Okay, quick quiz (I apologise in advance).
How many of these words do you know? Or, to specify, how many of these words evoke a strong emotion in you, whether that be positive or negative?
- Feral
- Yearning
- Tender
- Rage
- Pining
If you got 50% or more, congratulations! You’re likely the intended demographic for most of the artists in this article. If not, no worries. (If anything, it’s probably an indicator that you didn’t spend your adolescence on the ‘sad girl’ side of Tumblr, which will definitely benefit your mental health in the long run.) So, what’s the problem with these words? The issue here isn’t the words themselves. It’s the musicians to which they’re applied — predominantly female singer-songwriters in the indie and folk genre —and the misogynistic implications that these epithets (and the subconscious mindset that comes with them) hold.
To explore this phenomenon properly, we need to take a quick detour into its history. The root of what many lovingly refer to as ‘sad girl’ artists can be traced back to singer-songwriters of the 70s — think Joni Mitchell and Karen Dalton, musicians from mostly folk and blues backgrounds whose lyrics were often brimming with emotion and ideas of womanhood. Moving forward into the early 90s, we find a steady stream of artists (often inspired by this 70s folk tradition) that frequent the yearning playlists of indie girls, direct ancestors of today’s ‘sad girls’ — for example, Fiona Apple, Joanna Newsom, Alanis Morissette. In the last decade or so this trend has been experiencing something of a golden era. A good starting point for this new generation of ‘sad girl’ musicians is Lorde’s 2013 debut album, Pure Heroine, and the accompanying coming-of-age or manic pixie dream girl aesthetics, which filled many a blog and Pinterest board. The 2010s through to the current year has seen the rise of artists well-loved and revered for their ‘confessional’ music: Mitski, Lucy Dacus, Adrianne Lenker, to name a few.
To a certain degree, the increasing popularity and power of this music rests on its relatability. Of course, because who doesn’t want to hear themselves reflected back in a song, to have their troubles and heartaches recognised and validated? I’d argue that almost all music, especially the more sentimental kind, leans on relatability to secure listeners. However, when it comes to the aforementioned ‘sad girl’ artists of recent years, there’s a worrying trend forming. The reduction of these artists’ music to solely its relatability. Their songs are being viewed as diary entries, ‘tender’ accounts of their own lives, with their abilities as storytellers and artists being dismissed or ignored.
The descriptions that these female artists are subjected to become even more harmful when considering race. The majority of ‘sad girl’ artists are white women, with the handful of women of colour who are grouped in with them described in much more negative terms. Mitski’s Tiny Desk concert was described online as “raw”, and her music labelled “feral”. These descriptions are especially concerning when applied to women of colour — hey imply that any expression of emotion that does not come from a white woman is somehow more violent or irrational. Of the artists that are most prominent in the ‘sad girl’ sphere, black women in particular are in the minority. The link between fragility and white womanhood is a historical one, and one that is clearly reflected in this group of artists.
Pushing biographical interpretations to the forefront of artistic analysis is a constant when looking at female artists throughout history. Jeanette Winterson writes about her struggle with the “received idea that women always write about ‘experience’”. Christina Rossetti told her brother that she didn’t see why a female poet “should be less able to construct [narrative and characters] from [their] own inner consciousness”. Yet scholars still dig into the correspondences and journals of female authors in hopes of finding opinions and emotions that can be mapped neatly onto their work, as if to say, “Look! This came from personal experience! This clearly proves that she wasn’t nearly as imaginative as her male peers!” In a 2018 interview for Crack Magazine, Héloïse Letissier (Christine and the Queens) asserts that “even in art women are refused the apersonal”, which has been proved time and time again through interviews and public perception of female artists. It isn’t enough to analyse the art as art — there must be some personal experience that it’s based on. Mitski similarly takes issue with this, expressing in a 2018 Pitchfork article her annoyance at how people cry to her music because “it sounds like a diary, it sounds so personal.” She declares “It is personal. But that’s so gendered. There’s no feeling of, ‘Oh, maybe she’s a songwriter and she wrote this as a piece of art.’”
Yet there’s a duality here that must be addressed — what if these songs are autobiographical? Phoebe Bridger’s album Punisher was Grammy-nominated and highly praised by most music critics, yet six out of the eleven songs are about Bridger’s personal relationships with bandmates, parents, and exes. As a parallel, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a stunning literary exploration of depression and the oppression of women who don’t fit societal norms, but also a roman à clef. By sidelining the influence of the personal in favour of discussing artistry, are we ignoring the voices of women who do want to write about themselves, and condemning their desire for self-representation?
Many female artists write from experience and are happy to openly admit this. In 1998, following her infamous MTV Music awards speech, Fiona Apple told Rolling Stone “that’s me writing to myself.. I write [songs] for myself.” In 2020, following the release of her sophomore album Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers tells NME that her songs constitute “a big fat invitation to ask me about my personal life… It’s therapy – I do this for myself”. How do we, as listeners, contend with these opposing ideas? How do we deal with the knowledge that sometimes seemingly ‘personal’ songs are narratives, and to suggest otherwise confines female artists to the realms of confession, but that sometimes they are just personal songs, written from experience?
Separating the art from the artist has, and will always be, a sticky subject. But when it comes to female singer-songwriters, do we really feel the need to label every song as a biographical confession, a weeping woman’s diary entry in sonic form? We as listeners need to balance the ideas that women both create art influenced by their lives, and create art for art’s sake. To lean too heavily towards one of these views results in an oversimplification of the songs, and the perpetuation of sexist stereotypes. While emotional responses to art are always wonderful, it’s the least we can do to afford female musicians the same degree of objective analysis as we do male musicians.
Letissier asks, of her lyrics, “How can you tell it’s even private? Don’t you think I’m a good storyteller?” Ezra Furman mentions in her 2018 interview with Consequence of Sound, “People wonder whether this song is an accurate account of my real life […] I wonder why they want to know.” Both frame an emotional response to their songs as the listener’s own issue to deal with, instead of placing responsibility on the artist to explain which aspects are biographical, and which aren’t. “Does it change how the song feels if you know it’s true or false?”
“I guess it probably does. Which is why I’m not telling.”
