FEATURE:
Queens and Sisters
IN THIS PHOTO: Charli XCX/PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Engman for GQ
The Continuing Inspiration from Women in the Music Industry
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I have said a few times…
IN THIS PHOTO: Taylor Swift at Murrayfield Stadium on 7th June, 2024 for her Eras Tour/PHOTO CREDIT: David Fisher/Rex/Shutterstock
how women are dominating modern music. I am not sure what year it was exactly when we switched from that male dominance. I think that it has been at least five or six years where women have produced most of the best albums. They have created the finest and more interesting music. Some of the biggest tours. I think the past few years have been particularly strong when it comes to music’s queens leading the way. Even though the music industry, in many ways, is still male-dominated, when it comes to the music being made, women are leading, A lot of the power still rests with men. I hope that this changes. In terms of balance and equality, there are some steps in the right direction. In terms of festivals and recognition of women in headline slots. I have said this before. We are nowhere near where we should be but, the more women are ruling and leading the way, hopefully the industry will catch on! Not only do we see Dua Lipa and SZA headline Glastonbury later this month. We are currently witnessing Taylor Swift takes her Eras Tour around the U.K. We all know how successful this has been. The reviews for the shows she has performed so far have been enormously positive. Heralding it as a work of brilliance, journalists have written how moving and extraordinary her set is. For my money, Taylor Swift might be the greatest live performer of her generation. Once was the time when male Rock acts were the go-to for live acts. They were the ones most lauded. I think the balance has shifted. Not that there are a lack of great live male acts today. It is clear that the most potent and inspiring live performers of today are women. Taylor Swift is a leading example of how amazing women are taking to the stage and producing live sets that linger in the memory. That we will be talking about for so many years. I will come to a review from one of her recent Eras shows. When Swift played Murrayfield Stadium last week, The Guardian shared their views in a five-star review. Both powerful and intimate, this is an artist at the top of her game:
“It arrives in the UK trailing yet more mind-boggling headlines. In Aberfeldy, Loch Tay has been renamed Loch Tay-Tay in her honour. Not to be outdone, and undaunted by their inability to come up with a Taylor Swift-related pun, Liverpool has rebranded itself as Taylor Town. A radio station in London has been set up that plays nothing but Taylor Swift songs. A recent feature in this newspaper claimed that it’s become literally impossible to avoid hearing Taylor Swift’s name mentioned: no mean feat in an era where popular culture is so atomised and personally tailored that – if a rash of puzzled social media posts about SZA are to be believed – an artist can be big enough to headline Glastonbury while remaining unknown to a significant proportion of Glastonbury-goers.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jane Barlow/PA
So much attention has been focused on the Eras Tour that reviewing it seems almost beside the point. Every conceivable detail has already been dissected and discussed in depth, from the surprise songs she inserts into each show – here it’s Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve from 2022’s Midnights and a medley of Evermore’s ‘Tis the Damn Season and Lover’s Daylight – to the mass of visual signifiers and concert rituals that leave Swifties looking less like mainstream pop fans than Deadheads, albeit more prone to sequins and less interested in LSD than the Grateful Dead’s notorious travelling army of devotees.
Still, it’s an incredibly impressive show. It succeeds in leaping between an eclectic range of material – dubstep-inspired, dark-hued pop; tweedy folk; monster-chorus-sporting anthems and acoustic guitar-driven songs that show her Nashville grounding – all of it linked by Swift’s keen melodic awareness and ability to turn songs about famous ex-partners and celebrity nemeses into universally relatable figures.
You don’t want for plumes of dry ice and flames, costume changes – a snake-bedecked catsuit and diaphanous wood-nymph with cape suitable for Stevie Nicks-ish twirling – or indeed dancers pedalling around the stage on glowing neon bicycles during Blank Space, but it feels less predicated on special effects than on Swift’s ability to work the cameras that track her every move in a way that seems to draw in the walls of a vast rugby stadium. She’s a genuinely engaging performer on a grand scale, the big screens behind her constantly pick up on an array of expressions and asides that create a sense of collusion and intimacy.
