Queer Musical Ancestors: Honoring the Women Who Built the Genres We Love
- Jun 30
- 10 min read
What is it about music that reminds us of ourselves? Lyrics? Composition? Sound design? At We Make Noise, we are inclined to believe that every musical element creates feelings that cement identity, authenticity, and collective belonging in the greater art community and society at large. But historically, opportunities to participate in musical art-making have been gatekept, excluding and suppressing unique talents with one-of-a-kind stories and identities. As a result, the music industry became a boys' club, with about 3.2 male artists for every 1 woman artist as of 2024.
In honor of Pride Month, we want to highlight the queer women who, often quietly, shaped the music industry despite the challenges they faced within it. Specifically, we're celebrating four pioneers whose queerness and artistry shaped the very foundations of electronic music, rock 'n' roll, Americana/country, and Latin American song.
Then, we're turning the lens to the present by diving into three artists from our own community of emerging musicians, artists, and producers of underrepresented genders who are carrying this lineage forward and making it new.
✨ Before you read on: Which of these four musical ancestors speaks to your soul? Take our Pride quiz to find out which featured artist was your prototype, knowingly or not!
The Queer Music Pioneers
Women who rewrote the rules of what music could be.
SOPHIE | Electronic/Hyperpop
Born in Glasgow and raised in London, Sophie "SOPHIE" Xeon spent the early part of her career as a near-anonymous figure, releasing records under just her first name. Her production fused the bubblegum brightness of pop with industrial grit, creating synthetic textures that felt simultaneously artificial and uncomfortably organic.
SOPHIE emerged from the 2010s underground dance-pop scene and introduced innovative sonic textures and experimental elements that helped lay the foundation of the hyperpop genre. She was known for her adept construction of bubbly, metallic, and organic sounds, carving waveforms instead of relying on samples. Her early singles, now collected on 2015's PRODUCT, immediately made a splash and caught the attention of collaborators such as Nicki Minaj, Charli XCX, and Madonna. Quietly, she reshaped the sonic landscape of mainstream pop before listeners even knew her name.
In 2017, SOPHIE came out publicly as a trans woman, and her debut album Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides followed not long after, in 2018. The album stands as one of the most radical documents in recent music history: a meditation on body, transformation, and the violence and freedom of becoming. It moves from ecstatic pop euphoria to dissonant noise, mirroring the experience of living in a form the world doesn't yet fully recognize.
SOPHIE's influence radiates across the entire hyperpop and PC Music movements, and through them, into the DNA of contemporary pop production. Artists like 100 gecs, A.G. Cook, and a generation of bedroom producers working in her tradition cite her as foundational. Her death in January 2021 cut short a career that was still expanding its reach. The grief felt across the music world was a measure of how much she had already changed.
SOPHIE showed that electronic music could be a space for deep introspection, and that trans artistry was not a niche within the form, but a vital and visionary central idea.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe | Rock 'n' Roll / Gospel
Every guitar riff you've ever loved has a grandmother, and her name is Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Born in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Rosetta Nubin was raised in the Church of God in Christ, where music was both worship and survival. She began performing professionally as a child, billed as a "singing and guitar-playing miracle." By the time she reached New York City in the late 1930s, she was something the world had never seen: a Black woman who was an electric guitar virtuosa.
Her sound was a collision of gospel and blues, with both religious and secular themes. Her lyrics openly flirted with her open-minded relationship with love and sex, which shocked gospel audiences. Her bisexuality was known within the industry but kept secret from the public. Later on, she would tour with partner Marie Knight, forming a queer Black woman duo, which was a radical act for the time. The relationship between her faith, her artistry, and her identity was complex and deeply human, and it came through in her soulful strumming.
She played with a distortion and attack on the electric guitar that wouldn't become commonplace in rock music for another two decades, yet she did it in sequined gowns in front of integrated audiences in the '40s. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and more: all roads lead back to Sister Rosetta. She has been called the Godmother of Rock 'n' Roll, and the title isn't just honorary.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe's name is not as universally known as those she influenced, and that's not an accident. The music industry and wider cultural memory have historically centered white men in the stories told about rock 'n' roll. As we pull womanhood, femininity, Blackness, and queerness into the limelight, we celebrate Sister Rosetta Tharpe in an act of celebration and correction.
