Composition comes from the latin componere, ‘to put together.’ To compose, then, is to gather, to hold things together in particular and powerful relation. a song is a container; it holds fragments of sound in a tenuous and dynamic organization. Oftentimes, however, what gets held in this container are stories of men: their desires, their loves of women, their losses and victories. The dominant story of the song in 20th century popular music is this story. The song is captured and turned into a stage for the performance of masculinity, the theatrical enforcement of patriarchal dominance, and the subsequent coup d’etat of naturalization. Songs can carry many things; we wager that composition can gather together sonic threads of an alternative texture and rhythm to the hegemony of heteronormative popular musics.

We could (and should) criticize the politics of representation in popular music, denounce the ways in which heterosexuality and toxic masculinities are normalized. But to stop at the theater of representation is to obfuscate the structural, material dimensions of gender, music and recording. ‘the real struggle,’ as Anne Boyer notes in her poem Science Fiction which this tune samples, ‘is not between actor and actor; it’s between the actors and the stage.’ The struggle between the musician and capital, between the audience and the system of commodity-exchange, between femmes/trans folks/women/ gender nonconformists and social reproduction.

Bastardizing Debord, musical recordings are the result of a ‘choice already made in the sphere of production’: access to recordings for the listener is mediated through the wage, while the composer’s ability to create and circulate recordings is dependent in large part on those who have the means (i.e. a studio) to produce them. At issue here is a) the mode of remuneration for the composer (who is forced to sell their recordings in order to receive payment for their musical labor) b) ownership of the means of production (which, although less centralized now than twenty years ago, remains highly professionalized, inaccessible to the poor and privatized) and c) for the listener, the system of commodity exchange, all of which is a long-winded way of saying the way music’s economy is organized under capitalism.

These two issues of labor and ownership intersect with gender in overlapping ways. The overwhelming majority of mixing and mastering engineers in the United States are men (Women’s Audio Mission, 2016). We can thus speak of a gendered division of labor as being integral to the production of musical commodities, whereby non-men are systematically excluded from the means and knowledge of producing recordings.

Increasing the participation of women, trans, genderqueer and gender non-conforming folks in the fields of mixing and mastering is surely important. combating cultural norms that equate technical mastery with masculinity is a vital and necessary task (a casual glance at any mixing/production websites demonstrates the trans/misogynist, rapeculture apologist, heteronormative culture surrounding mixing/mastering e.g. a main mixing forum is called Gearslutz, for chrissakes). But a purely representational critique does not address the way recorded music’s process of production, from the design of its tools to its mode of circulation and exchange, from the way artists are paid to the mediation of listening via money and/or advertising, is fundamentally exploitative. Changing who does the work does not address the way the work itself is exploitative of laborers across the production process. as Jasmine Gibson notes in her poem ‘Bender,’ 'What are we going to do when politicians and superstars/aren’t problematic/Will you let the enemy in,’ (Gibson, 2016). Its fundamentally exploitative character is a result of the uneven subsumption of musical labor under capitalism, and of this subsumption’s specifically gendered character.