Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Building a Herstory Edition Part 2
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2024
⏱️ 42 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:19.4 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 0:30.5 | I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series. |
| 0:36.8 | On our last episode, we walked through the pre-history of Lilith Fair, |
| 0:43.5 | the late 90s All-Women Festival Concert Series launched by Sarah McLaughlin. |
| 0:49.2 | From the 70s era of Joni Mitchell, through the 80s rise of Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman, to the early |
| 0:57.0 | 90s emergence of a roster of dominant women performers like Liz Fair and Cheryl Crow. Women were |
| 1:05.2 | taking up more space on the charts and the radio dial. Now they were ready to command the stage. |
| 1:12.8 | And after a successful 1996 beta test of the Lilith concept, |
| 1:18.9 | named after an assertive woman icon from ancient mythology, |
| 1:23.4 | by 97, |
| 1:24.9 | McLaughlin and her fellow performers were poised to widen the circle. |
| 1:31.9 | Like the mythic figure, the whole premise of Lilith was a challenge, a rebuke. |
| 1:39.0 | Conventional industry wisdom held that multi-female concerts or airplay of back-to-back women artists on the radio |
| 1:47.8 | was commercial poison. Many of the women who would go on to play Lilifair told stories of |
| 1:55.4 | promoters, radio programmers, and managers who advised against pairing with other women. |
| 2:02.3 | Quote, I remember talking to my agent about touring with another female, |
| 2:07.5 | Cheryl Crow told Vanity Fair. |
| 2:10.0 | And the response was, you don't want to do that because it won't sell tickets, unquote. |
| 2:16.3 | If it makes you happy. because it won't sell tickets, unquote. Sarah McLaughlin expressed similar frustration about radio limitations, even after a first half of the 90s |
| 2:33.3 | where women had done well on the modern rock charts. |
| 2:37.0 | Quote, I'd hear all these radio stations playing Pearl Jam and Sound Garden back to back. |
... |
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