Women in popular music have created a tremendous history in the wake of feminism. They have made their presence visible by identifying themselves as feminists. Being a woman was hard during that stage. Women were not allowed to do many things due to gender inequality such as the right to vote and to own a property. Therefore, from that moment onwards, women decided to stand up and make some changes. During the early stage of feminism, women developed their skills in popular music to create awareness. They associate popular music with feminism. Although there were racial issues between the black and white during that time, both sides continued to establish in different ways, through different genres of music. Black women focused on ‘black genres’ such as blues, jazz, and gospel, whereas white women performed in musical theatres. Female artists such as Lilian Hardin, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Nina Simone were among the notable exceptions of female instrumentalists during feminism. In this essay, I will assess feminism focusing on the second-wave. Feminism is categorized into 4 main stages, known as the first-wave feminism (early 20th c, second-wave feminism (the 1960s to mid-1980s), third-wave feminism (1990s), and post-feminism (21st c). The emergence of second-wave feminism is distinguished by …show more content…
It leads toward the development of women’s presence and existence in the music industry. This song played a huge role in popular culture and music. Women started to get themselves involved in social media such as television and radio station to promote feminism. Popular culture was one of the site to reproduce gender inequalities. Women’s mind was stored with the idea of false image on femininity. “No more Miss America!” campaign motivated women to eliminate low class status by pleasing audiences with their body and appearance. (‘No more Miss America! [1968] (1970,
Nina Simone used music to challenge, provoke, incite, and inform the masses during the period that we know as the Civil Rights Era. In the songs” Four Women”, “Young Gifted and Black”, and Mississippi God Damn”, Nina Simone musically maps a personal "intersectionality" as it relates to being a black American female artist. Kimberly Crenshaw defines "intersectionality" as an inability for black women to separate race, class and gender. Nina Simone’s music directly addresses this paradigm. While she is celebrated as a prolific artist her political and social activism is understated despite her front- line presence in the movement. According to Ruth Feldstein “Nina Simone recast black activism in the 1960’s.” Feldstein goes on to say that “Simone was known to have supported the struggle for black freedom in the United States much earlier, and in a more outspoken manner around the world than had many other African American entertainers.”
Looking back on the dazzling and male-dominant world of music in the Sixties and Seventies, there stood a petite woman who was especially eye-catching. Janis Joplin, the female icon of the Sixties’ counterculture, conquered millions of audiences with her confidence, sexiness, straightforwardness, hoarse voice, and electrifying on-stage performance. To this day, no one can ever compare with her. She is thus known as the greatest white female rock and blues singer. Not only has her flabbergasting singing style innovated the music in the Sixties and Seventies, Janis Joplin herself is also character with most controversial and interesting characteristics.
Music travels in time by making a lasting impression, changing the world we live in, and reflecting on our past. Immediately, one is transported back in time when listening to, Respect, by Aretha Franklin, a song that was released over 48 years ago, in 1967. The song was featured on Franklin’s, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Album. I first encountered this song through my father’s love of music. Hearing the lyrics I could not help but feel more powerful as a female. The song made me think about the struggle Aretha must have gone through as a black woman in a time when there were not many black female artists, and women were not treated as equals. This reminded me of the sacrifices made by women such as Aretha and put into perspective how far women have come. During, Respect, Aretha’s voice expresses power, which elevates the impact of the song and coordinates with the strong rhythmic composition.
Popular music in the United States throughout the decades have always consisted of different genres of music and during the late 70’s and early 80’s, many of the popular bands consisted of only male artists and members. In an era dominated by male artists, Fleetwood Mac featured their lead female singer Stevie Nicks, who went on to transcend the gender expectations of the time and pursue a solo career in the midst of heavy adversity. Fleetwood Mac’s lead singer, Stevie Nicks, is a prime example of the evolution female artists have endured as they struggled to gain equal footing in this male dominated industry. This essay will examine the different factors contributing to Stevie Nicks’s popularity, along with her breaking these normative masculine roles and the way she combined different genres and personal
This exhibit takes a feminist approach to digital technologies in its engagement with women singers’ covers of blues, jazz, and popular songs, beginning in the 1920s and spanning through recent covers in the 2000s. Building from Angela Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, the exhibit presents a genealogy that traces the legacies of the blues women’s black working-class feminist consciousness over time and space, and across genres. It looks to explore how this feminist consciousness set forth by the blues women might have been engaged by subsequent women blues and jazz singers of different races and ethnicities through their interpretations of recorded cover songs. This article considers how digital technologies can be utilized to create useful platforms that can highlight feminist methodologies and epistemologies, particularly through engagement with sound studies and studies of the voice. In tracing the conceptualization of the Women Sing the Blues project, I aim to show that by listening closely to women’s voices on a digital platform, listeners have the ability to understand and interact with different interpretations of cover songs, which then has the potential for audiences to track singers’ engagement with feminist consciousness and social critique through a gendered lens. This article also discusses the benefits and limitations of particular platforms and approaches in the digital humanities, and advocates for the continued development of alternative platforms and technologies grounded in feminist methodologies and epistemologies. I focus on covers of the song “Black Coffee” as present on the exhibit in order to demonstrate these
Women’s sphere was as the homemaker before revolutions sprang in the 1960s. While other sexual revolutions were going on, music strayed from the social norms of this women’s sphere as well. “Another fundamental role of music within the countercultural movement was to provide female artists with ability to forge their own distinctive place within the music business” (“Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll: Music in the Counterculture”). With this ideal of Rock music challenging group identity for women, female musical groups began to emerge. Martha and the Vandellas was one of many girls groups, which enjoyed the vogue style. Women were given a secure place in the music industry with the emergence of Rock. This new style broke through old “social norms” and styles, creating a new, refined value of
The second wave of feminism came about in the 1960s and lasted into the early 1980s (History, 2010). This movement focused on many issues of equality in culture, politics, and many other areas. While this wave is often associated with bra burning, this is an exaggeration that actually ...
