Sasha Geffen is a writer based in Denver whose work appears in Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, NPR, The Nation, and others. Their first book, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary, about the history of pop music as a vessel for gender nonconformity, was published by the University of Texas Press in April 2020.
EB: How did you begin writing nonfiction? What drew you to music criticism?
SG: When I was in college [at University of Chicago], I resigned myself to being an English major, just because writing seemed to be the thing that most naturally fit my skill set. I always felt like I was good at it and had always been told I was good at it, so I decided to go on that. Then when I was twenty and about to begin my third year of college, I was scrolling through the U Chicago job postings website, and I stumbled on an internship with Performance magazine, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They were looking for someone based in Chicago to write about the scene there. To apply I had to write about the most recent concert I’d been to, which was an Explosions in the Sky show at the Congress Theater. Moving to Chicago opened me up to a much bigger concert scene, and writing about concerts really amplified that for me—just how many venues there were strewn all across the city that were always hosting music. There was a lot to write about, and it was kind of fun to have an excuse to go to shows by myself and think critically about the way that music made up the social fabric of the city. Chicago is a big city, but its music scene feels really tight and interconnected.
After that internship ended, I started writing for a local Chicago blog, doing album reviews and interviewing people, and after I graduated I looked for a staff writer position—Chicago has a lot of great publications—but it was 2011, and you could still feel the aftershocks of the recession, and being a recent grad with an English degree didn’t really make me stand out. And staff writer positions are few and far between. So, I ended up patching together a ton of freelance work and various part-time work—I worked as a personal assistant for a long time in and after college.
EB: I always love hearing about the random jobs writers and artists have to support themselves.
SG: Yeah, totally. But I just kept writing, mostly for free at first, and then for very little money and then for increasing amounts of money. It definitely wasn’t like a major source of income for a long time… Just a lot of a lot of work, a lot of frustration, a lot of mental breakdown those years. And then at the beginning of 2016, I got hired by MTV News.
EB: But why music? Why was that what you loved to write about?
SG: Music was a subject I was well-versed in. It was something I burrowed into in high school, and I just wanted to keep exploring it and figuring out why certain sounds spoke to me and why it was such a powerful communicative tool. My curiosity around music and its mystery has sustained me for a really long time, and, even now, eleven years into doing this, I still am fascinated by what music can do to me. I want to get at the root of it and to figure it out.
EB: You’re so right, music can stir up such intense emotions. It can be the soundtrack to whole relationships or time periods and create such powerful nostalgia. When I was reading Glitter Up the Dark, and you’d mention songs I know and love, suddenly I could hear them in my head and it was like running into an old friend.
SG: Yeah, there’s this really powerful camaraderie that can come from knowing that you’re having the same emotional reaction to the same stimulus as someone else, that doesn’t necessarily produce the same reaction in another person. It’s like sharing a secret. Music can be a really powerful like bonding tool.
EB: Right, isn’t that how we all made friends in high school? Oh, you also like Neutral Milk Hotel? Great, let’s hang out.
SG: Yes. Exactly.
EB: So how did you go about writing Glitter Up the Dark? I know your book is part of the University of Texas Press American Music Series. Did you pitch the book to them? Were you approached to write it?
SG: The press approached me to submit a proposal for the series, and I figured I would pitch something based on what I was already writing about—the intersection of music and gender had already kind of become my beat. Not really on purpose, just the music I was drawn to was playing around a lot with gender, and, being trans, I think it made some of my commentary on it juicier. I wanted to do a historical deep dive because the conflation of music and and gender transgression is very prominent right now, but if you dive back into its roots, you can go back thousands of years and find musical traditions and gender non-conforming and trans individuals from antiquity. Obviously, we didn’t have those terms then, and things from the past don’t fit into terms we use now neatly, but music performance and gender transgression have been really deeply intertwined for thousands of years. I wanted to write about the whole of the 20th century in my book at first, and my editors told me to reign it in a bit. But it’s all there if you look for it.
EB: Haha, yes. I know a little bit about that—trying to take on too much at first. And you still managed to cover so much in the book! How did you approach research for Glitter Up the Dark? Interviews? Travel? Archives? Hours listening to records?
SG: Rolling Stone in particular has really good online archives. Through them I was able to find contemporary profiles of the artists I was writing about. Rock’s Backpages is also a great database of articles from newspapers and magazines from the second half of the 20th century. There’s also fan archives! A lot of people devote a ton of their time to uploading and transcribing articles written in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s about their favorite artists, and they just host them on their own websites and blogs as a labor of love.
EB: Wow, that’s great.
