chaos — that aesthetic now walks every fashion week runway, scores every moody editorial shoot. And yet she was always negotiating her existence. Fighting to be booked, to be understood, to not be framed as merely exotic or too intense for radio. Her influence never waned, but the gatekeepers treated it like a costume to be rented, not a contribution to be paid for.

Two artists I’ve been loving recently are Cakes Da Killa and Le1f. I find that Cakes Da Killa spits with surgical rhythm, whereas Le1f bends flow and form in ways that entire art schools could study. Their styles are precise. Their pens are sharp. Their visions are singular. But they’re not framed as visionaries. They're pushed into the category of "alternative" or "niche." Meanwhile, their flows, their cadences, their swagger — those small sonic details — become templates. Mainstream rappers and pop stars echo them in heavily funded rollouts. And the reward gap is glaring.

There’s a strange math at work. You create a sound… the world copies it. You get a short profile in a culture mag… someone else gets a Grammy, and algorithms flatten it even more. A record labeled “edgy” or “experimental” surges on playlists… but only when the artist fits a digestible mould. The streaming platforms are no different than the radio stations once were. Visibility is manufactured. Access is rationed. The myth of “if it’s good, it’ll rise” breaks down when you watch someone else’s diluted version of your work get playlisted, sync-licensed, and marketed with a budget you never had.

Post-SoundCloud, things were meant to change. There was a window where the walls looked like they might fall. You could self-upload, self-release, build your own archive. And many did. But platforms pivot. Algorithms tighten. Independence can still mean invisibility. However, the moment the majors realised how much money lived in the underground, they didn’t uplift it — they extracted it. Bedroom producers became test labs, and queer innovation became trend reports. And yet, when it came time to sign artists, the labels chose safer hands. Hands that had never bled for a sound.

It’s a structural failure. Not a talent gap, not a branding issue. It’s the repetition of a deep industry logic: reward proximity, not origin. A producer who’s studied the underground can name-drop references and get clout for being “informed.” An artist who lived that reality? Too risky. Too raw. Too complicated. This is where capitalism meets cowardice.

We see it in headliners. The children of the movement get the stage, the budget, the articles. The architects get the footnote, if that. And yet, the architects keep building. They keep dreaming new forms, they release on their own terms, and they create with no guarantee of return. Because sometimes the making is survival, and sometimes the sound is the only space that lets you exist fully.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand better. 

Cultural recognition without financial infrastructure is not justice, it’s exploitation in better clothes.

Pay the people who create the world you profit from.
Fund the artists who invent your future.
Stop mistaking influence for exposure.
Exposure is not currency.
And talent is not charity.

Grace Jones deserved easier doors.
Le1f deserves full-page spreads.
Cakes deserves festivals that don’t just book him for diversity optics.
Queer Black artists deserve the whole pie, not just crumbs in a zine.

There is no radical aesthetic without equitable structure.
The revolution has already been soundtracked.
Now pay the invoice.

Mythology: Reinvention Without Resurrection

Pop loves reinvention…so long as it forgets what it’s reinventing. The churn of new looks, new sounds, new selves are sold to us as metamorphosis. A transformation narrative wrapped in glitter and pain. But so often, what we’re watching isn’t transformation, instead resurrection. Or rather, an exhumation. An aesthetic lifted from the past and styled for now, without tribute, without trace. What we call futurism in mainstream music is often someone else’s memory with the name tags swapped out.

There’s a strange kind of forgetfulness that becomes legacy. A version of history that is always smoothing out the rough edges, cleaning up the blood, re-styling rebellion as marketing. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust (one of my favourite artists, a true icon) was never just a glam alien. He was a mirror, reflecting the queer futurism already dancing in downtown New York, already stomping through clubs in Harlem. Yet Bowie was handed the language of ‘genius,’ while the pioneers who inspired him were left undocumented or reduced to ambience. This isn’t about Bowie himself — he was brilliant, and he knew where the light came from. It’s more about the machine that anoints some voices as eternal and lets others fade to static. Sylvester could sing whole solar systems into being. Little Richard’s scream was the blueprint for rock ‘n’ roll’s rebellion, but white boys got the royalties. They were rarely on the magazine covers. The problem was never Bowie. The problem is what happens to the people who taught him how to fly.