Music has played a role in society since the dawn of man. Said to be the beginning of communication in early civilization, music and dance have influenced how we think, act and treat members of our own society. Song and dance are used in rites of passage ceremonies such as births, weddings and funerals throughout the world. American and African people of color have contributed a brand of music that represented a struggle as well as a celebration during the civil rights movement. This Civil rights era fueled a people to stand and be accounted for and take pride in their culture and ethnicity after millenniums of oppression. The music played was the soundtrack to this movement. Soul, funk, rhythm and blues are a music born of a culture, protest and celebration. The use of this music as a reflection of cultural issues, values, and belief has been sampled by many cultures. Though some critics feel Soul music was merely a passing fad. I intend to discuss the Contribution of music on two contemporary cultures and its effect on their cultural issues, values and beliefs.
I had already decided to include a chapter on his wife, because I knew from my preliminary research that she was a vital part of the story I would tell, and I did not want to keep her in the background. But, as I began to realize, the figure of “the composer’s wife” poses a particular problem for feminist musicologists. The field of musicology has a history of elevating composers above everyone else—and of viewing music composition as an essentially masculine type of creativity. Without a feminist lens, it is all too easy to view the wife of a composer as either a passive muse or a destructive force. Yet the more immediately appealing subjects for feminist musicology are women who can challenge male-dominated historiography on its own terms—those with their own independent careers in composition or another music-related profession. In the case of a composer’s wife, the impulse may be to portray her as a creative force “in her own right” and to resist interpretations that place her primarily in her husband’s
Throughout history, women’s only function in music was as a muse, as a man’s “impulse support, and consolation”. However, through Amy Beach, “one of America’s leading composer”, we know that women can be more than just an inspiration for men. Despite being tied down by her aristocrat background, she went against the expectations imposed on her by society and succeeded. Her life remains an example that it isn’t women who are incapable of becoming great composer and musicians but rather the societal limitations that are hindering their success.
Historically, women have faced oppression in the music industry. Regardless of genre, women have often found themselves in a world of patriarchal domination. Two genres, punk and hip hop are especially known for male dominance. The two articles I will be comparing are as follows: The Expansion of Punk Rock: Riot Grrrl Challenges to Gender Power Relations in British Indie Music Subcultures by Julia Downes, and The Spirit Is Willing and So Is the Flesh: The Queen in Hip-Hop Culture by Leola A. Johnson. The articles focus on the Riot Grrl movement and the ‘Queen’ in hip hop and its accompanying culture respectively. The ‘Queens’ and the Riot Grrl movement defied political, social and sexual norms. They both had similar goals but somewhat different backgrounds and approaches. Both articles examine ways in which each group of women fought for gender equality and how they challenged and rejected traditional roles in music.
The origins of Third Wave feminism are highly debated, as there is no clear commonality that this wave uses to differentiate between the First and Second waves that occurred prior. Emerging during the 1990’s, Third Wave feminism sought to build upon the achievements and ideas that were accomplished during First and Second wave’s, by increasing the significance and accessibility of its ideas to a greater spectrum of people.
Although women’s civil rights have come a long way from being unable to vote or hold a job, there is still room for growth and progress. Women are unequal in the workplace with their pay, in pop culture in which they are held to unrealistic beauty standards, and in a society where one in five women will be raped and only 54% will be reported. Society has proven we are able to evolve in our mind sets over time, and it may take another 50 years but we will see the changes being made to a new and fully equal world.
Common expectations seem to indicate gender roles on every individual. The males will play their part in being masculine while the females act an as object. There are several ways one can see how gender roles are played. A way is through hip-hop and rap music in the black community. Joan Morgan, an African American feminist and hip-hop and rap music fan, shows us how gender roles are being played in her community through music. Since Morgan is a feminist, she voices her opinion on the way black men treat black women in her article, “From Fly-Girls to Bitches and Hos.” Morgan states her argument that black men write lyrics ranting about black women to give a self-reflection. The males feel oppressed and express it through music. There are many reasons a male can feel oppressed, whereas one reason is becoming masculine. Michael Kimmel, a sociologist professor at Stony Brook University and the author of “‘Bros Before Hos’: The Guy Code” states that guys tries their best to show that they are manly. To clarify on how the men portray their oppression is to sing of misogyny and self-hatred in disguised hatred toward women. Men expressing their oppression through music tie the guy code of acting masculine and Morgan’s view of men feeling oppressed. Morgan describes black men express their oppression by objectifying black women sexually in music. Jean Kilbourne, the author of “‘Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt’: Advertising and Violence” and an activist on advertisement based on public health problems and violence against women agrees with Morgan on women being sexually identified. Kilbourne and Morgan connect to Kimmel by showing how males are seen to be masculine and females are soft and emotional. Morgan’s claims, in “From Fly-Girls to Bi...
In today’s society, dancehall music is one of the most popular forms of music, however, the themes and lyrics of many songs that fall in this genre tend to be vulgar, offensive, violent and sexist. Sexism in dancehall music is one of the main topics of this paper and is apparent through the negative portrayal of women found in both the lyrics and music videos of such songs. This is an important issue because since dancehall music is so popularized today these negative representation of women, are being popularized to a huge majority of people, potentially giving them the idea that it is acceptable to treat women in such demeaning ways.