Female Singer-Songwriters: A Response

Female Singer-Songwriters: A Response

By: Felicia

A few weeks ago, Dan Wipert wrote a piece about the lack of female singer-songwriters on today’s charts and took a peek back to the 90’s, when it seemed like women were ruling the world.  There were even some comments thrown around saying that women should be appalled at the current female pop stars that are household names.  I think Dan made a lot of good points, but it’s really hard to digest a male throwing around terms like “slut” when describing someone like Nelly Furtado.  Don’t get me wrong, I understand the point of that statement was to compare how her persona changed through the years, I just don’t necessarily agree with the whole gist of it.

To preface this whole rebuttal of sorts I absolutely love all of the AudioSuede writers, who all happen to be MALE.  I love their viewpoints, even if I don’t agree with them all the time, I love the diversity between us and I love the fact that we create dialogue around the one thing in life that a lot of people can’t live without: music.  But as the only FEMALE on the AudioSuede staff I feel confident enough to make the statement that no woman in music today should feel ashamed at what they are putting out there.  Not even Ke$ha, and I can’t stand that hot mess.  Also, no person, male or female, should be ashamed for liking terrible pop music.

In the 90’s women were just finding their voices (excuse the pun) in music.  We lived in a flannel-wearing, depressed, angst-ridden world.  Then grunge started dying, literally, and there was a place for people like Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette and Jewel.  Female power ballads about sweet surrendering, going down on dudes in theaters and saving your soul was exactly what females needed after the grunge fog.  Times change though, and women went from feeling freed by these talented women to being oversexualized/empowered.  The word “empowered” in this instance meaning like those girls who feel “empowered” by posing for Playboy, not the Norma Rae type of empowerment.  This is when the likes of Britney and Christina came along and now the Katy Perrys, Ke$has and Lady Gagas are ruling the world.  It seems like a proper progression to me, but depending on which side of town you hang out on, other (and better) female artists are just as common as those gals.

Now if you solely look at the Billboard chart it’s true, there aren’t a lot of “respectable” women being represented.  Of course one person’s viewpoint of being respectable is completely different from another’s.  In my opinion, I don’t see how Lady Gaga is unrespectable seeing as though she’s the biggest goddamn star in the entire universe, she has a wide array of fans who like all different kinds of music, and she writes most of her music and plays her own instruments.  But today, as opposed to the 90’s, there are so many different ways to absorb music.  We have the internet now, music bloggers, music streaming sites and social networking.  Not to mention that instead of just an FM radio and MTV we now have radio stations that are playing a wider variety of music like Minnesota’s The Current and various college radio stations that are really pushing the envelope as far as the type of music they’re playing.

If you’re looking at the artistic level of a musician you can argue that the 90’s ladies had an upper hand on current music.  However, I would argue that the term “artistic” is extremely relative.  I actually think a lot of the Lilith Fair types were quite one-note (Oh God, another pun!).  I feel like a lot of 90’s music in that group all sounded the same and quite dated.  For instance, if you heard a band like The Sundays today and never heard them before you could easily pinpoint them as a 90’s band just from their sound.  It’s like they were all singing about being either spiteful or longing of men on a piano or guitar.  I feel today’s music is actually more diverse than the 90’s and that’s a good thing.

I could go on for years about all the excellent “indie” female musicians there are, and Dan made a point in his piece that agreed with this.  But I also feel like “indie” is becoming much more mainstream.  Just last week Florence + the Machine (one of my current faves) had one of the top ten best selling albums on iTunes.  This is probably due to the fact that they’re currently using her song “Dog Days Are Over” in commercials for some red-headed horse-faced actresses’ movie right now but regardless of how it got there, it deserves it.  I also just got back from my sixth Lollapalooza a few weeks ago and bands like Metric, led by Emily Haines, Stars, co-led by Amy Milan, Erykah Badu, Mavis Staples and male/female duos The xx and Matt & Kim didn’t have a shortage of attendees during their sets.  It was also the largest Lolla attendence-wise and I surely wouldn’t bet that it was just the male bands that were driving ticket sales.

This “females being respected in music” argument has been around for years and the thing is that there are just as many douchebag male musicians out there as women.  It’s just that we live in such a male-driven world that when women do either wrong OR good it always needs to be pointed out and made a spectacle of.  So yeah, that 12-year-old girl in Wichita might have just bought the new Taylor Swift single or some old Miley Cyrus album.  But that 12-year-old has just a good enough chance to stumble upon someone better like Ingrid Michaelson or Brandi Carlile in a few years.

Bad pop music is on a constant turntable and it’ll always be around, and I don’t see how females in music are in a worse state than they ever have been before.  There’s always going to be Madonna, or a Britney or a Ke$ha.  The female pop stars of today get a bad rap, but what about the male pop stars?  Nobody can say that Eminem is a real gem of a guy to look up to and that “band” 3OH!3 constantly perpetuates terrible stereotypes all across the board.  And how is Justin Bieber any different from someone like Rihanna?  They both get catchy pop hooks written for them, they are groomed to be appealing to the opposite sex and then are strung along the fame game like puppets.  Is it because women in this society are judged and put in the hot seat much more often than men?  It’ll be interesting to see if we can ever move into a world where music is just music, and it’s not thought of in terms of men vs. women.

And now I’ll leave you with some of my favorite female musical artists, with some male/female duos thrown in…And yes, a band like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs can be on the same list as Lady Gaga in my world.