Masculinity, for many, is an alien concept. Yet, we can understand masculinity in its stereotypes. One stereotype of masculinity is that masculinity possesses physicality. Another stereotype of masculinity associates the masculine with the outdoors. However, the nostalgic return of physical music points to a new and utterly alien form of masculinity.
"In the past few years, since Covid, we've seen way more people looking to get a new MP3 player," says Chris Laidler. And "Continuing one of the more surprising comebacks of the digital age, vinyl album sales in the United States increased for the 18th consecutive year in 2024." While CD sales are on the decline, “Cassette tape sales jumped by 204.7% in the first quarter of 2025, hitting 63,288 units. Meanwhile, CD sales fell 2.6%." Overall, more people are accessing their music physically than in previous years; physical music is making (or has made) a comeback. Here, we have a stereotypically masculine phenomenon occurring, one that involves getting in touch with physicality. Now the physicality offered by physical music is largely tactile; nonetheless, there is an agendered manliness to this. As this masculinity does not belong to men or any gender expression for that matter, all can embrace the masculinity of an ABBA vinyl, the manliness of a Fleetwood Mac cassette, and the maleness of an iPod loaded with the entirety of Tha Carter II. This is the thing with associations: they never capture inherencies, and so are always alien to some, outside of particular experiences.
There are a lot of interior spaces in physical music: the sleeves of vinyl records, the inserts of cassette tapes, and even the code beyond a Zune has an interiority. In physical music, we could claim to have a hermaphroditic phenomenon, a stereotypically masculine physicality mixed with a stereotypically feminine interiority. Or we could take this as an opportunity to redefine masculinity, a masculinity that embraces interiority, no matter how alien that would be to stereotypical masculinity. The return of physical music allows for an opportunity to open up new pathways of masculinity, a xeno-masculinity, which separates itself from xensculine, as xeno-masculinities are always temporary and/or contextual. Xeno-masculinities can become normative masculinities, as listening to vinyl records could theoretically become more popular than listening to music digitally.
Music fills the whole of the gender spectrum, often being agendered and gendered, depending on the music at hand. For example, "This trope that we see in a lot of naughties, early 2010s kinds of collab music where you see the male rapper singing the rap part and then there's like a female voice that comes in and sings the highly melismatic vocal part . . . The masculine person delivers the logos, they deliver the semantics, the meaning, and then the female vocality, the vocality that is associated more with eros and the body than the mind and the logos." Music exists in masculine, feminine, non-binary, transgender, and all other gender forms by categorization, but not by any inherency. There is nothing that makes Taylor Swift for women or Gojira for men; gender is both alien and commonly found in music. Physical music technologies are both well understood and nostalgically alien to many generations.
Some devices straddle the physical/digital border; consider the MP3 player. The MP3 player is a tactile device, but it is also a digitized device that plays digital files. No music is entirely separated from the physical; tracks uploaded on Spotify run through AirPods, YouTube Music is used on car speakers, and Apple Music is connected to Bluetooth speakers. Music is an invention made for a particular medium or set of mediums, finding itself straddling various worlds at once. The same goes for gender within music; how can one say music belongs to any one gender expression beyond invented intention? Here we can celebrate the invention of queer music while realizing that all music is queer. No music invented for the sake of masculinity, such as Megadeth, can express universal masculinity as such, so while Megadeth may be one individual's normative masculinity, it may be someone else's xeno-masculinity.
At once, the return of physical music heralds hyper-nostalgia and new gender expressions all at once. The return of physical music shows that no bout of nostalgia or conservatism can truly bring back the past, that every conservatism is a neo-conservatism. The vinyl players have MP3 components; the old transforms the new and vice versa. We can celebrate some forms of nostalgia and conservatism, which can ultimately only be partial. All of our concepts are alien, and thankfully, all of our music, no matter how it is played, is xeno-music.
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Anthony David Vernon
Miriam Boulos
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