The glittered androgyny of Bowie, the baroque sleaze of Prince, the spectral sorrow of modern alternative R&B — they all carry echoes of Black queer innovation. But the industry prefers its myths neat. It’s easier to isolate a figure than map the lineage. Easier to say “experimental” than admit this isn’t deviation… it’s continuity. It’s a long, textured thread of innovation braided through pain, joy, resistance, and necessity.

“Reinvention” becomes a kind of aesthetic laundering. Historical reenactment with new costumes. A chance to wear the danger without having lived it. The sharp shoulder pads. The latex. The soft falsetto that sounds like crying into a mirror. These aren’t just moodboard elements, they came from people who had to dress like gods because the world treated them like ghosts. Reinvention, for them, was survival. Not a press cycle.

I do think that there’s nothing wrong with homage when it comes with reverence, but pop has a short memory and a long reach. And it rarely looks back with interest. It looks back with scissors, perhaps cutting out the complicated bits, and editing the history into something sexier. Safer. Something that can be sold to a broad audience without footnotes.

Meanwhile, artists like serpentwithfeet are writing new psalms in the language of ancestry. His work isn’t genre play — it’s gospel that’s grown strange and glowing, a love letter carved into the air. Yves Tumor crashes through expectation, sculpting noise and sensuality into something holy. They aren’t anomalies; they’re heirs. They belong to a tradition that’s never been fully named because naming would require accountability, it would mean rewriting the canon and  scrapping the false binary between innovation and imitation.

And yet, these newer artists are still filed away as niche, experimental, fringe. As if they arrived from nowhere. As if they don’t carry the memory of every club floor, every basement show, every disco that doubled as sanctuary. As if this kind of sound wasn’t already carved into history by the fingers of those who didn’t get the benefit of legacy deals or award show tributes. The tradition persists, but it’s dressed in indie packaging and spoken about like discovery.

The mainstream wants reinvention to feel like rupture, but real reinvention is rooted and informed. It knows who sang before you, and why. It knows who danced, who stitched, who mixed those impossible harmonies by hand, before the plugins existed. It knows that “weird” isn’t an aesthetic, instead it’s often a life story.

We should stop pretending that every era begins with a blank page.
Most newness in pop is collage.
And collage is only honest when it credits the scraps.

This isn’t to say all borrowing is erasure. When Janelle Monáe channels Black queer ballroom’s kinetic grace into her visuals, or when Lil Nas X subverts the very gospel tropes wielded against him, homage becomes communion — not theft. These are the exceptions that matter: artists who don’t just wear the aesthetic, but redirect its power. Still, the rule remains. For every Monáe, there are a dozen others content to treat history as a costume rack. The difference is that one approach elevates, whereas the other excavates without ever naming the graves.

The mythology of pop reinvention needs revision. Not cancellation. Not guilt. Just clarity. Let the future sound like the future, but let it name its past. Don’t just quote a silhouette, acknowledge the soul. Don’t just steal the mood, pay the ghosts.

Because if reinvention is to mean anything at all, it has to begin with resurrection.
Not of sound, but of memory. Not just the look, but the life behind it.

Resistance: Making Music Anyway

The history of Black queer music is a history of refusal — not just of genres or labels, but of the idea that art must be legible to power in order to matter. It’s a lineage built in basements where the walls sweat from body heat, in bedrooms where the only audience is a flickering laptop screen, in clubs that get shut down by police by midnight. The work survives anyway. It survives because it has to.

Today, you can hear it in the way KeiyaA’s voice cracks open over a beat, raw as a fresh wound, and just as alive. Or in how Cakes Da Killa spits bars with the precision of someone who knows the cost of silence. Shamir’s music flickers between defiance and vulnerability, a reminder that those two things were never opposites. These artists aren’t “redefining” anything; they’re continuing a conversation that’s been running underground for decades. The tools have changed — SoundCloud links instead of mixtapes passed hand to hand, Bandcamp drops instead of warehouse parties — but the urgency hasn’t.

