FEATURE:
New Standards
IN THIS PHOTO: Self Esteem (Rebecca Lucy Taylor)
The Reality for Women in Pop in 2021
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THIS is a rather general feature…
IN THIS PHOTO: Charli XCX
but I have seen some articles and interviews recently concerning several of the most influential and strongest women in Pop today. Before starting out, I should explain how I do not really love a lot of Pop today. By ‘Pop’, I mean more of a general sound/genre rather than what is deemed popular. Whereas Pop in the 1980s and 1990s (and a few years after) was defined by something warmer with hooks and great choruses, that is not necessarily the case today. There are some great Pop songs, though very little that will be remembered in years to come; nothing that has hooked me, and I need to repeat because it is so satisfying and hook-y. Not to be too down on Pop artists. I feel the lack of genre and the changing scene has led to music that, whilst inventive, personal and powerful is not particularly warming and addictive – the sort of tracks you know that you’ll be playing years on because they are so infectious. Maybe importance, power and something more urgent is preferred over Pop music that is more cliched and about the melody and catchiness as opposed experimentation and more important lyrics. I will save my evaluation of Pop music today versus the past for another day. Although I can sense that there is a world of different between the music decades ago to now, there are greater challenges regarding getting noticed and creating music that is personal and not being guided by the labels.
If past Pop music (or the best music around) was split between men and women, today, I think that women are releasing the strongest work – and has been the case for quite a few years now. I am going to come to another topic/aspect of modern Pop in a minute. I feel, for women in the industry, there are expectations of how they should present themselves and what they should sound like. Whether this is labels dictating that or the wider industry. Not to suggest that modern Pop is dour, angry and lacks requisite memorability. I am a big fan of Róisín Murphy, Jessie Ware and Billie Eilish. They are making incredible music that sticks in the mind. Lizzo is another artist who always delivers something fresh and huge. I will come to an article that discusses women in Pop in 2021. One reason why I am writing this feature is one artist who is intending to release a huge Pop album next year is Charli XCX. She has a new single coming out very soon. Although, as this NME article reports, things have been pretty tough for her during the pandemic, her upcoming album will subvert expectations and take Pop to new place:
“The pop star is currently preparing to release her new single ‘Good Ones’ on September 2, but made the most of her unexpected downtime during the last 18 months to speak to a professional therapist.
“I started therapy at the beginning of the pandemic,” she told Refinery29. “And that was sort of timely and very fortunate that I was able to do that; it’s been really helpful.”
XCX added that she had decided to take the lessons she was learning from therapy “into life when the world goes back to however it’s going to return to”.
“But I already feel it slipping away from me,” she said”.
According to XCX, the new album will be “very contrasting” from ‘how I’m feeling now’, the record that she made in lockdown in 2020. “I’m just very into making ultimate pop music,” she explained.
“I’m exploring what it means to be a pop star on a major label in a not very current way. And that’s really fun to me. There are a couple of songs that have stayed as a part of this new project. And to be honest, the meaning of them hasn’t changed. I mean, they were all kind of about sex. And that’s still been quite constant for me throughout the pandemic”.
Self Esteem (Rebecca Lucy Taylor) is another artist who is producing Pop music that is very different. Perhaps not overly-sweet or catchy, there is a directness and layered sound that is very much her own sound. Women are definitely leading when it comes to the best music – not just in Pop music, but right across the board. Self Esteem’s second studio album, Prioritise Pleasure, is out in October. Like Charli XCX and a lot of women in Pop today (one can apply this to any genre and sound), there is this feeling of being held back in the past. Whether that was because of expectation or the pandemic has changed things, I am not too sure. There are a couple of recent interviews with her that I want to source. I don’t think that male-driven Pop is especially affecting or memorable. Although I have bemoaned the lack of hooks and something akin to the best of the 1980s and 1990s, there is a great deal of authenticity and truth. A lot of the best Pop hides behind masks and is quite indirect. Artists like Charli XCX and Self Esteem are creating this very personal music – which, whilst not always super-fun, is definitely their own voice. Not being told what to write or succumbing to pre-conceived ideas of a woman in music/Pop should sound like. In an interview with The Guardian, Taylor discussed her 2019 debut album, Compliments Please, in addition to why she was keen to address topics such as submissiveness on Prioritise Pleasure:
“In a comedy sketch that was released to promote her 2019 debut Compliments Please, Rebecca Lucy Taylor is grilled about the imagined impact of the album 20 years on (it was so great, it “destroyed music as we know it”). With a transatlantic accent, impeded facial movement and wearing a tiara over a turban , she faces a hostile male interviewer who attempts to sum up her revolutionary sound: it is “melodic complaining”, “poor-me periodcore”, and “menstrual madness set to music”.
