Women's eNews (https://womensenews.org/tag/music/)
At this year’s Viña del Mar festival, in Chile last month, the festival queen took a dive into a pool, covered only in rose petals, surrounded by fans and photographers.
The annual weeklong event in New York City is designed to inspire women to “find their strength.” The folk and blues musician started it in 2010, as a reaction to the midterm elections that year and the impending “war on women.”
Gone are balaclavas, boots, wool stockings, angular fighting gestures, distorting jangling guitars and screaming voices. All that is defining for a group of everyday women transforming themselves into masked underground protesters.
Fronted by Gia, the group Hang on the Box embraced their sexuality and spoke in a way that was less demure, a first for China, says Jemimah Steinfeld in this except from the book “Little Emperors and Material Girls: Sex and Youth in Modern China.”
When I went to Iran this summer, almost everything I participated in related to music was illegal. I played piano to male audiences, participated in underground concerts and danced without my headscarf to Persian pop music.
The rock icon, best known for her role in the band Sonic Youth, talks about the challenges of being an artist, musician and mother and looks back at her music career in this excerpt from the book of interviews “Mistakes I Made at Work.”
Activist group UltraViolet just called out hip hop star Rick Ross for his rape-celebrating lyrics and got Reebok to cancel his lucrative partnership deal. Not all rappers’ attitudes are the same, however. Tyson Amir is spreading the message of peace, love and not being confused “with those other dudes.”
Las Krudas is part of an art movement in Cuba created by black feminists, says Fari Nzinga in this essay in the anthology “Getting In is Not Enough.” But like female rappers in the U.S., they fight invisibility in the industry.
Jennifer Knapp and Marsha Stevens, both top-billed Christian singers at one point, went public about being lesbian decades apart. But Knapp’s recent rejection has been just as harsh as it was for Stevens in 1980.
The Melodia Women’s Choir will perform on May 16 in New York. But Jennifer Clarke, the choir’s founder, worries about the fate of female artistry as cultural institutions suffer and stimulus aid fails to recover ground lost in this economic downturn.