Feminist Respair and the Music Industry: Reclaiming the Narrative through Taylor Swift’s “The Man” and Kesha’s “Woman”
It is undeniable that both Taylor Swift and Kesha are icons in the music industry. With a combined 44 Grammy nominations and accolades from Billboard including “Trailblazer” and “Woman of the Decade”, both Taylor and Kesha are hugely successful artists who have influenced popular music for over a decade (Grammy, n.d., Johnson, 2022). While both have found major success through their music, both women have also been transparent about the struggle of being a woman in an industry largely dominated by men. Both have been the subject of multiple controversies surrounding men in the business, and both have spoken out about their experiences. Because of this, Taylor Swift and Kesha can be seen as strong models of what feminism in the music industry looks like today.
The music videos for “The Man” (off Taylor’s 2019 album Lover) and “Woman” (off Kesha’s 2017 album Rainbow) can be interpreted as feminist videos and direct responses to controversies they have faced in the music industry. In 2020, Taylor was involved in a feud with industry manager Scooter Braun over rights ownership of her earlier albums (NPR, 2020). She has also come forward with sexual assault allegations in the past (Refinery29, 2020). Similarly, Kesha was involved in a highly publicized lawsuit against her former executive producer Dr. Luke, which involves sexual assault, sexual harassment, and emotional distress among other accusations (Rolling Stone, 2016). In these two videos, Taylor and Kesha use their art to comment on the tribulations they have both faced in their careers.
Both “The Man” and “Woman” feature lavish displays of wealth and power, but they approach feminism with different perspectives. In “The Man”, Taylor herself plays an opulently rich businessman who bears a striking resemblance to Scooter Braun. The video montages extravagant scenes of the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by the man, including visits to strip clubs, marrying a much younger woman, and general debauchery. Conversely, in “Woman”, Kesha is also portraying a rich, carefree lifestyle, but she herself is the one enjoying it. Even Kesha’s lyrics, “Don’t buy me a drink…Don’t call me honey” send a direct message to the industry. If “The Man” sheds light on the industry as it is, then “Woman” is a glimmer of hope of how it could be, with more confident women assuming positions of power in music.
Although the videos contrast in style, the message is the same. Taylor and Kesha are using their voice and authority to push back at the negative experiences they have gone through, and therefore, both videos can be seen as a form of “respair”. Respair is not hope, nor despair, but rather an acknowledgement of the need for collective repair of a broken, often misogynistic society (Boyce Kay & Banet-Weiser, 2019). According to Boyce Kay and Banet-Weiser, “respair is about staying with the trouble, sticking with the mess, and committing to the hard work of repair collectively” (Boyce Kay & Banet-Weiser, 2019). Instead of showing “feminist anger”, Taylor and Kesha more subtly acknowledge the problems in the industry in a way that can still entertain, but also make audiences think.
At the end of “The Man”, we hear the director call cut, then the camera pans and Taylor herself is sitting at the director’s chair. She asks the man, “Could you try to be sexier, maybe more likeable this time?”, to which he responds, “Yeah. Okay. No problem”. While humorous, this is a clever ending to the video because it reverses the roles that Taylor has witnessed in the industry. The thought of a man being asked to be “sexier” or “more likeable” is basically unheard of, but for women, it is no rare occurrence. Kesha’s video has a similar scene, where the men in the back of her car do not get out of the car or even look at her until she tells them to. While exaggerated, both Taylor and Kesha play with the theme of role reversals in their videos.
In her book Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls, Lisa Robinson fills one chapter with accounts of nearly every iconic woman in music and the struggles they have faced with sexual assault, abuse, and misogyny in the industry, a list that includes both Taylor Swift and Kesha (Robinson, 2020). Robinson makes evident the fact that there is a harmful pattern in the industry, of women being sexualized, objectified, and abused, but the question remains as to what the industry must do to fix it. At least by being transparent about it in the media and their videos, and even making light of it, Taylor and Kesha can turn their experiences into a display of respair, a hopeful call to action to up and comers in the industry.
