Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Building a Herstory Edition

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4.2 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2020

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Like many media organizations at the moment, Slate is getting hit pretty hard by what's going on with the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We want to continue doing our work, providing you with all our great podcasts, news and reporting, and we simply cannot do that without your support. So we're asking you to sign up for Slate Plus, our membership program. It's just $35 for the first year, and it goes a long way to supporting us in this crucial moment.

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music.
0:03.1	Hey there, Hit Parade listeners.
0:05.7	What you're about to hear is a preview of our latest episode.
0:10.1	As we announced recently, Slate, like many media organizations,
0:15.3	has been hit hard by the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
0:21.6	We need your help to continue producing this show and all the other work we do at Slate.
0:28.6	So we're asking you to sign up for Slate Plus, our membership program.
0:33.6	It's just $35 for the first year, and it will go a long way toward supporting us
0:40.3	at this crucial moment. Sign up at slate.com slash hit parade plus, and you'll get to hear this
0:48.1	and every episode of Hit Parade in full. That's slate.com slash Hit Parade Plus. Thanks. And now your episode preview.
1:09.6	Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate Magazine, about the hits from coast to coast.
1:18.1	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series.
1:25.4	On today's show, 23 years ago, in the early summer of 1997,
1:32.2	a team of women mounted a tour that was the first of its kind. It was a traveling festival
1:39.1	that defied conventional wisdom, the idea that no concert tour should have more than one or two women on the bill.
1:48.5	This tour would be all women and woman-fronted bands. They called it Lilith Fair.
1:55.3	Water is wide, I can't call soul. Founded by Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLaughlin, Lilith Fair would prove a blockbuster success, the highest grossing touring festival of the year on its very first run.
2:19.9	And why should that have been surprising?
2:23.3	After all, Lilith's mainstage acts were all certified gold,
2:28.8	or platinum. Where-platin or multi-platin
2:43.0	every day is a winding
2:49.0	at the time Lilith Fair was received as the consummation of a decade and a genre, 90s rock,
	...

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