Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary

CAN YOU see the iridescent thread that connects Big Mama Thornton’s revolutionary roar to Bikini Kill’s riotous scream? Or the mirror-image reflections of Nirvana’s subversive ambiguity? All this and more sparkle through this pocket history of pop music through the lens of gender, written by one of today’s deftest cultural critics. “The gender binary cannot really be broken because the gender binary has never been whole,” Sasha Geffen writes.