Previously on Women Who Rock...
[Sheila E] To be on MTV was everything,
and it meant that you made it
if you were able to get on MTV.
[Natalie Merchant] These video shoots
would take one day,
cost $400,000 to $800,000,
and then you'd find out that you were responsible.
It was recoupable against your royalties.
[Danyel Smith] In the late '80s,
Black music was just coming into its own,
and hip-hop was just becoming what it was going to be.
[Sheryl Crow] I wanted to be taken seriously,
like the artists that I had absolutely loved and adored...
all these incredible women who made music
that paved the way for me to do what I was doing.
[Pat Benatar] I wanted to break the boys' club,
my way, my terms.
I'm showing you my body 'cause I want to.
[Nancy Wilson] The Riot Grrrls were unfollowing the rules.
They were going for the raw energy of rock itself.
They were taking it in a political direction,
which was, by this time, I think, necessary.
[Tori Amos] I didn't listen to that lesson
that Rickie Lee was trying to tell us all,
that if you're you, and you're unique,
there is a place for you.
[amplifier feedback]
[electric guitar strum]
[St. Vincent] Growing up,
when I discovered these incredible women
making rock music,
I mean, that's, like-- that's the dream.
People would be like, "Whoa,
look at that little gal with that big guitar,"
like a novelty.
[Benatar] I wanted to break the boys' club.
I wanted to break down that bullshit.
[Khan] I said, "Let me tell you something.
I'm going to be a star with or without you."
[Jett] Growing up, I thought,
"There's gotta be other girls
that wanna play rock 'n' roll.
I can't be the only one."
[Twain] There's something very liberating
about being able to take on a rock 'n' roll attitude
and not have to abandon your femininity at the same time.
[Crow] There were lots of obstacles along the way for me,
but I knew the only person that could drive my ship
that I felt I could trust was me.
[Staples] I'm not a diva.
I love people. I'm a people person.
I'm just Mavis.
Just Mavis.
Yep.
♪♪♪
[laughs]
So many things, just even looking at the cover.
It's fun now to look back
and think about all this,
how deliberate it was.
This whole album, "Come On Over,"
I was really still only finding myself.
It was a lot of fun recording this album,
a lot of fun and a lot of laughs.
[Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like A Woman" plays]
[laughs]
♪ Let's go, girls
Shania writes a fucking banger.
♪ Come on
Shania Twain, I love seeing powerful women.
I love seeing females that just stick to their guns.
[Sheryl Crow] Shania to me embodied
the ability to not only write a great song,
but to write a song that could
live in its own space.
She could be at pop radio,
or she could be at country radio,
and it didn't really matter.
She sort of brought everything together.
♪ The best thing about being a woman ♪
♪ Is the prerogative to have a little fun ♪
[Bethany Cosentino] She writes the hookiest,
catchiest melodies.
You hear that song,
and you can't get it out of your head,
and that's a good songwriter.
When you hear a song like "Man! I Feel Like A Woman,"
it's like, "Yeah,
they call her the queen of pop country for a reason."
She's just a badass.
♪ Man, I feel like a woman
♪ I feel like a woman! ♪♪♪
[Twain] "Man! I Feel Like A Woman"
encapsulates all of the styles
that I've been inspired by,
the rock, the country,
the attitude,
the female empowerment
that I've always carried with me
pretty much on my sleeve.
[laughs]
[Margo Price] What I do love about that song,
and about Shania Twain in general,
is that, like, duality
that a lot of people think that you can't have,
where it's, like, you can't be sexy,
and you can't be smart all at once,
and she is,
and that is the best thing about being a woman.
[Twain] I was really having fun with that balance
of embracing being a female, embracing my curves
that I had been so shy about not that long before...
and lyrically, being able to
let my personality
live and exist in the songwriting,
and being able to punch attitude
and exclamation into my lyrics
unapologetically
was very satisfying.
♪♪♪
Music has always been an escape for me,
but I had a lot of stage fright,
so in a way, getting up on stage,
I had the music to...
to hide behind.
By the time I was eight years old,
I was already singing in local bars
in my small town of Timmins,
in small northern mining towns in Ontario, Canada,
and that was my education
in becoming a stage performer.
There was a huge gap
[laughs] between
the little town bar singer to
the nearest television show
or recording studio.
It seemed impossible
that I would ever make it as a singer.
I went through so many different phases
of singing on stage, you know,
starting out as a small child,
singing, you know, Dolly Parton songs,
Anne Murray,
more folky kind of country,
singing Tammy Wynette,
"Stand By Your Man,"
and then going into my teens,
I was singing Pat Benatar and Heart,
belting out "Barracuda."
Rock when I was growing up,
the men were athletic,
and the hair was flying,
and there was so much drama,
and the women,
watching the women of rock
beside these men
as powerful, as dramatic,
as kickass,
I always found it to be very inspiring.
