The Dixie Chicks epitomized this in country: The trio played into classic rural romance fantasies with songs like "Cowboy, Take Me Away," but buried those same dreams with the anti-domestic violence anthem "Goodbye Earl" – on the same album. Others explored how the defiance of women in rock could work within less openly anarchic musical genres, refashioning old norms instead of discarding them. Some seemed almost retrograde: the teen pop stars whose tanned-and-taut young queen was Britney Spears, and who expressed a self-confident sexuality that was hard to read as wholly self-cultivated, but which has been fully claimed as such by today's pop rebels from Taylor Swift to Lorde to Charli XCX. The messages these artists sent were mixed. Into this fractured landscape came a diverse array of artists who took on the challenge of expressing self-aware womanhood in very different ways.
90s female pop stars series#
The unrest on the rock scene in the first half of the 1990s felt to many like a paradigm shift, but it was really a blast pattern: a series of eruptions that added up to real damage but which only partially reached pop's cultural foundation. Turning The Tables Women Are The Fabric Of 21st Century Pop In retrospect we can see how artists like Aguilera, who emerged in the final years of the 1990s, not only touched on innovations that would become the center of millennial music, but addressed central feminist concerns of autonomy, pleasure and self-determination in complicated and wide-ranging ways, resetting the parameters for women as agents of their own expressiveness and values in ways that are still playing out now. The conflagrations set by women out to remake rock in the mid-1990s had calmed - many said that the spirit of movements like the feminist Riot Grrrl been co-opted by a "girl power" strain of capitalism that doused their radical potential. But the title-bearing chorus - a list of prerequisites delivered with supreme self-assurance, leading to the central assertion, "Whatever makes me happy sets you free" - is purely, deeply, indicative of where cultural feminism would go in the new millennium, especially in music.
On one hand, Aguilera's manifesto is old-fashioned: She fortified her teen pop with 1960s soul inflections, and the song's lyrics about a sensitive (and monogamous) tough guy could have come from the Maybelline-streaked lips of the Shangri-La's. "What a Girl Wants" is a power ballad deeply emblematic of the Y2K moment, when old forms of expression were being reshaped by the young generation immersed in the emerging era's fundamental restructuring of social and neural networks. Turning The Tables The 200 Greatest Songs By 21st Century Women+
0 kommentar(er)