The songs from her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, get the same vociferous response as the well-worn hits from 1989 or Red, but it does leave you wondering where the woman at the centre of it all goes next. It’s not Cassandra-ish to suggest that this kind of ubiquity and success is an unsustainable moment. Whether she’ll even try to is an interesting question: perhaps, like Macavity, the character Swift sang about in the movie Cats – one part of her oeuvre that doesn’t get an airing tonight – she’ll do a disappearing act.
But, for now, Taylor Swift seems all-powerful, so much so she can take risks: amid the big hits, truncated so more of them can be crammed into the show, she plays All Too Well – a 10-minute-long song – and it’s a show-stopping emotional sucker punch. And when she performs the piano ballad Champagne Problems, the response is so loud, and goes on for so long, that Taylor Swift looks overwhelmed again: this time it doesn’t seem like hokum”.
It is not only Taylor Swift that is delivering these staggering live performances. I feel that, more and more, the most compelling live sets are coming from women. Whether that is a new band or an established solo artist, it is clear that festivals should react to this. I know this year has been an improvement in terms of parity. We are getting all this proof and celebration regarding their live prowess. Music’s queens excelling and overtaking their male peers. Not that it is a competition or a time to pit artists against one another. For decades, men have been given all the opportunities. Assumed to be the dominant force. This sort of music patriarchy. That is no longer the case. I want to mention St. Vincent a recent gig she performed at the Royal Albert Hall on 1st June. A very different show compared to Taylor Swift, here is another queen who is a phenomenal live performer. I realise that there are some terrific male artists whose live sets are brilliant. Not to take anything away from them. I just feel that it is female artists who are taking things to a new level. This is what NME wrote when reviewing St. Vincent in London:
“There’s usually plenty of theatrics to St. Vincent gigs. The ‘Masseduction’ tour explored power, control and lust via PVC suits, a never-ending supply of guitars while the run of shows to celebrate the sugary; ‘70’s-inspired ‘Daddy’s Home’ were driven by a warm spontaneity as St Vincent and her extensive band worked through past trauma amidst (somewhat unfair) social media backlash.
She wanted something more direct and confrontational for seventh album ‘All Born Screaming’ though. “I’m gonna fuck ‘em up,” Annie Clark promised NME earlier this year. True to her word, tonight’s gig at London’s Royal Albert Hall is vicious, destructive, and pure electric.
Throughout the pulverising 90-minute set, Clark wields her guitar like a weapon and attacks the microphone with a restless urgency. Big, cathartic breakdowns teeter on the edge of chaos, but Clark and her four-piece band never let things fall apart completely. It’s gorgeous to watch, but it demands participation as well. With music this charged, there’s simply no standing on the sidelines.
In the years since St. Vincent last played London, co-writes with Taylor Swift (‘Cruel Summer’) and Olivia Rodrigo (‘Obsessed’) have taken over the airwaves, but instead of chasing an arena-sized glamour, ‘All Born Screaming’ is a visceral exploration of death, flecked with hope. That’s very much the mood of tonight’s gig as well.
PHOTO CREDIT: Blair Brown
From the crushing purge of opener ‘Reckless’ through the unsettling horror-infused ‘Big Time Nothing’ to the snotty ‘Flea’, St Vincent indulges in bleakness. It gives the glitching dystopia of ‘Los Ageless’, the soaring anxiety of ‘Fear The Future’ and the pleading ‘Marrow’ an added sense of despair, but there’s more to this show than rage in the dying light.
“Show of hands, who has a Prince Albert,” Clark asks with a smirk, immediately after praising the beauty of the grandiose venue while there’s a playful, choreographed turn from her and her guitarists during ‘Flea’.
“This song is for all the people who have loved immensely, stared at the moon, and taken that leap,” Clark says before a gorgeous ‘Sweetest Fruit’, a stripped back ‘Candy Darling’ is lush and delicate while even the unruly attack of ‘Broken Man’ is sprinkled with tenderness. As St. Vincent describes it, it’s “deep epic beauty and chaotic violence, all at the same time”.
After she dives into the crowd once more and embraces them for the soaring romance of ‘New York’, the night ends with ‘All Born Screaming’. On record, the twisting, furious track feels lethal but performed in front of a crowd, the song encourages a shared experience through collective pain and fear.
