Recognizing Women in Music

Thao Nguyen from the folk-pop band Thao and the Get Down Stay Down

I would consider myself to be a self-described music junkie, an album enthusiast, and record obsessed. I like and collect most music that comes my way, creating a lot of levels of terrible guilty music pleasures. But it wasn’t until recently that I cared to look more closely at the content of what I was listening to. I began to consider my musical choices after many recent discussions in a few of my classes prompted the thought. In these discussions, we’ve been talking about the gender gap and a general lack of women artists in art museums. In art museums, only 3% of artists in major and special collections are female. Women are rarely asked to be included in retrospective shows and are severely unrepresented. This situation is far too similar to that of the music world.

None of the artists in my list of last-played music were women. The closest I came to was a duet between a male and female artist, but even in that case, the female singer wasn’t the main part. Despite the sudden and unsurprising spike in Beyoncé’s popularity, one would think we’d be banning together for representation of more female artists in music, especially independent artists.  Even when speaking in terms of indie and underground rock, male singers are more played and more highly supported than females. They get played more on the radio, asked to play more shows, and invited to more festivals. Male artists are being supported more; we should be helping all the talented female independent artists that we can. By supporting these artists, we are lending a helping hand to closing one of the many gender gaps that women face in the professional world.

We hold up singers like Miley Cyrus, tongue out and all, at god-like standards. We support them in their lyrics that are all too similar to their male counterparts’. They want to be at the same successful level as the men, so in order to gain proper popularity, they sing about the same topics they do. In many cases, they do so in the same tone and perspective, but the honest truth is they don’t have the same perspective as their male comrades. They have an independent and unique perspective on life and emotion. It is different and it is good. There are so many female singers who deserve so much more recognition for their music and serve as strong examples for role models in the music industry. I could rattle off a handful for you, but I’ll only give you a few and have you look them up. They’ve become staples in my musical identity over the years and the kind of women I’d like to see make it successfully in the music industry. Look up: Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, Jenny Lewis (of Rilo Kiley fame), Sarah Jaffe, Lily & Madeleine, First Aid Kit, etc. There are so many others, they just need to be recognized.

Image Source

Grace Poole

Art Director Scr ’16