I didn't really fit in anywhere
when I when I got signed as a recording artist.
I don't think anybody really knew
where I was going to fit in the end.
But I was sure
that I definitely wanted to be
my own singer-songwriter.
I had to learn to take a lot of rejection.
[Andrea Warner] She had gone to Nashville,
and she had tried to make it in country and rock,
but her studio was telling her,
"No, you have to make a traditional country record,"
and she's saying, "I love rock and pop music.
Like, this is the kind of music I want to make."
She just knew, and I think, like,
we see this all the time when artists kind of understand
what they have to offer,
and they know that it's missing.
They know that there's an audience out there for it
because they are that audience.
But then she had to go back to Canada
after her parents were killed in a car accident.
She sacrificed a lot, and took care of her family
before she even followed her dreams
and went for them, you know.
She puts family first.
[Twain] There was no going back for me.
I had no parents anymore.
I had no other education.
Music had been my whole life.
I think that that focus really came
from not having a choice.
I have to survive this.
I had already been through a lot in my life,
and time not was on my side.
I was 30 when I had my first hit song.
More than ambition, I had determination.
I certainly wasn't going to let anybody stand in my way
if I could help it.
There was only one way to feed myself,
and that was to succeed.
[Ann Powers] Shania was country's
biggest blockbuster artist,
with a sound that was bright and shiny,
and even though she's Canadian,
she was truly that, like, sassy Southern woman
who's gonna ask you whose bed your boots have been under,
who's gonna go out and have fun,
be sexy,
challenge her man to treat her right,
but also to let her be free.
It's a slick version of women's liberation,
but it's liberation nonetheless.
[Twain] I was a strong thinker,
and I believed in the way I saw things.
I was not afraid.
Actually, I was quite fearless.
It's almost like going to war a little bit, you know?
I had to fight.
Knock me down, I gotta get back up.
Stand in my way, I'm going to go around you.
There was no way I was ever going to be stopped,
and I had to do a lot of managing
in order to succeed,
and to get respect.
Oof.
Very, very hard to get respect
when you're trying to do things your own way,
or you're trying to be original.
Those stresses are, you know, in my past,
and I sure hope that it's...
different for women
in the future.
[crowd roaring]
[Sheryl Crow] In the early '90s,
when I was able to start being the headliner,
I would always inquire about other female artists,
and I would always be shot down.
You could not have two women on a bill
because one novelty act is enough.
[Crow] It was right around that time
that Sarah McLachlan called me and said,
"I'm really tired of the status quo,
and I don't believe that story that they're telling us
about women can't sell tickets,
and I want to prove everyone wrong,
and would you do that?"
♪♪♪
[Sarah McLachlan] When women come together,
women talk, women form ideas,
women form coalitions, we create change.
Women get shit done.
That was innately intimidating
to men and to the old structure,
which they just, they--
Everything, they wanted things to stay the same,
and...
we wanted things to change.
[crowd cheering]
Anybody that's back there,
y'all come on out and join us.
We're going to have a hootenanny.
Okay!
♪♪♪
[crowd cheering]
♪ I went to the doctor
♪ I went to the mountains
♪ I looked to the children
♪ I drank from the fountains
Lilith didn't start out as a "fuck you" to the industry.
It was really more of a desire
to bring all these women together,
and prove that we're not competing against each other.
We want to lift everybody else up.
There's a place for all of us.
[Amy Ray] Everybody, now!
♪ Closer I am to fine
♪♪♪
♪ Closer I am to fine
♪ Yeah
[song ends, crowd cheering]
[cheering and screaming]
I was constantly told,
"Well, we can't add you this week on radio
because we added Tracy Chapman,
or Tori Amos, or Sinead O'Connor.
I'm like, "Well, we're all very different.
We do different things.
Like, why are you pigeonholing all of us
into this little box?"
It never sat very well with me, clearly.
This is going to blow a lot of old myths
out of the water.
We've had in the past
really stupid old rules applying to women in music.
You can't play two women back-to-back on the radio.
You can't put two women on the same bill.
Promoters are no longer going to be able
to say that to any artists
because we've proved that it is successful
and it can be done.
[Warner] Sarah McLachlan
absolutely changes everything for women in music
with Lilith Fair.
You know, it's unparalleled.
[Benatar] It was so ballsy,
and I never understand why anybody ever uses "balls,"
because they're the most fucking fragile things on Earth, okay,
but you know what I'm saying?
It was like you felt really like...
like you were with your tribe,
and it felt great.
[Natalie Merchant] The opportunity to meet
all these other women artists,
to be on the same stage as Sinead O'Connor,
or Liz Phair,
or Bonnie Raitt,
and Emmylou Harris, you know,
it was wonderful.