“We’re all here for one reason, and that reason is love,” Clark explains. “As far as I can tell, there’s no other fucking reason to do anything,” she adds, offering a vital protest against a world that feels increasingly dark”.
Not only is it from the stage where women are inspiring. I use that word without caution. It is right to say. They are leading the way for the next generation. It is also through albums where we are finding the best music is being made from women. Few cannot deny this. Sisters united, this year is no exception when it comes to women leading once more. I am picking specific examples when it comes to review and examples. It goes much wider and deeper than a few names. I hope that the power dynamic shifts in the industry very soon. The fact that women are dominating should be reflected in those who hold power. Those who make decisions and can make and affect change. We are still in a position where there is discrimination, inequality, abuse and misogyny. Things can and will change. I wanted to use this feature as another opportunity to salute women throughout music. I will round off soon. Before that, one of this year’s best albums arrived on Friday (7th June). From the wonderful Charli XCX, BRAT is possibly the most critically acclaimed album of the year. Following from 2022’s CRASH – which won acclaimed but some mixed reviews too -, this album has gained a raft of five-star reviews. BRAT joins a list of amazing albums from stunning female artists in 2024. I think that, as we head through the year, we will see so many more astonishing and hugely acclaimed albums from newcomers and established alike. Further proof that it is women who are changing things. Producing the most important music of our age. There are ample options to select from when it comes to extremely positive reviews for BRAT. I want to highlight what DIY wrote:
“I’m famous but not quite,” proclaims Charli XCX over the unique balladry of the disarming ‘I might say something stupid’, a moment that immediately dispels the notion that ‘BRAT’ - the singer’s sixth studio album - is going to play out like any other club record. It’s an incredibly fitting statement for an artist who hit the top of the charts with 2022’s ‘CRASH’, landed a track on pop’s soundtrack of the decade for Barbie, yet whose affiliations with the comparably underground and now defunct label and collective PC Music and their shared love of musical unpredictability define them far better. Charli may have faced a fork in the road with ‘CRASH’ propping open the door for pop mega-stardom, but ‘BRAT’ unfolds as an unmistakable representation of her very core; an exhilarating ode to the multiple facets of club culture that have formed the foundations for everything Charli has become over the best part of two decades.
As she sings “sometimes I just want to rewind,” over an unapologetically heavy digital soundscape, her mutually shared debt to pioneering producers and friends AG Cook and Danny L Harle shines brightest. ‘So I’ takes every page from the rulebook that iconic musical powerhouse SOPHIE so brilliantly ripped up prior to her untimely death in 2021 for what is one of the most fitting posthumous homages in recent memory, Charli landing a complex balance between celebration of sound and lyrical heartbreak: “You always said it’s ok to cry, so I know I can.” This candour sits alongside the album’s heaviest calls to underground dancefloors - ‘Club classics’ and ‘B2b’ - which, at opposite ends of the record, pull a thread from the past to the present, the latter living up to its name with jarring precision. Yet even in these moments, Charli sends her vulnerability firmly to the forefront. “I don’t want to feel fearless,” she sings on a record that – at least musically – presents her as just that.
The album is fundamentally bookended by love letters to raves and everything that comes with them, the thunderous ‘365’ pushing opener ‘360’ to levels set to make any heads with a conservative mindset spin. And that’s the real joy here: it’s hedonistic to a tee, and an exhilarating ride through the highs and lows of going ‘out out’, whether the fundamental friendships and relationships that are formed and lost, putting the world to rights in the dark corners of clubs, or the pure ecstasy of an unrelenting dancefloor. If ‘BRAT’ will ultimately push Charli XCX into mainstream pop’s top tier still remains to be seen, but it absolutely guarantees the best night out of your life”.
In addition to highlighting a few recent triumphs from some incredible women in music, I wanted to use it as examples of what is happening right through the industry. We will see more captivating and memorable live sets from music’s queens as we head through the festival season. More year-defining albums. Brilliant new acts coming through. At a moment when women are still overlooked in some ways, the proof is out there that they are worthy of respect and equality! They are very much leading from the front. I think that we will see the dominance…
FOR generations to come.