Girls, Girls, Girls

I’m just going to begin by making a few observations concerning girls in music. The first three albums I purchased in 2025 were all records made by female artists, Laufey’s Bewitched, Aurora’s What Happened to the Heart, and the debut album from The Last Dinner Party, Prelude to Ecstasy. I didn’t watch the Grammy Awards as it aired, but I did see a whole mitful of clips from YouTube and I took much interest in following the results. To wit: top album, Beyoncé; best country album, Beyoncé; best alt rock album, best rock song, and best alternative music performance, St. Vincent; best rap album, Doechii; best new artist, Chappell Roan; songwriter of the year, Amy Allen; best pop vocal album, Sabrina Carpenter; best dance/electronic album, Charlie XCX; best R&B performance, Muni Long; best jazz vocal album, Samara Joy; best alternative jazz album, Meshell Ndegeocello; best traditional pop vocal album, Norah Jones; and here’s one more, even though I think I probably missed a few, best American roots performance and best Americana performance, Sierra Ferrell! By all accounts, women absolutely kicked ass at this year’s Grammys. Out of all of these winners, a few are personal favorites of mine. I can’t get enough Beyoncé, for example, and St. Vincent has been my favorite artist for the better part of a decade now. I love everything she’s done. I saw Doechii’s Tiny Desk concert on NPR and my mind was summarily and sufficiently blown. While I am not a huge Sabrina fan nor am I super enthusiastic about Charlie XCX, I have listened to them both somewhat superficially and liked what I heard. I guess what I would say, from my own personal taste and musical knowledge vantage point, there are no winners up in here that I don’t think are deserving. And browsing through the records I have purchased over the last couple of years, as they are at my fingertips in a couple of browsing boxes, I’d say that more than half of my musical purchases over the last 24 months or so have been by female artists, by my count, more than 30 distinct titles. Digging around for an explanation to this phenomenon, I suppose I could say that, as I’ve aged, my musical tastes have diversified. When I was a kid and in my twenties, I could probably count on one hand the number of female artists I listened to on the regular. Today, I would need at least twelve arms. Maybe it’s not about my tastes at all, but because opportunities exist in the music industry for women that didn’t exist twenty or thirty years ago. I think there is a lot of truth in that. The explanation that I like most, though, is perhaps the most straight forward one, and that is that women are simply kicking more ass. And I think this is not just happening in the music industry, but in literature, in television and film, and in politics. If you had asked me twenty years ago who my favorite politicians were, I would have probably just laughed at you. But now I could say with some confidence their names–and they’d all be women. The phrase “year of the woman” has been bandied about a few times in recent years during particular seasons when women seemed to be emerging en mass to positions of success and power–but clearly, obviously, we have not arrived. Christian Nationalists, the far right, the second Trump administration, are all leading an effort to roll back the clock, not just against women, but against every progressive principle. I was close to despair on election night. No, I don’t know why I’m hedging: I was in despair on election night and on and off again since. But I saw a TikTok video of Ayanna Presley this morning speaking to a crowd of enthusiastic resistors and her words, her fierceness, her power to absolutely destroy Elon Musk in her oratory, rekindled in me something like optimism, and suddenly I had hope again. It’s so past time already to just get out of the way and let women run this thing. Boebert, Green, and Mace being exceptions, of course. We need to send those three ladies packing. Otherwise, let’s take a cue in every other field from what’s happening right now in music: girls, girls, girls.