I got to be friends with Queen Latifah
and Skye Edwards from Morcheeba.
[Powers] Lilith Fair is feminine,
at least on the surface.
That's what people think about it, right?
That here are these soft, gentle women
laying out picnic blankets
and sipping white wine
as they listen to Sarah McLachlan
sing songs about angels,
but in fact,
many of the artists on Lilith Fair
were making radical music
in pretty packages.
[McLachlan] Matriarchs,
young women just starting out,
radical feminists.
Wildly enough,
women are incredibly varied and dynamic.
[Benatar] Imagine.
Imagine if this would have happened
when we started,
if this was going on when we started,
how different it would have been.
To be able to have been part of the progress being made,
it was incredible. It was like
being able to, like...
[inhales]
[exhales]
like, take a breath.
[Crow] I'm super honored that she thought of me,
and wanted me to join that force with her,
because those three summers
of defying what promoters
had basically tried to prove,
and Sarah proved wrong,
were the most gratifying summers of touring,
and I know for a fact
that it made a huge difference
in the future of music for women,
and we have Sarah to thank for that.
-Thank you! -[crowd cheering]
Good night, see you soon!
♪♪♪
[Macy Gray] I took piano lessons.
I think I started when I was about seven.
I hated every second of it,
but I learned how to play the piano.
I think just from me learning music,
I was open to a lot of different styles.
In college,
I met this guy who was cute.
He had a little four track,
and we used to hang out in his dorm room
and write songs together for fun.
Pretty soon, we had all these little cassette tapes,
and I'd be singing on them.
I'm, like, no...
I had no intention of being a singer,
just if you write a song, you have to sing it
so the person knows how it goes.
It started growing on me.
I started, you know, going to, like, real studios.
All of a sudden, like, that's all I did,
And so it kind of was something that just kind of, like,
came into my life, you know,
and then pretty soon
I was taking it really seriously,
and I started, like, sending tapes
to A&R people and stuff.
About two years later, I got signed to Epic.
That's where I made my first album
that everybody heard, "How Life Is."
[Macy's "I Try" plays]
I didn't know it was going to be that one.
[laughs]
♪ Games, changes, and fears
All right.
♪ When will they go from here? ♪
Every once in a while, we get one of those voices,
truly unique, right?
Macy Gray was that voice.
♪ ...has brought us here
♪ And we should be together, babe ♪
♪ But we're not
♪ I play it off but I'm dreaming of you ♪
I love Macy Gray.
I love her.
She's a good, honest woman.
♪ I try to say goodbye and I choke ♪
♪ I try to walk away and I stumble ♪
♪ Though I try to hide it it's clear ♪
♪ My world crumbles when you are not near ♪
♪ Goodbye and I choke...
[Gray] I remember when I first came out,
a lot of people started wearing their afro again.
I was really proud of that. [laughs]
So anyway, they shipped me off.
I went to Europe to tour.
I was, like, seeing the world,
I was playing music every night.
I thought I was in heaven.
So I'm in London.
This was about March or April of 2000,
and my manager called,
and he says,
"You have the number-one record,"
and I was like, "What does that mean?"
and he said, "That means
they play your record more than anybody else's."
I thought it was cool,
but I just didn't get what was going on,
because I was having so much fun on my tour,
[laughs]
But anyway, we go back to the States,
and my son was with me.
He was five at the time.
We landed in New York,
and it's freezing,
and he doesn't have a winter coat,
so I have the driver take me straight to the Gap.
I walk in, and all these people
were swarming me,
and, like, taking pictures,
and, like, these girls are screaming and stuff,
and I'm just trying to hold on to my son.
He's five years old, and there's these people,
and I'm just worried
that they were gonna hurt him or something,
but that was the first time I realized
people knew who I was,
and that things had changed, for sure.
[crowd cheering]
I definitely had my little ego trip,
and my little diva couple of years.
I was an asshole for a while,
and I did all the partying anybody could do.
I mean, I had a ball. I was in heaven.
I was, like, on a whole 'nother planet.
You couldn't tell me nothing...
but now,
I don't kind of walk around thinking,
"Oh, I'm Macy Gray," you know?
Even sometimes, I go out,
and somebody will be staring at me,
and I forget that they might know who I am, you know?
So... [laughs]
My Atlantic deal,
I got pregnant in the middle of making that record,
and then they dropped me shortly after.
You know, that's not, like,
what A&R guys go out and look for.
[Khan] I had my first kid at 20.
I watched my children climb into the suitcase,
that I'm packing to go on the road,
and I missed the first teeth,
first steps, first words.
I had to. I had to work.
I took them both on the road with me for the first year.
[laughs]
On a tour bus,
in a bassinet over the motor
where it's warm, and the motor's running,
and they would sleep the whole time.
