This dissertation argues for the potential of popular music in the twenty-first century to encompass various forms of affective labor in response to trauma and violence. By focusing on popstars, I explore the global reach—and limitations—of their affective labor by attending to their music’s reception amongst fans, trauma survivors, and general audiences. For the performers discussed in this dissertation, their traumatic experiences are connected to musicmaking and gender: Ariana Grande’s response to the Manchester Arena bombing (2017), Kesha’s allegations of assault by her producer (2014), and Lady Gaga’s recovery from a performance injury (2013). Through these examples in which there is a traumatic impetus to create, perform, or listen to music, I demonstrate the potential of pop songs to function as affective labor and promote a cooperative experience of healing that I term “collective processing.” Music is an ideal mode for collective processing because of the interconnection of its lyrical and sensual meaning, allowing for the accordance of meaning and feeling as embodied knowledge. Through collective processing, the embodied effects of music become socially diffuse; making music, in other words, can transform healing from an individual to a communal experience. I conceive collective processing as a mode of musicmaking in which individual participants prioritize certain emotions within a group while retaining their privately felt emotions. The burden of care is thereby distributed among participants. Thus, they may productively engage with difficult emotions without fixating on their individual recovery, evading prescriptive or goal-oriented paths of healing, which remain unachievable for many trauma survivors. Making or listening to music can in this way serve as productive response to trauma and unprecedented violence. The project imagines the reparative possibilities of engaging together through music related to trauma and violence. Through analysis of trends in fan activity, social media engagement, and community musicmaking I theorize the phenomenon of collective processing as an intervention in how musicology and cultural studies broadly can think about the nexus of music, violence, labor, and community.