There’s something radical about music made without the expectation of reward. A queer producer in New Jersey stitches together gospel choirs and club breaks not because it’s trendy, but because the dissonance feels like truth. A nonbinary artist in Berlin crafts beats that stutter like a skipped heartbeat, because smoothness was never the point. These sounds aren’t meant to be swallowed easily, instead they’re meant to linger.

The industry calls this “underground” as if it’s a phase, a stepping stone to something more polished. But what if the underground isn’t a waiting room? What if it’s the only place where the music can breathe? Algorithms favour repetition, but Black queer artists have always known that survival demands reinvention. A ballad recorded on a cracked iPhone at 2 AM, autotuned to hide the shaking in the singer’s voice, doesn’t need a studio to be devastating. A DIY video shot on a hand-me-down camera doesn’t need a budget to feel like a revelation.

This isn’t about scarcity. It’s about abundance where no one thought to look. The mainstream music machine thrives on scarcity — the idea that there’s only room for one queer Black star at a time, one sound, one narrative. But the artists working outside that system refuse the hunger games. They collaborate, sample each other, and pass the mic. They build altars out of whatever they have.

Maybe that’s why their music feels so alive. It’s not focus-grouped into safety. It’s messy, uneven, glorious in its contradictions. A voice breaks mid-note and it’s not edited out. A beat glitches like a memory fighting to surface. These aren’t mistakes. They’re proof of life.

The industry will keep chasing the next big thing, but the future is already here in a subreddit where someone shares a track no label would touch, in a Brooklyn loft where the bass shakes the floorboards, in the headphones of a kid in Houston who hears their own heartbeat in the music for the first time. The machines of forgetting are loud, but the sound persists. It always does.

Reckoning: Reclaiming the Pulse

Music history isn’t a straight line — it’s a palimpsest, layers of sound and struggle written over, erased, rewritten. The fingerprints of Black queer artists are everywhere, but too often treated as footnotes rather than foundations. We’ve grown comfortable with the myth of solitary genius, the idea that innovation springs fully formed from nowhere. But brilliance doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It’s forged in ballrooms and basement shows, in the spaces between survival and celebration.

I think of how often a sound gets labelled “groundbreaking” only after it’s been scrubbed of its origins. Disco wasn’t just glitter and strings… it was Sylvester’s raspy vibrato, Black queer DJs turning oppression into ecstasy. House music wasn’t born in European festivals but in Chicago’s South Side, where Frankie Knuckles and other Black queer pioneers built sanctuaries for bodies the world tried to discard. Even today, the most thrilling experiments in pop — the warped vocals, the genre collisions, the unapologetic mess of feeling — trace back to artists who refused to shrink themselves to fit.

Reckoning means more than nodding to influences in interviews, as it demands digging into the archives, the forgotten tracks, the artists who never got their due. It means asking why some voices get amplified while others fade to static. The work isn’t academic, it’s alive. Listen to the way serpentwithfeet bends gospel into something holy and haunted, or listening to the way Kelela builds entire emotional landscapes in the space between R&B and electronic experimentation. This isn’t past tense. It’s happening now, in real time, in the margins.

The industry loves a revival, but rarely the repayment. We’ll sample a voice, mimic a style, borrow a swagger — but will we pay attention to the people still here, still creating? Will we make space for the next generation of Black queer artists to thrive, not just survive? 

Music isn’t a museum.
It’s a living, breathing thing, fed by the voices we’ve been taught to overlook.
To hear it fully, we have to unlearn the habit of extraction.
Listen closer.
Listen with your hands open.
Support Black queer archivists.
Demand liner notes credit samples.
Fund DIY collectives.
The future of sound depends on who we’re willing to hear, instead of what the media pushes for us.

S xoxo

Written in the Peruvian Amazonia

9th April 2025