If you work and you have kids,
your husband is not doing that.
He is not having those issues. It's not the same.
It's probably never going to be the same.
My first child,
that's really what sealed it for me.
I mean, I was already just duking it out every day,
but, you know, once you make a spinal cord from scratch,
that makes you pretty tough, you know,
but they were cutting me no slack, you know,
and I remember Chrissie Hynde and I
had talked backstage once,
and she... and Natalie was already born,
and I said, "How are you doing this?"
and she said, "I'm not.
I'm not doing this. It's really hard."
The very fact that you persevere and do it,
and I don't care what job you have,
if you are a checkout girl,
if you are somebody who's working in a doctor's office,
if you are a schoolteacher,
if you are out there
trying to do more than one thing at a time,
and trying to do it well,
you are doing it.
[Price] Women are writing
some of the best music of our time.
Having a young daughter at home
makes me more present in what I say and what I do.
I want to be able to tell young girls
that it's okay. You don't have to look
like a supermodel,
and you don't have to go get your lips done.
You don't have to go get a nose job,
and you don't have to go do these things,
because you're good enough on your own.
I'm really trying to reframe a lot of what I do
and a lot of how I behave
for my daughter,
and just for young, young girls out there.
[Gray] Motherhood impacts everything.
You really can't get around it on any level.
It changes the way you sing, the way you walk,
you know, the way you see things,
the way you comb your hair,
what time you get up,
who you hang out with, where you go.
If you're an artist,
it definitely gets into your art, for sure.
[Kelis] Macy Gray is great at what she does.
She works hard. She shows up.
We were on the same circuit
for all these festivals in Europe.
There's a festival every day.
Europe is like festivals everywhere, right?
But for years, like,
if I saw any Black person
walking around backstage anywhere,
I was like, "Oh, is Macy here? Where's--?"
And they're like, "Yeah, she's--"
Of course she's here
because that means that person's with her, right? [laughs]
So, like, it becomes just respect,
because you know what it took to get there.
There were no other Black artists out there.
And I remember
standing in front of seas of white faces
at one of my first big festival shows
in Nuremberg, Germany,
and they were like, you know,
"You're the first Black person to perform here."
They told me as I was walking out,
and I'm like, "What?"
but I just kept going on tour,
because your producers don't go with you on the tour.
Your label's not there,
so I didn't have to hear all the noise.
I didn't have to talk to the label.
Every time I did something with the label,
I was in trouble, every frigging time.
"Why are your feet up?"
"Why are you chewing gum?
Why are you cursing? Why are you smoking?"
It was like, "No one wants to see a girl behave this way."
I was like, "I think you're wrong,
because I just grabbed my crotch
and mooned about 40,000 people,
and I'm still going." You know?
I didn't know that I was going to have
to have a board meeting about how people perceive me,
and was I going to flat-iron my hair,
or was I going to lose weight?
That stuff wasn't even a thought
until I was sitting in these rooms,
and I was like, "Am I fat?"
[laughs] It was like, I had no idea, you know?
[Crow] It's still a pitfall
that wherever art is being peddled as commerce,
we look for things that already sound like
something that's successful,
or already looks like something that's successful,
and you have to fight
for what you know is aligned with your authenticity.
We're in a male-dominated field,
and a lot of times as females,
we're not taken as seriously as we should be taken,
and when a guy acts in a certain manner,
it's called aggressiveness.
When a female act in the same manner,
we're called a bitch.
Missy...
the icon of icons
of icons of all iconography.
Like, if you want to talk about an icon,
the entirety of her visual catalog
is a schooling in how
to be completely individual
in your framing of how you see the world.
For me, Missy Elliott
it is the idea of possibility realized.
[Ramona Gonzalez] Missy Elliott showed us
that as far as gender goes,
it doesn't matter.
You don't have to be a guy
to produce incredible fat beats
and insane pop songs.
[Julianne Escobedo Shepherd] Missy is the quintessential
iconic producer,
and she made it so that you cannot deny
that there are these sort of auteur women figures.
[Bjork] And you have eight tracks and 100 noises,
and you can make as many songs as you want,
and a lot of my tunes,
for the last four years, I wrote on that.
It's just, it's so incredibly, um, convenient.
[Yola] I had a great exposure to Bjork,
and, you know, she was like
the producer extraordinaire,
just, creator.
There's no way that these ideas
came out of any other brain.
♪ I go through all this
♪ Before you wake up
♪ So I can feel happier
♪ To be safe up here with you
♪ I go through all this
[Syd] I discovered Bjork in high school.
Her music is very juxtaposing in a sense.
She's able to morph light and dark
in such a crazy way.
Songs that, like, were sad and happy,
and beautiful, and joyous,
and dark, and scary,
and that was just, you know,
for me as a high school student,
I was like, "What?