Tracy Chapman | Folk / Country / Americana
In 1988, a young Black woman walked onto the stage at Nelson Mandela's 70th Birthday Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium, stepping in at the last moment when Stevie Wonder's equipment failed. When she sang Fast Car solo to an audience of 600 million people worldwide, the stadium was held in silence.
Tracy Chapman was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of a single mother, and earned a scholarship to Tufts University, where she continued writing the songs she'd been working on since childhood. Her 1988 self-titled folk debut featured sparse acoustic arrangements built around stories of poverty, longing, race, and the desire to escape an unfulfilled life. Yet, in a landscape of arena rock and pop maximalism, she was impossible to ignore.
Country and Americana have historically been complicated terrain for Black and queer artists. Fast Car itself exists in a space between folk and country, a song about two people trying to drive toward a better life, and the heartbreak of realizing the destination keeps moving. When Luke Combs covered it in 2023, the song was brought to country radio audiences who may have encountered it for the first time. Chapman's 2024 Grammy performance alongside him became a watershed moment: the first Black woman to win the Country Song of the Year Grammy, for a song she wrote 35 years earlier.
Tracy Chapman has been private about her personal life throughout her career, a personal choice that the queer community has long respected while also quietly recognizing her as one of our own. Her music has always had the emotional texture of lives lived at the margins, of love that is complicated and longing. For queer listeners, especially queer women, her work has been a companion for decades.
Tracy Chapman is living proof that you can move slowly, refuse the machinery, stay true to your own voice, and still change everything.
Chavela Vargas | Ranchera / Latin American
Born Isabel Vargas Lizano, Mexican singer-songwriter Chavela Vargas was a masculine-presenting ranchera singer and actress who paved the way for Latin American women and LGBTQ+ artists. She is noted for her emotional songwriting and unique stylings within the ranchera tradition.
Rancheras are typically sung from a man's perspective alongside a mariachi band, but Chavela sang solo, using only her guitar and her voice. This act situated Vargas in opposition to the female lovers typically described in the music, and it wasn't just an act. Outside of performances, she was a lesbian known to dress in men's pants and ponchos, smoke cigars, and drink excessively. Mid-20th-century society was not receptive to her rejection of heteronormativity, and Vargas was questioned and marginalized for her gender expression and sexuality throughout her career.
But that's part of why audiences loved her: she refused the ornamental femininity of her genre's conventions and instead sang dramatic love songs to women in her iconic red jorongo (poncho). Even though she wasn't widely accepted at the time, those who loved Vargas resonated with her gender-bending style and music, and supported her successful career.
Vargas disappeared from the public eye in the 1970s, but after a two-decade hiatus, she reemerged with an international comeback in the early 1990s. Her 2002 autobiography, Y si quieres saber de mi pasado ("And If You Want to Know About My Past"), revealed her lesbian identity, which by then was an open secret in the music industry, but had been kept from the public. She was honored with a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007, recognizing her exceptional career and monumental contributions to Latin American music. Vargas performed publicly until she was in her 80s and passed away in 2012, at 93.
Through her music, she revealed something latent in the ranchera tradition: that its themes of devastating love and grief had no gender. Chavela Vargas showed the world that desire in music belongs to whoever is brave enough to feel it fully.
🎵 Find your musical ancestor. Which of these four pioneers shaped the music that moves you most? Take the We Make Noise Pride Quiz and submit an original song to our community playlist to find out which featured artist is your musical ancestor.
The New Generation
The following three artists were sourced directly from We Make Noise's community of emerging musicians, artists, and producers of underrepresented genders. Meet the artists carrying the torch.
NYALLAH | R&B / Interdisciplinary / Alternative
Musical Ancestor: Chavela Vargas | Listen: “Lately” | Follow NYALLAH
Los Angeles-born and Sierra Leonean-American, NYALLAH (they/them) is a gender-fluid artist who moves across music, performance, and interdisciplinary storytelling with a tangible fluency. Through celebrations of Black liberation, spirituality, and collective healing, their work crafts soulful, cinematic experiences that honor ancestral memory and future rhythms.
