Building a Herstory Edition Part 2

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History, Music Commentary

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2024

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For decades—literally since Woodstock—female musicians had battled music-industry perceptions that amassing too many of them, on the radio or on the road, was bad for business. And yet, by the ’90s, women were vital to the rise of alt-rock and hip-hop on the charts: from Suzanne Vega to Queen Latifah, Tracy Chapman to Sheryl Crow, Natalie Merchant to Missy Elliott. Sarah McLachlan harnessed this energy into an all-woman tour she dubbed Lilith Fair. Its string of sellouts from 1997 to ’99 affirmed women’s clout in the decade of grunge-and-gangsta. But the festival was also criticized for its narrow focus and for branding “women’s music” as a genre. More than two decades later, Hit Parade assesses the legacy of Lilith on the charts and on the road—how its performers, attendees and musical descendants are helping to ensure the future is female. Podcast production by Benjamin Frisch and Kevin Bendis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:21.8	or lowercase that That's Shopify.
0:23.9	CODieK slash Special Offer. Well, I'm not going to do it. Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine,
0:50.8	about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart
0:55.0	analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slates Why Is This Song Number One series.
1:00.0	On our last episode, we walked through the prehistory of Lilleth Fair, the late 90s All Women
1:08.1	Festival concert series launched by Sarah McLaughlin. From the 70s era of Joni Mitchell
1:15.0	through the 80s rise of Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman
1:19.0	to the early 90s emergence of a roster of dominant women performers like Liz Fair and Cheryl Crow.
1:27.3	Women were taking up more space on the charts and the radio dial.
1:32.4	Now they were ready to command the state. the
1:35.0	charts and the radio dial. Now they were ready to command the stage and after a successful
1:38.0	1996 beta test of the Lilith concept named after an assertive woman icon from ancient mythology by 97
1:47.7	McLaughlin and her fellow performers were poised to widen the circle.
1:55.0	Like the mythic figure, the whole premise of Lilith was a challenge, a rebuke.
	...

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