How... how did she do that
and make it work?
I don't..." 'Cause it works!
♪ Safe up here with you
[Sara] Like, I think of, like, Bjork
and the work that she's done,
and it gives me, and I think Tegan as well,
like, this confidence that, you know,
it doesn't have to be like, "Oh, now I'm painting,"
or, "Now I'm writing a book."
Like, it's like, "Oh, I'm going to put the energy
and the passion and the creative heart
behind this new thing,
and maybe it'll even be bigger and better
than what I am known for."
[Suzy Exposito] Women in music today
want to have more control over how it sounds,
and a big way that they can do that
is by getting behind the mixing board.
We're starting to see more parity
when it comes to representation.
However, we need more women producers.
We need more women in production,
in engineering, in sound, because
there's power in being able
to master your own sound.
[Syd] You know, my mother wanted to be
a recording engineer,
but when she mentioned it to a friend of hers
who was actually a mixing engineer
and was songwriter-producer and was mixing a record
for Earth, Wind and Fire at the time, he said,
[inhales through teeth] "It's not for women."
He wasn't saying it in that sense,
like, "Stay away."
He was more so out of care and worry.
Like, you know,
things happen to women in these studios,
things that we have all seen come to light recently,
and so she didn't pursue it.
All we can do is move forward,
and I'm glad that I can say
if I raise a daughter in this world,
we won't have to have the same conversation
that my mom had.
♪♪♪
[Powers] Every cultural shift
and aesthetic shift in popular music
is really about technology,
and we've seen that
the Internet has changed everything about access,
both to the processes of making music
and distributing music.
Now, I don't want to paint this as too utopian,
because we still have the old systems,
and they still pose a lot of challenges,
but the open access that defines our time
has been only good for women
and all marginalized people within popular music.
The medium has changed so much
that women are able to get their stuff out,
where in 1975, we weren't.
You didn't have the Internet.
You didn't have ways to get your own material
out there directly to the fans.
[Syd] I was 14.
My dad had just got a family computer.
It had GarageBand on it,
so that became my first instrument
that I really clung to.
♪♪♪
I'm mostly self-taught.
I taught myself GarageBand.
If there was something I couldn't figure out,
YouTube University. [laughs]
I like to think I'm pretty self-proficient,
if you will.
It felt eye-opening,
first using GarageBand and realizing like,
"Wow, okay, this is how it's done.
This is how all of these songs that I grew up listening to
come to fruition."
When I got into the industry professionally,
I felt like people were ready for something new.
I started making beats, making remixes.
My first song I ever wrote, I was 16.
I had produced it, written it,
recorded it late at night one weekend,
and I woke up in the morning, and I listened to it.
I was like, "I still like this,"
and the next thing you know,
it was up on MySpace,
MySpace Music.
We were putting our music out for free.
Like, we just wanted people to hear it.
In punk, there is this ethos
that you should do it yourself,
and that is supposed to be the antithesis
of what the commercial music industry does.
MySpace took that ethos
and cut out the middlemen.
It makes it so that, you know, you're taking your music
straight to the people that you want to hear it.
This is exactly what helped propel
a lot of women
who are making rock music today.
[Syd] Streaming was just kind of getting its footing,
I feel like.
It just started to become transparent
when it comes to monetizing it.
There was a long time
where we couldn't see the numbers
and we had no access to the data,
and that, I think, was the scariest time
because we didn't know if the labels
were lying to us or what.
Streaming services really sell the idea
that they're democratizing the listening experience,
but they're not.
They are really, like, selling artists short,
big time.
The way that Spotify works
is that the most listened-to artists,
they get more money per stream.
Meanwhile, like,
that puts indie artists at a disadvantage.
[Star Amerasu] Songs used to be sold,
but now it's just streams.
A stream is like 0.00023 of a cent per stream,
so streaming for me is never going to make me money.
So unfortunately, we live in a world
where you do have to kind of commodify yourself.
[Gonzalez] Technology in general
is creating a better future for women in music
simply because women are able to see more examples
of other successful women
doing it on their own,
in control of their music
and making music.
That helps to inspire more women to create,
but I will say
that all the accessibility that you can get in the world
is not going to replace
the need for patriarchal attitudes
around women and technology to change.
We have to, you know,
encourage women to see themselves as technicians
if they want to be that.
[Powers] In the 21st century,
we see these women power players emerge
who are not only leaping over boundaries
in their music,
but also changing the way women can be
in the business side of things.
[Tegan] The artist that pops into my mind
when I think of a female
who has a career that I would want
-is, like, a Gwen Stefani. -Sure.