A graduate of USC's Popular Music program, NYALLAH's music has been recognized by Bandcamp Daily, Teen Vogue, NTS Radio, and dublab, and they have performed at venues including The Peppermint Club, Baby's All Right, The Miracle Inglewood, Public Records, the Brooklyn Museum, and more. Their 2023 EP R+B was released as an alternate expression of vulnerability, laying bare sadness and rage alongside passion and tenderness. As the founder of the Black-led creative studio Noir Studios, they produce festivals, public programming, live experiences, and creative learning rooted in sound, care, and gathering.
The connection to Chavela Vargas lies in their expansive identities, their authenticity, and their work in traditions that weren't built to hold them as they are. Chavela sang rancheras about desire and loss that everyone in the audience could relate to. NYALLAH makes music and art that holds the complexity of a life built on intersections, creating space for everyone navigating the distance between who they are and where they came from. Both artists remind us of the relief that awaits authenticity, and the tangible effects of love within community.
Joyce Tratnyek | Shoegaze Pop
Musical Ancestor: SOPHIE | Listen: “One of the Boys” | Follow Joyce
Twenty-one-year-old Joyce Tratnyek grew up being the shy kid. On elementary school playgrounds, she was the kid who struggled to speak up, but as time passed, she realized that what she lacked in words could be expressed through honest melodies. The NYC-based singer, songwriter, and producer makes music she describes as lyrical, emotional shoegaze-pop: a sound built from layered textures, intimate vocals, and moody guitars. She records everything herself in her basement using Logic Pro, her guitar, and her imagination.
Her queerness is woven into her work through her lyrics and subject matter, with tracks like "One of the Boys" diving into nuanced gender realizations, and her new single, "Lavender," expressing freedom of love and identity. As a young LGBTQ+ artist writing about her own experiences and the world around her, she makes music that helps people understand both a little more deeply.
Like SOPHIE, who built a sonic world so singular it redefined what electronic music could be, Joyce is constructing something that is authentically her own.
Joyce Tratnyek is a featured artist on We Make Noise Vol. 1, a compilation album featuring 20 women and gender-expansive artists from the global WMN community. Her contribution, “One of the Boys,” is available on all platforms.
Flower Kitty | Grunge/Indie Rock
Musical Ancestor: Sister Rosetta Tharpe | Listen: "Unreliable American Narrator" | Follow Flower Kitty
Flower Kitty began with primal rage and a shared love of Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. The all-femme grunge band, formed by best friends MK Mahany and Caroline Russo, started with the kind of audacity that makes great bands: neither of them could play their instruments. MK picked up guitar, Caroline picked up bass, and they grew while enlisting help from the Rochester, New York music community around them. Their music speaks directly about basic human rights, female autonomy, disillusionment with men, and more. As they grew in musicianship, the group quickly began building a name for themselves within the scene.
In 2025, lead guitarist Torri Ross and drummer Hannah Maier joined the group, sharpening their sound further. With Kristen Herford on background vocals, they released their first and self-titled EP — reviewed with admiration by Rochester City Magazine — in the fall of 2025, to an earnest community of femme rock lovers. They continue to play shows locally in Rochester, with touring on the horizon as they gear up to record their first full-length album.
Across eight decades, the lineage from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Flower Kitty is a straight line: women who picked up electric guitars they weren't invited to touch, yet played them with a ferocity that left no room for argument. Sister Rosetta did it in gospel sequins, and Flower Kitty rips it in grunge. In a world that wants femmes to make themselves small, we are proud to uplift free expressions of rage, joy, and everything in between.
The Song of Queer Music Continues
There is a version of history that writes queer women out; we remember the music, but not the women who crafted the vision. Queer women and gender-expansive artists have always been pivotal shapers of culture, even before they were fully acknowledged in the mainstream. Now, the world is starting to catch up with the art they created and inspired, and it's vital that we appreciate queer artists, past and present, for how they continue to shape the music scene.
The three artists you've met today, Joyce Tratnyek, Flower Kitty, and NYALLAH, are the next generation of queer and femme-fronted music, and we're proud to continue building community with them. Queer music changemakers, past and present, are their lineage, and now it's time for new-gen artists to show us what they're made of. With your ears and support, this is their moment.
🌈 This Pride, We Make Noise is building something together. Take the quiz to find your musical ancestor and submit an original track for a chance to be included in our community Pride playlist. Take the quiz and add your voice →
Want to learn more about our work building gender equity in the music industry?
Written by Iniobong Obong
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