Women have been angry, and the media has brought it to the forefront of everyone’s mind.
Female self-destruction is anger that often doesn’t know how to express itself as such. It implodes as an eating disorder, self-harm, addiction, and devastation, but now, music is a shared outlet for camaraderie and mourning.
Taylor Swift, a long-time promoter of breakup revenge albums, is spearheading the movement of women taking back the power in their breakup stories. The 2017 release of her album Reputation took the world by storm after Swift reclaimed her society-given label as a snake and genre jumped away from her typical love pop sound into the sharp electronic edge. Currently, she’s on her North American tour and making headlines with the most attended and anticipated performances of the year.
On Feb. 14, Kelsea Ballerini released her EP Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, a record heard as a eulogy to her marriage with fellow country music star Morgan Evans. The EP was incredibly raw and heartbreaking and helped Ballerini control the narrative of her divorce to set the record straight. She refuses to stay docile and silent and instead is using her music as a way to express herself.
In one of the most iconic depictions of female rage in this century, Beyoncé smashes a car window in the music video to her 2016 hit “Hold Up.” Paris Paloma’s recently released song “Labour” has become an increasingly popular TikTok audio for women to express their exhaustion with the stereotypical demands of femininity.
Olivia Rodrigo, following a highly speculated and public breakup with costar Joshua Bassett, released one of the most iconic albums of 2022. SOUR depicted Olivia’s emotional turmoil during the breakup, and it won 7 awards at the Grammys.
Boygenius, a female supergroup, released an album in March that was full of angst and appeared in the Billboard 100.
All of this is women taking back the power within their own narratives and sharing their stories. By using music as the medium for this reclamation, it creates a monetized version of female rage.
In news and politics, women have historically been underrepresented and ridiculed. Showing emotion is seen as weak, whereas if a man does it it’s seen as strong. Men are seen as more credible when they spoke with emotion, whereas women were deemed to be less credible, according to a 2015 study from Arizona State University focusing on gender bias.
In order to understand this resurgence in music, it’s important to note the influence of the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s.
The term “Riot Grrrl” originated almost as a joke. It was a comment that got written into magazines of the Pacific Northwest that eventually spread around the world. Thus was born the movement of activist chapters that organized protests, made artwork, and raised awareness one girl at a time. Cassette tapes, 45s, EPs, LPs, CDs — everything was recorded and shared. While this movement dissolved due to members’ hesitancy to enter mainstream media, it showed a pattern of women wanting to express themselves and share their art musically.
“I wanted to scream because no matter how much I scream, no one will listen,” said Sara Marcus in her book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution.
Today, TikTok serves as a primarily music-based platform. Women share their stories while accompanied by hard-hitting lyrics like Stevie Nicks’ powerful performance of “Silver Springs” with Fleetwood Mac, or Lorde’s “Writer in the Dark.” Categorizing this music as a sort of female rage is a representation of a healthy outlet for female emotions.
“When outrage is not suppressed or turned inward but, rather, sublimated, we all fare better. Sublimation is an adaptive defense mechanism where the energy of a biological impulse — in this case, anger — is diverted from its immediate goal to one of a more acceptable social or moral use,” psychotherapist Allison Arbmas told the Feminine Rage Archive.
The music industry is ever-evolving and adapting to fit the newest trends and women are realizing that they can push their way inside of it. TikTok and other social media platforms make it easier than ever before to push out marketing to a targeted audience — no longer is it needed to have a label or a publicist to get record-breaking streams. Lizzy McAlpine, an unsigned artist who got her start with viral songs on TikTok, now has 17 million monthly streamers on Spotify.
However, while this rage has seemingly always been there, today’s resurgence can potentially be credited to the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. When the Supreme Court decision was originally decided in the 1970s, similar musical patterns emerged. Dolly Parton released Just Because I’m A Woman, her first solo album after her public separation from fellow country music star Porter Wagoner, with the songs detailing everything from heartbreak to abortion to suicide. Aretha Franklin released two singles that spoke about dealing with trifling men, and Loretta Lynn passionately mentions the availability of the abortion pill and protests in New York in a single of her own. Around the time of the court decision, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simmons all released albums about the inequalities being fought for in the women’s movement.
Activists are fighting tooth and nail for the rights that they deserve, and it’s clearly evident within the music. They’re picking their battles, and they’re picking all of them. Roxanne Gay says it best in her novel Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture: “Angry women care. Angry women speak and yell and sob their truths.”
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