♪ Uh-huh, this my shit
♪ All the girls stomp your feet like this ♪
♪ A few times I've been around that track ♪
♪ So it's not just gonna happen like that ♪
♪ 'Cause I ain't no hollaback girl ♪
♪ Ooh, ooh, this my shit, this my shit ♪
♪ I heard that you were talking shit ♪
♪ And you didn't think that I would hear it ♪
♪ People hear you talking like that ♪
♪ Getting everybody fired up
♪ So I'm ready to attack, gonna lead the pack ♪
♪ Gonna get a touchdown, gonna take you out ♪
♪ That's right, put your pom-poms down ♪
♪ Getting everybody fired up
♪ A few times I've been around that track ♪
♪ So it's not just gonna happen like that ♪
♪ 'Cause I ain't no hollaback girl ♪
♪ I ain't no hollaback girl
♪ Ooh, ooh, this my shit, this my shit ♪
[Tegan] She had a band,
but then she was also a solo artist.
Now she's, like, hosting on TV.
It's really cool to have such a long career,
and to see that we're not restricted to one lane.
Sara and I have started to really see ourselves
as, though we are not always climbing,
we're widening, always,
always making the universe bigger.
The influence that artists like Gwen had on us,
who were not restricting themselves
to one artistic format,
that was really influential and important.
Women like that, who showed
that you could do other stuff, keep it interesting,
not be retired by the industry at 38.
[crowd cheering]
[Beyoncé] Almost 10 years ago,
I got my start in a singing group.
[crowd cheering]
Do you guys know the name of that group?
[crowd screams] Destiny's Child!
Yes,
and if it was not for Destiny's Child,
I would definitely not be standing here.
[Powers] Beyoncé starts as the protégé of her father,
and we see her evolve over many years to become
not only one half of one of the most influential
power couples of all time
in popular music,
but someone absolutely in charge
of this multifaceted career
that's essentially an empire.
Beyoncé, I mean,
this is a powerhouse person
who is making her mark in her own way.
It's just amazing to see.
[Powers] I think Beyoncé's evolution,
it is all about control,
and no artist in the music industry
has insistently taken control
and maintained control of her image, her music,
her business, her private life,
and her influence on the culture
as effectively as Beyoncé.
[Beyoncé] I want to win an Oscar,
and I want to win a Tony.
I know I'm 21, and I have a long way to go,
but it's great that so young I'm able to start,
and I think I have a long career ahead of me.
At least, I want a long career ahead of me,
and I'm trying to make the right decisions.
[Danyel Smith] Of the last 40 years,
the only people that can even stand next to her
if she was alive would be Whitney Houston.
You know, there's also Adele.
There's Jennifer Hudson.
And then I'm saying, "Well, where are we going?"
Because when Beyoncé decides
she's going to give you a good night,
man, there's nothing like it.
35 minutes of Beyoncé,
I lost all cares in the world.
Beyoncé gave me a little reprieve
from the mundane.
Also, she was one of the first people
to do the visual album
that told a story,
and she really started that trend.
The tragedies and things
that she's had to deal with in her personal life,
coming to terms with what's going on
with Black people in this country,
how Black women are treated,
and to see all that reflected in her music, you know,
you could devote encyclopedias on top of encyclopedias
to Beyoncé.
She is the definition of "superstar."
[Powers] Like Beyoncé,
Taylor grew up right in front of our eyes,
and in our ears.
From the minute Taylor Swift emerged
in Nashville as a teen,
everybody knew that she was going to change the game.
Taylor Swift is a powerhouse talent
of every kind.
She's a bright, smart, dedicated young lady.
I'm very proud of her.
♪♪♪
♪ See the lights
♪ See the party the ball gowns ♪
♪ See you make your way through the crowd ♪
♪ And say "Hello"
She's always had so much clarity, it's obvious.
She just never lost herself along the way.
I have a lot of admiration for Taylor Swift.
[Exposito] She's not just any old, like, teen pop star.
She wasn't any old country star.
Taylor Swift was the first artist since Elvis
to have that many simultaneously charting hits.
♪ I love you and that's all I really know ♪
♪ I talked to your dad
♪ Go pick out a white dress
♪ It's a love story, baby
♪ Just say...
♪ Oh, oh, oh
♪ 'Cause we were both young when I first saw you ♪
Taylor Swift has advocated for women in music
by advocating for herself.
She sued a guy
for grabbing her butt during a promo event.
She sued him for $1
and won,
just on the principle
that, like, you should not do that.
You can't be violating a woman's space like that.
[Bethany Cosentino] She is an advocate
for, like, songwriters and musicians
getting paid the amount they deserve
for their music to be listened to.
[Exposito] She's spelling it out
and being like, "Read your contracts.
Make sure you own your songs."
I respect
how much transparency she has offered
when it comes to how women are treated
in the music industry.
That is her impact.
♪♪♪
It would be really easy to say, "I'm 21 now.
I do what I want.