“That’s what it is!” cackles Taylor, two years on. “Can’t deny it!” It’s true that the 34-year-old – better known by her nom de disque, Self Esteem – makes music packed with warts-and-all honesty and, yes, a certain amount of justified complaining. Topics include toxic relationships and the insidious effects of the patriarchy. But her songs are also maximalist, danceable and infectiously fun – a wholesale rejection of the restrained indie-folk of her previous band Slow Club. “I’m trying to do a Trojan horse thing,” explains Taylor over a cup of coffee in her PR team’s dazzlingly white offices. “You think you’re getting this sugary injection of a pop song but it’s going to leave you with something more.”
Compliments Please did not have the seismic effect Taylor joked about, but it did establish Self Esteem as an exciting new pop star. Hers is not the kind of ruthlessly commercial pop that is machine-tooled for chart domination. Instead, it’s pop as an aesthetic and a mood – big-chorused but experimental too. “My friend said it’s art-pop,” recalls Taylor. “I was like: ‘Yes!’ It means there’s more layers to it.” One of those layers is camp – Taylor performed at Glastonbury 2019 in a minidress made of Boots Advantage cards – but there is also sincerity. Brilliant recent single I Do This All the Time chronicles the thought process behind not wanting to go to somebody’s birthday drinks in a droll sprechgesang over a hypnotic beat – think Arab Strap’s The First Big Weekend but fuelled by social anxiety instead of youthful hedonism.
That song is taken from Self Esteem’s forthcoming second album, Prioritise Pleasure. On its cover, she poses in a cowboy hat and extremely high-cut leotard. Its title is a rallying cry against a society that has convinced its female population they should put other people’s needs before their own. “We’ve been trained to be submissive and secondary and all I’m doing with this is going, what if we’re not?”.
There is going to be plenty of revelation and boldness through Prioritise Pleasure. Taylor/Self Esteem spoke with NME. Her brand of Pop is slow-burning at times. Whereas women in Pop, years ago, might have needed to sound a particular way or project an unrealistic image of themselves, Taylor is among many women today who are taking control. There is abrasiveness and sharper edges in her music. More width in terms of genres and sound. Something that is very real and natural to who she is as an artist now:
“Though Self Esteem’s 2019 debut album ‘Compliments Please’ won Taylor plenty of fans with its barbed take on pop music, ‘I Do This All The Time’ represents her breakthrough moment ahead of ‘Prioritise Pleasure’. Her June rendition of the song on Later… with Jools Holland was one of the most powerful television performances of this year; as the lights burst into technicolour, Taylor throws her head back and beams with pure, undiluted glee. Though she initially set out to build a discography rather than one huge moment, she’s grateful for the steam it has gathered all the same.
“Mostly, I’m excited that the song isn’t a poppy sure-fire breakthrough,” she points out. “I still love that song; I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever made in my whole career.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Eva Pentel for NME
Many of ‘I Do This All The Time’’s lyrics refer to Taylor’s own experiences – the voice creepily calling her a “sturdy girl” is based on a real-life tour manager, while many of the reassurances – “don’t be intimidated by all the babies they have / Don’t be embarrassed that all you’ve had is fun” – answer to the pressures that Taylor still feels.
And, true to its title, ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ as a whole is an album that champions putting yourself first – even if it makes certain people uncomfortable. “I’ve done years of therapy, done plenty of work on myself, and read every fucking book you can fucking read about it, and it comes back down to true self-acceptance and self-love,” Taylor says. “It’s the answer to everything, but it’s still something that you’re meant to not do. I go down this road a lot, and I get quite upset. But then I think, no – just keep in my little part of the world, my group, accepting myself, loving myself, and then make my little silly songs and do my little silly dances. And if someone can learn from that and pass it forward, at least I’m doing something?”
This same boldness is also evident in ‘Prioritise Pleasure’’s sound, which often springs up from a particular kind of steamy, slower-burning pop, and warps it – and for every chipper nu-disco bass-line, there’s a left-field touch of abrasiveness. “Sexting you at the mental health talk feels counter-productive,” Self Esteem belts out on ‘Moody’, her sheer honesty jarring with a snappy alphabet-chant chorus”.
I shall move on and wrap up soon. I wanted to tie together a couple of features regarding two of the most popular women in Pop today. I have mentioned Billie Eilish and Lizzo. Lorde is another artist who has been in the press recently. She was promoting her new album, Solar Power. It has received a lot of positivity, though some have been harsh because they were comparing to her previous album, Melodrama. Perhaps not as upbeat or spirited as Melodrama, some critics have called Solar Power quite flat or boring. Would the same words be levied at a male artist? Is there this perception that female Pop artists have to stay the same or have to conform. Perhaps Pop music has reached a new age. Can we ever go back to the days of Madonna and the type of sound that defined the biggest hits of the day? The pressures of fame, toxicity and social media has made a big impact on some of our greatest female artists – from Charli XCX and Self Esteem to Billie Eilish. One cannot generalise and say that this is the case with all women in Pop. I want to end with an article Laura Snapes wrote for The Guardian. She asks whether being a female Pop artist in 20121 has become unbearable:
“The mechanisms of pop stardom have never been subject to as much scrutiny as they are now. Britney Spears’ conservatorship struggle exposed their potential for (alleged) abuse. Raye recently split from her major label, Polydor, after she reached breaking point and shared her frustrations about not being allowed to release her debut album despite signing in 2014 and helming numerous massive hit singles. Former X Factor winner Rebecca Ferguson has called for a parliamentary inquiry into alleged widespread music industry wrongdoing. That labels should root out exploitative and predatory behaviour and protect exposed young stars is a baseline requirement. But increasingly it seems that the existential state of pop stardom – particularly for young women, subject to greater scrutiny than their male peers and often held to contradictory standards – is intolerable beyond any level of protection.
