For Amanda Magyar ’17, getting into radio was as simple as wanting to expand her own listening tastes.
“I thought, ‘I listen to so much music already, but so little of it is by queer musicians, and I know that there are people out there who are openly queer who are making great music, and I want to look more into that,’” Magyar said. “I think that deliberately looking for these musicians and airing their songs is really eye-opening for me to see the sort of music that’s out here, that there’s more than just Macklemore rapping about how he thought he was gay once because he’s good at art.”
Magyar’s show, “Loud and Queer,” showcases songs by queer artists that span a wide variety of genres. Weekly themes have ranged from queer rap to ’90s classics, but every playlist is based around Magyar’s own taste and draws from music recommended by her friends and listeners. The show features music by queer musicians in addition to songs that deal explicitly with queer identities.
“I did have a lot of fun doing queer punk week, where a lot of the songs were kind of aggressively loud about queerness,” Magyar said. “I discovered one band that, what they play exclusively is transgender Jewish folk punk.”
Despite her desire to unite queer artists in a single, weekly hour of music, Magyar is adamant that queer music, defined by her as any kind of music created by an openly queer artist, encompasses a broad variety of genres.
“I’d say that sometimes there can be a definite queer scene that exists as a sub-scene within a genre,” Magyar said. “I wouldn’t say that queer music as a whole is any kind of coherent genre.”
Ultimately, Magyar said she hopes to help her listeners to learn along with her as she explores outside the heteronormative conventions that often dominate popular music. She sees her show as an attempt to share music by artists whose voices are often marginalized.
“Sometimes you hear in the mainstream people talk about queer music and the only thing [is] ‘Oh, Macklemore, “Same Love” is about the gays, right? I listened to it and I cried once,’ and that’s the extent of people’s knowledge of queer musicians,” Magyar said. “But it’s not because there aren’t queer musicians out here making music about their lives and their experiences. It’s just that sometimes they don’t get as much attention.”
“Loud and Queer” airs every Wednesday at 12 a.m. on KDIC.