You raise your kids,"
but it's not the truth of it.
The truth of it
is that every singer out there
with songs on the radio
is raising the next generation,
so make your words count.
She doesn't play down how much control
and what a big voice she has in her career.
She says it how it is.
She is still a boss.
She hasn't always done everything right,
and she doesn't make excuses for that.
It can be very off-putting to some people, I think,
because she is not apologizing
for being strong-willed, strong-minded,
and very much in control of where she goes.
[Powers] She is an artist of her own independence,
and I think she really is both of her generation
and inspiring her generation.
♪♪♪
Country music is undergoing
a radical, fundamental change.
It's happening because of women
like Rhiannon Giddens,
because of Yola,
because of Allison Russell,
because of Mickey Guyton.
Finally, Black women are not being told,
"You can't be country.
We're going to call you R&B,
we're going to call you soul,
we're going to call you folk.
We're going to call you something else."
Black women are not only turning the tide
of what country music
and Americana music can be today,
but changing our whole sense of the genre
from its beginnings.
These are the people who inspire me now.
[Crow] I love Yola.
Yola fights for what she believes in,
and she puts it in her music.
She doesn't belong in any certain genre.
She's bigger than that.
[Yola] I was talking to Allison Russell.
She called me the door-kicker.
She was, like, "Oh, you know,
you're just always kicking doors down,
ushering the rest of us in."
I'm like, "Well, I suppose I debuted
before everyone else." [laughs]
By the time I got to being a front woman for hire,
being part of other people's bands,
and all this kind of business,
I realized that the best way
that I could further this mission
was to do my own thing.
And I went in to do live interviews,
and I went to a lot of spaces,
and I found them to be overwhelmingly
male and white spaces.
So then we started focusing on, like,
"Okay, how can we find
female and spaces of color,
and try and at least reflect
my identity
in the spaces I'm going into?"
And that wasn't an easy fix or a quick fix.
You're going to be in these spaces,
but you've just got to make concerted effort
to find spaces that reflect you
so that you can speak more deeply.
That was something that I realized
it was going to be a lot easier
when I'm not alone.
Whatever it takes
to get the space to be more representative,
more equitable,
that's really what I'm trying to do,
is to whisper in the right ears
at the right time,
and adjust the way people are thinking.
[applause and cheering]
♪♪♪
I left college
and joined The Polyphonic Spree,
which is a band from Dallas
that I used to see when I was in high school,
and I loved this band,
and then that led to playing
in Sufjan Stevens' band.
All the while, I was working on
what would become my first record.
But what was really important to me as an artist
was proving that I
could do a lot of things, for some reason.
I remember on my first record
listing all the instruments I played,
and being very, like,
"People need to know I can play," you know.
♪ Seiken no fuhai! ♪
♪ Seiken no fuhai!
♪♪♪
♪ I can't turn off what turns me on ♪
A lot of that came from gendered expectations.
I felt as if I had something to prove,
like, writ large.
♪ I can't turn off what turns me on ♪
♪ Masseduction
♪ I can't turn off what turns me on ♪
♪ Masseduction
♪ I can't turn off what turns me on ♪
Annie Clark is absolutely and completely an artist.
You know, she is, like, a throwback to Kate Bush,
where there's no one like her,
she does everything amazingly,
and it should be celebrated
for how it's calculated.
She's in control of it.
She projects what she wants to project
through her music and her persona,
and it's totally amazing.
♪♪♪
♪ Mass destruction!
[crowd cheering]
[Fefe Dobson] In the pop-rock genre,
just seeing it come back so hardcore is amazing.
Pop punk.
Rock pop.
Just hearing guitars be up front is pretty killer.
That's amazing.
That's what it's about.
I mean, there's such a thing as genre,
but at the same time,
we can play with genre.
You have to find some way to fit in there,
which was always a big problem when I started.
Now it's like, you know, alternative,
and you can put rock in there, you can put pop.
You could put some hip-hop, you could put urban--
It just can go in there, it's organic.
[Exposito] Billie Eilish came up
in a post-genre world,
and we're seeing what that looks like,
and what that's going to look like
in her music.
[crowd screaming along]
♪ White shirt now red my bloody nose ♪
♪ Sleepin' you're on your tippy toes ♪
♪ Creepin' around like no one knows ♪
♪ Think you're so criminal
[Exposito] She has a vision
for the future of pop and rock music.
"Why are they even separate things?"
is something that, like, Billie Eilish would ask.
♪ My soul? So cynical
♪ So you're a tough guy
♪ Like it really rough guy
[Exposito] Billie Eilish harnessed her image
in a way that I think
a lot of teen girls in the music industry
are discouraged from.
♪ Might seduce your dad type
♪ I'm the bad guy
Duh!
♪♪♪
[Exposito] She has made strides
for women in pop and rock music
by blurring those lines.
