FEATURE:
The View from the Lighthouse
IN THIS PHOTO: Stevie Nicks
Bringing Abortion Rights into Music
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I have said before…
PHOTO CREDIT: MART PRODUCTION/Pexels
how politics and big subjects is not coming into music as much as it should be. A Hip-Hop community once ignited and united against by injustice, oppression, racism and social inequality seemingly far less concerned and motivated at a time when it is rife and widespread. Pop music once confronting subjects like the AIDs epidemic, inequalities and serious subjects. That is not to say that music is devoid of this sort of activism and awareness. In fact, many artists are addressing bigger themes and things beyond their own lives. However, as we are seeing genocide and bloodshed on the news every day, there is a definite vacant space. Where artists should be shouting and asking for action! Think about women’s rights and violence affecting them. Whereas a few female artists are tackling this, why is this not a bigger topic and talking point in the modern landscape?! There should be nothing preventing artists across every genre speaking out. Label consequences, fan division or a lack of commercial and radio play success should not hold back bringing very important subjects to the fore! And yet it is. More than it should be. I do wonder about the motivation of a lot of artists. Those with the most lure and appeal should be using their platforms to really tackle vital areas. Reproductive rights are especially vital when it comes to song subject matter. Though it does not really affect women in the U.K. music, it is a major issue in the U.S. The almost illegality of abortion right across wide swathes of the nation. Throughout many states there is a Stone Age and biblical approach to abortion rights, it is insanity that the most powerful nation on Earth dictates women’s bodies! Forcing countless women to carry children against their wills. Dictating their safe right to abortions. This seeming puritanical approach is endangering so many women and forcing many to travel to other countries to abort. Others self-aborting or carrying through delivery and then giving children up for adoption. We should not live in a time when governments and controlling women’s rights and bodies. It is shocking enough to see it in countries in other continents. Where women are not allowed to show their faces in public or even speak. Seek education. Prehistoric and barbaric conditions that exist here are often seen as less appalling though, no matter how wealthy or progressive a country might seem, any prohibition or law like this is barbaric!
PHOTO CREDIT: Emma Guliani/Pexels
In the U.S., in 2024, women have fewer rights over their bodies then they did a decade ago! Every year should see progress towards equal rights and greater respect for women. That may sound horribly naïve and idyllic of me, yet how can we go backwards?! In music, abortion rights seem almost taboo. How many artists are discussing it right now?! Why left only to women to discuss an issue that also affects men too. Not only from a paternal viewpoint, also their care and consideration for women’s autonomy and reproductive rights?! Perhaps many artists feel like it is too divisive an issue or a hot potato. Something that could split their fanbase or incur backlash. As I say, there are moments when artists need to cross a picket line or barrier and speak out regardless of the consequences. Especially when it comes to something as important as abortion rights in the U.S. That is why Stevie Nicks’ new song. The Lighthouse, is so important. The music icon released the track last week. The Guardian provide more details about a very urgent, important and timely musical release:
“Stevie Nicks has released a forthright new single, The Lighthouse, inspired by the fight to reinstate abortion rights in the US.
Nicks wrote the robust, swaggering rock song in the aftermath of the June 2022 decision by the US supreme court to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that Americans had a constitutional right to abortion.
“It seemed like overnight, people were saying, ‘What can we, as a collective force, do about this?’” Nicks said. “For me, it was to write a song. It took a while because I was on the road. Then early one morning I was watching the news on TV and a certain newscaster said something that felt like she was talking to me – explaining what the loss of Roe v Wade would come to mean. I wrote the song the next morning and recorded it that night.
“That was September 6, 2022. I have been working on it ever since. I have often said to myself, ‘This may be the most important thing I ever do. To stand up for the women of the United States and their daughters and granddaughters – and the men that love them.’ This is an anthem.”
In the song, Nicks casts herself as the titular lighthouse, guiding women to campaign for their rights. “I want to teach them to fight / I want to tell them this has happened before, don’t let it happen again,” she sings.
