The 90’s saw an explosion of women in rock music. First, the genre cleansed itself by jettisoning the 80’s hair bands with their bikini babes, replacing it with T&A free Grunge. Then came an upswell of female singers and songwriters who’s success was not centered on their physical appearance. These women were battle tested, gaining a fan base through relentless touring in small venues, cafes, bars, and even house parties – wherever they could get a slot. They wrote songs about their world, their pain, their mind, and their drugs. Or cannonballs, it was a nutty time.
The rise of women artists crescendoed until in 1997, when the Lilith Fair was announced. Tired of the music industry’s trepidation at promoting an all female concert tour, Sarah McLachlan booked a tour featuring dozens of the top female performers in the industry. The tour was an unmitigated success, proving that people did want to pay to see a festival of talented commercially successful female musicians – duh.
But not everyone, not even all feminists supported the Lilith Fair. In the 90’s I was a Riot Grrl and had no time for grandpa’s guitars. Folk music, harmonizing, gentle melodies…gross. I came up listening to punk, rap, goth, industrial – harsh synthetic highly produced music. By 1997, I was attending a very different type of event. Needless to say, the Fair wasn’t my bag. And one particular main stage artist became the symbol of the Fair for my friends. She was used as shorthand to mock the concert as a pseudo hippie rich white girl bummer fest, that musician was Jewel.
(The hilarious thing is that now days, there are multiple rich white girl bummer fests, it’s a whole genre of festivals. But at the time, we, the unprivileged, were able to focus our animosity on fewer events.)
See, in the 90’s, we all watched MTV like it was a job. My friends and I must have seen Jewel’s Who Will Save Your Soul video a kajillion times. We hated it. The reason we hated it was because we didn’t like Jewel and the reason we didn’t like Jewel was because she was a pretty blond blue eyed woman with a nice voice that you could picture not wearing shoes in the grocery store. She was everything I was not. Plus, her music sucked. So out of all the badass performers at the Lilith Fair, Jewel was low hanging fruit. Jewel was vapid and had an easy life. She was cosplaying a rockstar. To us, she represented the crossroads of privilege and shitty music.
30 years passed. Then last week, my daughter and I were playing music for each other and she played a song by a pretty young woman who is apparently a song writer. The woman was singing a gentle melody, she was looking into the camera earnestly and dancing and I think their was an acoustic guitar involved. I thought, hey, this reminds me of Jewel. So when it was my turn and I played the Who Will Save Your Soul video for my kid.
Holy Moly! First, the song still isn’t my type of music, I’m old not soft. But I finally listened to the lyrics and watched the video. The song isn’t fake or stupid, the lyrics aren’t trite and insipid. It’s not about boys or parties or love. The video is pretty heavy actually, containing imagery that is frankly far more controversial now than it was then. Police brutality, homelessness, poverty, religious hypocrisy. In the 90’s, I was used to seeing and hearing about these topics in pop music. But watching it now, it was wild to see a pretty 22 year old woman sing about those issues in a Top 40 song.
I read about Jewel. She definitely had some advantages, but she worked like hell to get her career going. Living out of her car, touring relentlessly, dealing with A&R guys back in the day – respect. I had it wrong in the 90’s.
Especially jarring was the contrast between Jewel’s song and my daughter’s pick, That’s So True by nepo baby Gracie Abrams. This was my first encounter with Abrams music. As you may of guessed, I did not like it. Although Gracie has *gasp* brown hair and eyes, she was cast fully in the mold of non-threatening soft voiced you can picture her in a grocery store without shoes type. She does a lot of whispery talk singing, kind of like having an unpleasant itch in your inner ear. But what is really soul destroying about this young woman is her odious lyrics.
Tedious doesn’t even begin to cover the coma-inducing banality of this woman’s lyrics. Her songs are the musical version of the everything beige decor craze. Like slowly being suffocating with a t-shirt soaked in La Croix. It’s as if nothing has ever happened to this person. She should call her next album “New in Box”. Of course people will respond that Gracie is singing to a younger audience than Jewel. But is that true? Gracie is for teens and tweens. But, wasn’t Jewel’s audience the same age? Some will say “Well, Gracie’s audience is more innocent, suburban.” Uh, but that’s the exact same audience that listened to Jewel? Also, Gracie and Jewel were the same age when they had their first hit singles. So the age of the artists cannot account for their differences either.
Clearly, times have changed. We have entered a “The only thing that’s safe for me to sing about is how much I want to be your girlfriend, please call me, I can be whatever you want me to be, seriously, I’m sorry I was talking while you played your video game, it won’t happen again, and you can totally go on that boy’s trip, I’ll clean up the kitchen while you’re gone, who keeps texting you – is it Kayla?, never-mind, I love you, did you hear me?, I said I love you, it’s okay, you don’t have to say it back…” era.
So, I’m not sure how we got to this point but one thing I do know is that I owe Jewel a big apology.