♪ Bad...
[crowd cheering]
I watched the Billie Eilish documentary.
It was fabulous.
♪♪♪
[Benatar] Progress that I see
is that it probably never occurred to her
that she couldn't do it.
That right there is everything.
When we were doing it,
not only did it occur to us that we couldn't do it,
roadblocks, roadblocks, roadblocks.
If you weren't throwing them down for yourself,
someone was throwing them in front of you.
I don't think it even is in her lexicon of thought
that, "I can't be this person.
"People can't tell me what to do.
You can't make me."
The thing I admire about all of them now
is that they start out with not even an inkling
of, "You can't..." you know,
"I have to do anything that you say."
They start out with, "I don't have to do anything you say,"
and I love that part.
That's the big change.
[Crow] I turn on the radio now,
and I hear Phoebe Bridgers,
and Courtney Barnett,
and I am Shazam-ing like crazy
to find out who are these women,
and I'm downloading the music,
and I'm learning their songs,
and they are making me better,
and they're making me feel,
and that's what I did when I was a kid,
and it's giving me hope about the future
of what not just female music looks like,
but what art looks like.
There's just so many artists now that are so good,
and I don't know if it's because they all have a platform now
on social media,
so you just are aware of more of them,
or if there's more people in the world, or what,
but there's always someone
that somebody is telling me about
that I'm blown away by, you know?
I love Brittany Howard. I love her last album.
I love watching her do anything.
She's such an incredible performer,
and I love her high falsetto thing she does.
I want to sing harmonies with her someday.
[chuckles]
[Syd] So much has changed
since I started in the industry.
It feels like there's room for everyone...
[chuckles]
where it maybe didn't feel that way before.
Feels like there's a space for everyone,
there's an audience for everyone.
Just moving things forward,
moving the culture forward, you know?
[McLachlan] A lot of young artists
and a lot of young women witnessed us
breaking new ground
and living our dreams, essentially,
and being successful,
being exactly who we were, and how we wanted to be,
and how we wanted to show up in the world.
[Nona Hendryx] The legacy, I think,
is that we changed
how girl groups of color were seen, you know,
what they would create for themselves.
[Twain] There's something very liberating
about being able to take on
a rock 'n' roll attitude,
and it's a huge privilege
to be a woman with that edge,
so I kind of feel like
being a woman in rock 'n' roll
is way more fun,
and there's something very glamorous and sexy
about being a woman in rock.
To have a chance to bond
with girls that had a like view
of women in music as I did,
it felt very liberating.
I think it's partly about the music,
but it's also a lot about the attitude
and the message you're trying to get across.
[Kate Pierson] Let your freak flag fly.
Follow your path of heart.
You know, just do music that comes from your heart,
because that's what we did.
People have told me,
"Oh, you got me through high school.
You got me through a difficult time.
Your band was mostly gay,
and it really helped me come out,"
so... rock on.
[Jody Watley] As an artist,
don't be afraid to grow and change,
and don't get stuck in a rut
in trying to be something you're not.
[Gray] If you're a successful artist,
it's because you love it,
because there's too much shit to do to get there.
There's too much to put up with,
and money's not enough
for all that you have to do, and endure,
and put up with, and work at as an artist.
You know, you have to really love it,
or be committed to it, or something.
Something else has to be going on
besides the money and the fame.
[Chaka Khan] You know what?
It is so hard today
for any woman [laughs]
to embark on entertainment.
It's tough, tough, tough, tough, tough.
My biggest hope are young artists,
but you gotta pay some dues, you know?
[Susanna Hoffs] Songs are about feelings.
Songs are about the lived experience,
our lives, what matters to us, what hurts,
what gives us chills, what thrills us.
There is an aspect of that as to why we do this.
It's sharing something that we've loved.
[Norah Jones] If you're loving what you're doing,
and trying to always gather new things to throw at it,
and putting your heart and your energy into it,
you know, I think that's all you can do.
This is what I've done all my life.
I think you're just gonna have to drag me offstage.
There won't be no quitting for me.
No retirement, no quitting.
I'm going to sing until I can't sing no more.
-If I stop singing... -It'd be hard to stop.
-It will be hard. -[laughing] Yeah.
[St. Vincent] It is slow and steady,
but I think there really has been growth
in terms of women having more autonomy.
They're getting to be
not just one female voice in the room,
not pitting female artists against one another
and saying, "Well, there can only be one,
so who's it going to be?"
It's like, no, there's plenty of room for all of us.
We all do very different things,
and if we're here, we deserve to be here, so...
go fuck yourself, you know what I mean?
[Nancy Wilson] Women who rock, they're not scared.
They're not timid.
They can kick ass.
I like being a woman who rocks.
[laughs]
♪♪♪