The chorus is similarly a call to action: “They’ll take your soul, take your power, unless you stand up, take it back / Try to see the future and get mad / It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had / And you don’t have much time to get it back.”
Nicks is backed by Sheryl Crow, who plays guitar and bass as well as singing backing vocals. Crow also co-produced the song with 13-time Grammy winning Dave Cobb.
The Lighthouse has been released amid a US election campaign where abortion access has been at the forefront of campaigning.
Trump installed the supreme court justices who overturned the decision during Joe Biden’s presidency, and has boasted about it: “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v Wade,” he said in May. In August he said he had “no regrets” about the court decision, saying: “The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue. It’s being solved at the state level and people are very happy about it.”
Kamala Harris has repeatedly criticised Trump on the issue, characterising him earlier this week as “the person who said women should be punished for exercising a decision that they, rightly, should be able to make about their own body and future”.
With abortion law now decided at a state level, 14 states have banned abortion with another 11 described as “hostile” to it by the Center for Reproductive Rights. Research published this month by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health found that doctors are being forced to provide substandard care by making women take unviable pregnancies to full term”.
Think about songs that tackled abortion rights back then. Even though abortion is not Illegal throughout the whole of the U.S., it is looking more likely more and more states will outlaw it. Let’s hope that if Kamala Harris is elected President later this year, there is going to be a bigger push to put abortion rights for all women on the table and through Congress. That there is a chance that all states across America one day will legalise abortion without any addendums or caveats. That is the basic right of every woman! Yet abortion, in so many states, is seen as shameful or murder. Even if 2022 was a year when many artists spoke out against the prohibition of abortion across multiple U.S. states, the desired wave of songs tackling this did not quite occur. I want to bring in some of this article from 2022. Pitchfork talked about the soundtrack of abortion rights – not a mix one would see popping up on Spotify! – through the past fifty years. How it has been highlighted by many women in powerful and different ways:
“It felt like 110 in the sun when the Reproductive Liberation March paraded through downtown Dallas in July, following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But even amid the heat wave, the Black women from the Afiya Center who organized the event, as well as hundreds of other protestors, gathered with their signs and all the water they could carry to march and chant.
Joining them was a local band called the Hot Topics, who played several 1990s alt-rock classics. Desera “Dez” Moore, the group’s singer, said this choice was purposeful. “I was trying to keep the energy light and encouraging toward the beginning, with songs like ‘Drops of Jupiter’ and ‘Semi-Charmed Life,’ to bring people in with a positive light. Then halfway through, switch to songs that conveyed my frustration and rage.” Moore’s fury included a double hit of Alanis Morissette (“Ironic” and “You Oughta Know”) and the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong.” The crowd’s visceral reaction to these songs offered yet another reminder that this protest was an unflinching response to the loss of human rights.
Over the last few months, the sound of the abortion rights movement has been expressed through various styles and emotions, some more forthright than others. It’s Olivia Rodrigo and Lily Allen singing “Fuck You,” retrofitting a bratty pop song with lyrics that speak to what’s happening now. It’s Megan Thee Stallion leading chants of “my body, my motherfucking choice” alongside gloriously blunt rap anthems like “Plan B.” It’s the catharsis of screaming “I Know the End” along with Phoebe Bridgers, who has been transparent about her own abortion. The music often serves as an acknowledgement of the sadness and grief around the difficult decision to have an abortion in the first place.
There haven’t been many songs released that speak directly to the issue, so people are getting creative, sometimes retrofitting unlikely pop hits to bolster the cause. Hence the Chainsmokers’ “Paris,” with its chorus of “If we go down then we go down together,” becoming an unofficial anthem of solidarity for women on TikTok. This isn’t a new phenomenon; there never have been a lot of songs about abortion specifically. But, historically, whenever abortion rights are threatened, songs about inequality are used to meet the moment.
