On the Death of the Girl Group.
by Emma Winsor Wood
Today, the girl group died. Or, maybe it was in 2010 when the Pussycat Dolls broke up. I’m not sure. Most of my exposure to pop music came from parties in college; since I graduated in 2012, I have found it harder to keep up. But I do not need to be a music devotee to see there are no girl groups—which I am defining loosely, as any band composed entirely of women—currently on the Billboard Top 100. It is not that the band itself has died; there are a number of all-male or mostly-male groups on the list: Rixton, Bastille, OneRepublic, Imagine Dragons, and Coldplay, to name a few.
In truth, the idea of the girl group as I grew up with it in the 90s, when it appeared to serve mainly as a conduit for girl power and sisterly sentiment, was gone long before the Pussycat Dolls split up. Their 2005 single “Don’t Cha” chronicles the story of a cheating boyfriend as seen from the point of view of the “other woman.” The song, which remains the best selling song by the group in the US and one of the bestselling singles of all time worldwide, asks in its hook:
Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?
…
Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was fun like me?
In contrast, Destiny’s Child sang, from the opposite perspective, in 1999:
I am not the one to sit around and be played
So prove yourself to me:
Tell the truth, who you with?
How would you like it if I came over with my clique? (Say My Name)
Rather than pit herself against the potential “other woman,” as in “Don’t Cha,” the Destiny’s Child narrator focuses on her boyfriend’s behavior, expressing a sense of female solidarity with the mention of her “clique.”
In 1999, TLC also disavowed bad boyfriends, identifying a scrub partly by the way he treated his girlfriend: “If you have a shorty that you don’t show love / Oh yes, son, I’m talking to you.” Similarly, in 1996, the Spice Girls broadcasted their (admittedly peppy) warning to potential lovers: “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.” With these lyrics, girl groups—already by default a model of the power of the sisterly bond—endorsed solidarity among women, while also encouraging their listeners to hold the men in their life to perfectly reasonable standards (e.g. don’t cheat; don’t be a loser; don’t hate on my friends).
In “Don’t Cha,” the Pussycat Dolls trained the same kind of critical eye that Destiny’s Child, TLC, and the Spice Girls had used to size up men against other women. It is possible “Don’t Cha” marked a sea change in pop music, from the Riot grrrl-inspired girl power groups of the 90s to today’s solo women singers, who blame themselves for their heartbreak (Taylor Swift: “And I realize the blame is on me / Cause I knew you were trouble when you walked in / So shame on me now”); can’t resist bad boys (Lady Gaga: “He’s a wolf in disguise / But I can’t stop staring in those evil eyes”); and frequently single out other women as their main antagonists (Lana Del Rey, reportedly as an attack on her one-time rival Gaga: “I’m a dragon, you’re a whore” as well as Swift who, despite an Instagram account that has become an ode to female friendships, once sang: “Hey, what’re you doing with a girl like that? / She wears high heels, / I wear sneakers. / She’s cheer captain, / And I’m on the bleachers”).
The complicated relationship between art-making and autonomy in the pop music industry, however, muddies the interpretative waters: although many of these women, as well as the groups that preceded them, might have started out writing music alone in their bedrooms, most now work with a team of song writers and producers. The positive, if giggly, girl power of “Wannabe” was part of a fad—which started with the underground feminist punk rock movement Riot grrrl in the Pacific Northwest—on which producers and writers happily riffed. The girl group itself was a fad that has since gone out of fashion.
Even if the girl group was only a fad, the fact remains that it is hard to represent girl power if, like most of today’s solo female pop stars, you don’t belong to a group. This is somewhat paradoxical: pop stars like Lady Gaga, Swift, and Beyoncé all embody girl power, defined in the OED as “a self-reliant attitude among girls and young women manifested in ambition, assertiveness, and individualism,” whether they want to or not. Perhaps it is partly this self-reliant attitude that, as Jody Rosen wrote in her profile of Beyoncé earlier this month, “provok[es] ire from naysayers and ideologues of all stripes,” transforming these solo pop stars into lightning rods for (often critical) analysis. The woman who has the courage to stand alone is perceived as more of a threat than the woman who stays with her “clique.”
Lana Del Rey, the singer accused of antifeminism for the passivity displayed by the female “characters” on her first album, recently released her second album, provocatively titled Ultraviolence. It has sparked the expected controversy. Allison Stewart writes, “[Ultraviolence is] not just retro, it’s calculatedly, disturbingly retrograde, as if someone decided that vacant female subservience was somehow underrepresented in the Top 40,” while Sasha Geffen praises Del Rey’s attempts “to imagine the sorrow and desperation and flat-out anger of the women still cast in men’s spotlights.”
Del Rey has distanced herself from the feminist critiques of her music. In a recent interview, she said, “I don’t know too much about the history of feminism, and so I’m not really a relevant person to bring into the conversation. Everything I was writing was so autobiographical, it could really only be a personal analysis.” In 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote in her essay “The Personal is Political,” that “It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say.” In the same breath as she admits her ignorance of the history of feminism, Del Rey unwittingly links herself to one of the core tenets of the feminist movement: the personal is political.
And in a way, Ultraviolence, with lines like “He hit me and it felt like a kiss” and “I fucked my way to the top / This is my show,” scans as a twisted reincarnation of the Riot grrrl movement, which was created to explore formerly taboo topics such as rape, abortion, domestic abuse, racism, classism, and women’s sexuality—and which groups like the Spice Girls are often accused of undermining. Del Rey is not afraid to mine the darkest, most taboo parts of her personal history for material; in doing so, she challenges our accepted narrative of the progress of feminism in the 21st century.
In her essay, Hanisch continued on to say, “I think we must listen to what so-called apolitical women have to say…There are things in the consciousness of ‘apolitical’ women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have.” I hope we can stay quiet long enough to hear what Del Rey has to say.
Emma Winsor Wood is a poet and freelance writer. She writes the Women and Words column for TheRiveterMagazine.com. You can find her on Twitter @EmmaWinsorWood.