SG: Yeah, a lot of my research depended on the work of people who just really love the artists I was writing about, and I’m so grateful because they don’t make money doing this. They just really love these artists and want to have as much information as possible about them available.
I didn’t have the luxury of like traveling outside of my city to get my hands on some physical archives—I would have if I’d had more time and a bigger budget. But there was already so much I could find online and through library websites and databases. There is so much digitization—The New York Times has pretty much all their archives online, and Google Books has lots of old books scanned. It’s possible to do so much work just from your computer.
EB: Seriously, if you’d been able to travel for additional research the book would have been five times as long?
SG: I ended up going over anyway.
EB: I feel you. I always go over, too.
SG: [laughter]
EB: So, Glitter Up the Dark definitely is not a memoir, but you still appear as a character throughout the book, popping up every now and then. How did you decide when to include yourself? Why did you include yourself at all?
SG: I close a lot of the chapters in the book with an artist I really love, the one that was usually my entry point to the different techniques explored in each chapter. For example, I was really into Against Me! as a high schooler and before I even knew that Laura Jane Grace was trans. Plopping those bands and those moments down at the ends of the chapters was a way of sweeping up everything into the present and how they found their way to me specifically. I also just didn’t want this book to be a super dry compendium of androgyny and popular music. At the end of the day, I knew it was not going to be an objective book, because I don’t really believe that there are objective books, and I think feigning objectivity is disingenuous. So, I’d reference myself and my own entry points into certain genres or types of music, just to make my lens a little bit clearer, and to show how all these voices ended up shaping me in a lot of ways. A lot of these artists illuminated my own understanding of myself and my body and the way I think about gender.
EB: Yes, of course. I completely agree—there are no objective books. Nothing in art is objective.
SG: Sure, there are things that people agree sound good. If you look at pop music, there are only like three chord progressions. But just because there’s consensus doesn’t mean that there’s an objective truth about it. It comes down to what’s shared among different subjects.
EB: That’s so true. Now that you’ve finished writing your first book, what do you feel is the most challenging thing for you when you’re writing nonfiction? And what do you think is the most rewarding part of it for you?
SG: The biggest challenge, honestly, is procrastination.
EB: [laughter]
SG: I’ve come to embrace it as part of my writing process. I’ve tried to observe my own habits. For example, I did have to spend a lot of time listening to music for this book, but when I listen to music, I always like to be looking at something or doing something with my hands, and so I ended up playing a lot of video games while doing my listening research. Playing video games and listening to Prince’s whole catalogue—that sounds like cheating to me, because, yeah, I’m doing research, but I’m also really just having fun.
Also getting that first sentence down—I think that is the hardest part. Ideally, a first sentence will open up the rest of what I’m writing. It’s all contained in the first line, and once you have that, you just have to write the next thing. You just have to build on what’s already there. But breaking the emptiness of the page is really hard for me. When there’s nothing to build off of, I feel the weight of everything else resting on the beginning.
EB: Yeah, I don’t know how poets do it. They start with a blank page every time.
SG: The most rewarding part, for me, is the discovery of figuring out what I’m actually writing. A lot of thinking happens on the page for me. I don’t go into a piece knowing what exactly I’m writing about necessarily. It’s like entering a dark room—you know what the door looks like, but you don’t know what else is in there until you’re going through it and your eyes adjust. It’s so rewarding just to figure stuff out and make connections and draw lines between different ideas. I learned so much while writing the book.
EB: My favorite books are ones where I feel like I’m on a journey discovering things alongside the author.
SG: There was a Teju Cole tweet from a few years ago, that I don’t remember verbatim, but it was something like constructing language is more of a searching than anything else. That illuminated so much for me. I was twenty-four, I think, when I saw it, and I realized that is such a good way to think about writing—it eases a lot of my paralysis to think about it that way. It’s really hard to get started if you feel like you don’t know what you’re talking about, so if you can accept that you’re not knowing what you’re talking about until you talk about it, it can help you get started. It’s part of the process. It makes things a lot more fluid.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?
SG: By Akwaeke Emezi from this essay on The Cut:
It has been grueling to remake myself each time I learn more about who or what I am—to take the steps that such remaking requires, to bear the costs. Sometimes, those costs are worn on your heart, like when the people you love no longer have space in their worldview for you. Other times, it’s the body that bears them, in markings and modifications. By now, I’ve come to think of mutilation as a shift from wrongness to alignment, and of scars as a form of adornment that celebrates this shift. The keloids on my chest and the small lines spilling out of my navel function as reminders—that even when it meant stepping out of one reality to be swallowed by another, I kept choosing to move toward myself.