Musical protest around abortion dates all the way back to the second wave feminist movement in the ’60s and ’70s. Music was only a small part of the overall movement at the time, but the songs that were inspired by it were brash and audacious. In 1968, Dolly Parton released Just Because I’m a Woman, her first solo album after ending her longtime musical partnership with fellow country star Porter Wagoner. The most powerful song on that album is “The Bridge,” a first-person story of a woman who is pregnant and was abandoned by her lover. At the end of the song, she dies by suicide. Abortion wouldn’t become federal law in the United States until 1973, but that character embodied all of the women dealing with a significant wage gap, an injustice that would stop them from caring for their unborn children alone. It also illustrated the reality that women were prohibited from getting a line of credit in their own names, and faced the possibility of being fired if they got pregnant. If “Just Because I’m a Woman” was a protest song about society’s sexist double standards, then “The Bridge” was the sound of an internal revolution.
That same year, Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” and “Think” dropped a hammer on the idea of putting up with trifling men, as did the Supremes’ “Love Child,” in which a woman asks her lover to wait to have sex and consider how tough the life of a child of two unprepared parents could be. In 1969, Roberta Flack mentioned that “unwed mothers need abortion” in “Compared to What,” an anti-war song. Loretta Lynn’s 1971 song “One’s on the Way” includes a passionate mention of “the girls in New York City, they all march for women’s lib,” followed by the hope that the birth control pill, which would become available to single women in 1972, would change the world. But its main character still faces the issues of the day: She has too many kids, too much work to do around the house, and a husband who is no help at all.
The universally recognized song of the women’s movement in the ’70s was Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.” But it wasn’t exactly compatible with the abortion rights movement, thanks to the lyric, “I’m still an embryo/With a long, long way to go.” For some, though, the overall sentiment of the song still gave a sense of empowerment they craved. Second wavers including Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Nico, and Carly Simon released career-defining albums around the time Roe was decided, with songs about the inequities that the women’s liberation movement aimed to change, or the freedoms that sexual agency brought women. But very few wrote about the desperation of not having control over their bodies. Instead, many of these songs tapped into the dark, melancholy feelings that came from experiences of oppression”.
Artists did react to the decision by the Supreme Court’s “decision on Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization on Friday, effectively overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that codified the right to abortion, social media predictably exploded with myriad responses”. This article showed there was a lot of anger and disgust. This article names ten songs around abortion/abortion rights; songs that might not have explicitly been about abortion/abortion rights but take on new context now. Whilst this article mentions how some artists reacted fast to devastating news in 2022, how much momentum has there been since then?! In the past two years, how many artists have put reproductive and abortion rights at the front of their music? I hope that more and more do following Stevie Nicks’ latest song. In fact, another song that she wrote, Sara, is about her having an abortion. That song was released in 1979:
“Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Olivia Rodrigo and Megan Thee Stallion used the stage at Glastonbury Festival as their platform to vent.
Janelle Monae turned her presenting gig at the BET Awards into an opportunity to voice her concern.
Halsey spoke passionately during her live performances and artists including Pink, Lizzo and Eminem tweeted messages filled with fury, sadness, vows to keep fighting and financial pledges to Planned Parenthood.
Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade after 50 years, which negated the constitutional right to an abortion, netted a swift reaction from the music community.
Some artists quickly spun their concern into new music: Ani DiFranco and Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard released “Disorders” and Promise of the Real’s Lukas Nelson (son of Willie) unveiled a harrowing ballad about a trio forced to have babies despite extreme circumstances such as incest and date rape”.
It is staggering that women should be denied access to abortion clinics/facilities in this day and age. Anywhere in the world! The fact that it is quite common throughout the U.S. is reprehensible and abuse. Women not only being denied something as fundamental but also having their rights stripped. How any government thinks it can control women’s bodies and will is insanity and frankly inhumane! I don’t know how powerful music is when it comes to sparking change and activation, though the more and more artists that cover it in music, the greater the pressure gets. It is not down to anyone other than women who get pregnant to decide if they keep a foetus. The partner should have say, though it is women’s bodies and it is their decision! It definitely should not be something politicians feel they should be involved in. When it comes to women and their abortion rights, it is entirely…
THEIR choice.