Participants in alternative forms of music production often assert a correspondence between their activities and counter-hegemonic politics. In early 21st-century Brazil, actors in the indie music sector framed their performances and festivals as resisting conservatism, authoritarianism and the patriarchal Brazilian family. Yet during the same period a series of indie #MeToo stories began proliferating, with women accusing male musicians and promoters of sexual mistreatment and outright physical abuse. Participants sometimes pointed out the relation between this dynamic and indie’s labor structure, dominated by men performing and receiving public recognition, while women took on the infrastructural organizing work to make such performances happen. Drawing on social reproduction theory and feminist economic scholarship, this paper fleshes out the ways indie political ethics not only papered over structural sexism, but reproduced it – despite this sector’s efforts to organize “alternative” music economies and its self-image as a vanguard of the progressive, counter-hegemonic left. Instead, the very economic organization of this sector reproduced and affirms male dominance both materially and ideologically. Treating women not as full human subjects whose labor was vital to the sector’s economic functioning and whose bodily integrity was sovereign, indie naturalized women’s “carework” and sexual subservience, the epitome of the very patriarchal authoritarianism indie actors claimed to contest. As practitioners and music scholars alike have ample such cases of contradictions between the ideology of music practice and its real-world effects, the paper asks why music continues to be invested in as a site for counter-hegemonic politics.

By tracking responses to the genocide in Gaza, this paper evaluates the limits of music and sound in confronting conditions of domination, inequality, and suffering. While the charity single “Rajieen” (“we’re returning”) has been streamed over 30 million times since its release on October 31, 2023, it cannot be claimed that cultural recognition for Palestinians has altered the political calculus determining their life and death. After chants of “Free Palestine” echoed across college campuses, only traces of sonorities of dissent remain now that antidemocratic forces have effectively silenced demonstrators. And in Gaza itself, any evidence of the healing properties of music appears overwhelmed by the scale of injury, loss, and devastation. As Tamer Nafar of the Palestinian hip-hop group DAM lamented, “music can’t stop a war machine.” In contrast to the more familiar and optimistic slogan “music is the weapon,” Nafar’s skepticism undercuts attachments to music or sound as a social good that can mitigate or counteract political problems. I draw out this skepticism by suggesting that the underlying faith in music and sound to make a better world rests upon a faith in participatory democracy that is no longer tenable. As Western democracies move increasingly toward *depoliticization* (the constraints placed on political participation), ethnomusicologists cannot take for granted music’s capacity for *politicization* (its entry into and effect on the sphere of normative politics). The Gaza example suggests, instead, that we must reckon with the limits of music and sound as the possibilities for political change have profoundly narrowed.

With the ability to be heard comes the possibility of being overheard. When secure communications are compromised, it can mean the difference between the success and failure of an endeavour. This is as true for insurgent movements as it is for business and military interests. My research grows out of activist ethnography with Indigenous and settler land defenders in Canada when the ubiquity of state surveillance in Anglosphere countries was becoming known. This paper begins from those moments when sound becomes a marker of danger—one that collapses distinctions between inside and outside, in-group and out-group. A phone rings and everyone in the room simultaneously knows without speaking that it is the police. Changing formations of officers at a blockade indicate that an activist meeting place has been bugged. Activists are tormented by auditory phenomena that may or may not be coming from outside. The epistemological uncertainty (let’s call it paranoia) to which these examples attest is a response to the massive collection of data (let’s call it positivism). Such an orientation toward the world of data, self, and others establishes conditions of possibility for a political program. And yet sound studies as a field, following the model of music studies, has tended to view sound and music as politically liberatory. This paper draws on existing studies of music and sound’s radical ambiguity, their manifestations as data, surveillance, and military intelligence, to pose questions for an uncertain sonic episteme.

This paper begins with a deceptively simple question: can music do anything? I begin by reflecting on claims regarding music’s utopian transcendence, from Bloch to Muñoz and beyond, and then introduce a note of skepticism. Based on a careful review of the literature and supplemented by ethnographic research, I suggest that although music can and does promise an “otherwise,” it is powerless to deliver on that promise. In other words, music can’t really do anything—so, at least, is my claim. I then place debates around utopianism into conversation with the recent multimedia project “You Can’t Trust Music” (YCTM). Hosted on the platform e-flux, TCTM brought together musicians, artists, and writers to explore music’s ambiguity and slipperiness. I suggest that such creative multimedia products generated by music’s radical ambiguity give testimony to the fact that, although music hardly “does” anything at all, its next-to-nothingness may indeed be worthy of our attention, and perhaps even our devotion.