IN THIS PHOTO: Lorde
Lorde’s third album, Solar Power, released today, lingers on the damage that fame wreaked on the New Zealand star, who broke out at 16 and is still only 24. The lyrics describe her as a “teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash” and enduring panic attacks before performances of her “fistful of tunes that it’s painful to play”. She explains that she fled fame, with its “poison arrows aimed directly at my head”, as well as the expectation to be a generational voice, to retreat to her New Zealand home town for a more grounded kind of life.
“Things I once enjoyed just keep me employed now,” Billie Eilish sings on Getting Older, the first song on her recently released second album, Happier Than Ever. Five years younger than Lorde, she has reached the same conclusions one album sooner, forgoing the fantastical horror behind the lyrics of her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, to detail the depressingly humdrum bogeymen that now stalk her life: untrustworthy lovers, deranged obsessives, paparazzi and trolls waiting to pounce on the faintest hint of a wrong move. She can’t post a picture of herself goofing around with the female co-stars of a music video without being accused of queerbaiting, nor wear a tank top without becoming a lightning rod for debate about body image. None of it sounds fun, and not in the Drake “protesting too much” way.
Creative autonomy and speaking directly to fans via social media mean that Eilish has never had to conceal her antipathy to fame and how it has ruined elements of her life, unlike earlier generations of female pop star who had to sell a whole, shiny, aspirational product. That she doesn’t make her status sound desirable is paradoxically part of her gigantic appeal to authenticity-craving gen Z. And so privacy has become a vanishingly rare commodity, one she flaunts in the lyrics to her new album as if it were a coveted jewel; her current aspirations, she makes clear, are happiness and respect.
Another part of the problem is that Eilish and Lorde modelled a new type of teen pop stardom – songwriters first, extruded teen aesthetic beyond what any marketing exec could ever dream up – that nonetheless emerged into the old models of exposure and scrutiny. Both from evidently loving, artsy families, they arrived at fame via songs that blew up on SoundCloud and a media primed to fetishise anyone that chimes strongly with teenagers. (See, too, early YouTube phenom Clairo, whose recent second album, Sling, decried record industry execs staring down her top and how she warped herself to play the part of willing ingenue; it also paid musical homage to Carole King.)
Eilish and Lorde’s latest releases chime with a moment of societal refusal, firmly stating what they need in order to protect their mental health and mirroring a turn away from hustle culture towards more intimate forms of self-protection and fulfilment. Making lower-key music in the face of rabid expectation feels like applying aloe vera to a burn, and accepting a sales hit a potential way to establish a sustainable path forward long term – Lorde has said she isn’t worried that her environmentally friendly “music box” release, a replacement for the CD, won’t count towards the Billboard charts.
Perhaps we are on the brink of a watershed, definitively ending the 1.0 era of conquering pop behemoths (from Madonna to Katy Perry) that the New York Times tolled the bell for three years ago. But individual solutions can only go so far: labels will simply fill any roles vacated. Obsolescence is built into a system that works against survival”.
I will write a future feature about Pop music today and how the sound has changed – latching onto the feature from The New York Times mentioned in the article from The Guardian. Having read articles about women in Pop today and interviews with a few popular female artists, I have been thinking about how difficult it is and how there is this sense of needing to conform. Lorde, Self Esteem, Charli XCX and Billie Eilish have all recorded (are recording) albums that are very different from their previous work. Bolder, more personal and a reaction to personal and professional struggles. I am especially looking forward to Charli XCX’s single, Good Ones, as she has been posting pictures online that look a bit ‘80s; quite seductive and intriguing. Almost like she has created a new person or character. I can imagine it is harder being a woman in Pop now than at any other time. Once was the time when there was little variation and mainstream Pop especially was quite limited and formulaic. Now, for better or worse, there is a lot more importance of the lyrics and sonic broadness. I think one thing that unites many of the women mentioned in this feature is the taking back of control. A sense of making big changes or becoming more independent and honest to themselves. With album titles that mention pleasure, power, happiness and sunshine, one would assume that the sonics are lighter and warmer. That is not always the case. What we are hearing is new priorities and inspiring mantras. I don’t think things are as gloomy and unbearable as Laura Snapes suggested in her article. If the music is not overtly happy or always optimistic, it is definitely…
MORE personal and empowered.