Society’s ruthless rotation of internet starlets and icons has been ingrained in the music industry for years. Someone new and shiny comes around with something important to say and immediately gets compared to the woman who held the spotlight before them. Some sort of comparison that includes, “You’re like ____ but with less of an entitled attitude!” “You’re like the next ___ but far more talented!” It’s like tearing down the bricks of a past legacy and building a new tower is somehow the ‘highest compliment.’
Competition in the industry has become a staple in modern times and is often forced upon two women who are equally good and talented at their craft. Women like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift get pinned against each other in ruthless competition, forcing young people to believe that there is only room for one successful female in the music industry. Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber are constantly criticized and called mean girls for their so-called “feud” that viewers and media have simply gathered from insufficient evidence. It’s almost sinful for a woman in the music industry to be inspired by another artist and remain in the same genre as them. This, for some reason, is open fire to compare and analyze how a new artist is trying to be a “wannabe” or “copycat.” Society has a hard time handling two successful women in the same room.
Not to mention the public’s obsession with tearing down women and claiming their success was a man’s doing. If a woman was stranded island alone for two years writing music and producing it herself, the media would somehow find a reason to prove that a man had just as much to do with her work, if not more than she did. That’s the only answer.
Women get criticized countlessly in the music industry for being catty, snotty, serial daters, boring, or only well-known for their looks and sex appeal. A man is able to throw a chair off a balcony of a bar and get arrested due to being heavily intoxicated, and a week later, headline a music festival. A woman, however, stands on stage watching as a microphone is being taken from her after her hard work was the reason she was on that stage, and years later, gets to sit and watch the media and celebrities call her a snake, fake, and talentless. A woman is expecting to get on a stage and perform a two-hour concert with outfit changes, dancers, production, and still sound flawless, while a man can get on stage in jeans with a guitar and not get called boring, lifeless, and lazy. Not once is a man criticized for bragging about how much money he makes, or for dating women half his age, or what he wears to a red carpet event.
This stigma of women in the industry goes past music and into film and Hollywood. For instance, 2023 was a massive year for film with huge movies like Oppenheimer and Barbie, which were pinned against each other constantly. During the problematic Golden Globes opening monologue, Oppenheimer was praised for its innovation, storyline, and cinematography while Barbie got called the movie about “a doll with big boobies.” That one comment completely undermined the entire relevance and message to the film, which once you dive deeper than the surface, is actually a very complex commentary on women’s roles in society and how they are perceived by the world. Gerwig’s directing was completely undermined and Margot Robbie’s work in the film was equally as overlooked. Women in any space of Hollywood are accustomed to being looked down upon and it is a vicious cycle that seems to have no end.
Women are always too smart, too soft, too tough, too masculine, too feminine, too quiet, too loud, not enough. Olivia Rodrigo comments on these stigmas in the music industry, and in general life, perfectly in her song “all American b***h”. She describes herself as the perfect American girl society expects all women to be and emphasizes how specific, contradicting, and impossible these standards and ‘desires’ are.
The music industry is a hostile place for women. Society doesn’t like it when women are too big or too opinionated. Society likes their women small and simple-minded because a woman with too much of a sense of her own worth is dangerous and threatening to the ways that we are so used to.
Once a woman becomes of Taylor Swift status, she is “fair game” for horrible name-calling and unapologetic villainizing. Once a woman becomes big, it is malicious and violent in the eyes of society. Once a woman becomes big, it is not her lyricism, talent, rigor, or hard work because the only answer to why she is so popular is because of her body, her face, and her looks. Once a woman becomes big, her personal life is dissected and critiqued for being friends with too many models and dating too many men for people’s liking. Once a woman becomes big, she is meant to be a silent painting hanging in a gold frame meant to be perfectly fine with being criticized and analyzed in the cruelest way.
After a couple of years of gallery walking and some occasional graffiti defacement, society gets bored of their star and leaves her there hanging, collecting dust, waiting, and watching as another rose gets picked from the vine and put into a jar, shiny and new.
The question, now, is who is next?