There is still much to be done, and two musicians calling out toxic masculinity in their music videos will not directly give way to the legislative, judicial, and cultural changes that must take place. However, by using their voices and their artistic talent, Taylor Swift in “The Man” and Kesha in “Woman” show examples of how women in music can acknowledge their experiences without letting them be defining, and can push back against an industry that has long let women down.
Works Cited
Johnson, P. (2022). Music Industry [PowerPoint slides]. Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
Johnston, M. (2018, June 25). Kesha, dr. Luke: The case explained. Rolling Stone. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kesha-and-dr-luke-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-the-case-106731/
Kay, J. B., & Banet-Weiser, S. (2019). Feminist anger and feminist respair. Feminist Media Studies, 19(4), 603-609.
Kesha. Recording Academy. (n.d.). Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.grammy.com/artists/kesha/187816
keshaVEVO. (2017, July 13). Kesha - woman (Official Video) ft. The Dap-Kings horns. YouTube. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXyA4MXKIKo
McKenna, L. (2020, February 27). Taylor Swift, man. NPR. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/2020/02/27/809983814/taylor-swift-man
Rivas, M. (2020, January 31). Everything that happened in Taylor Swift's sexual assault case with DJ David Mueller. Taylor Swift Sexual Assault Case: Timeline Of Events. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/01/9328556/taylor-swift-david-mueller-sexual-assault-groping-case
Robinson, L. (2020). Abuse. In Nobody ever asked me about the girls: Women, music, and fame (1st ed., pp. 60–78). essay, Henry Holt and Company.
Taylor Swift. Recording Academy. (n.d.). Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.grammy.com/artists/taylor-swift/15450
TaylorSwiftVEVO. (2020, February 27). Taylor Swift - The Man (official video). YouTube. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqAJLh9wuZ0
Stella Cha
ReplyDeleteHi Isabella,
Thank you for your insightful post about feminist respair and the inequalities of the music industry being exposed through Taylor Swift and Kesha’s music videos. The two videos shine a light on the discrimination women have faced in the industry as a result of misogyny and sexism in music.
You bring up strong points when you analyze the different roles that men and women play in the music industry; men live an extravagant lifestyle filled with women by their sides, whether it be strippers or accessory-like girlfriends. However, women are constantly fighting their way to make a name for themselves, which often comes hand in hand with sacrificing their womanhood to please the male gaze and slowly climb up in rank. They are often subject to sexual assault and abuse, which goes unspoken due to the systematic oppression against women by powerful men in powerful positions.
Hall brings up another strong point about binary oppositions and their role in creating stereotypes. He informs us that binary oppositions are mutually defining opposites that serve to define each other (for example, black and white, civilization vs savagery) (Hall, 1997). In the case of the music industry, the binary opposition exists between man and woman. These two “opposites” create an oppressive power structure in which women are treated unfairly because of the systematic sexism in which men typically hold higher positions of power and are in charge of handling women’s affairs and business. The music industry has been historically dominated by male producers, managers, CEOs, and more, including Scooter Braun and Dr. Luke. They are seen as living carefree and lavish lifestyles with no concern that women may have any sort of power over them. However, women are seen as the performers, often sexualized and objectified with a short leash held by the men that control their careers. Through these music videos, Taylor Swift and Kesha successfully exposed the gender inequality and power struggle they faced by depicting the differences between treatment of men and women. For instance, the example you bring up about Taylor directing the man to be sexier shows the stark binary opposition between men and their power versus women and their subjection to men’s wants and needs.
Your discussion of female artists has led me back again to Hopper’s “Pazz & Jop: So, Are Women Here Yet?” article which I think coincides exactly with what you gather from Kesha and Taylor Swift. Hopper’s mapping of female artists’ ascendence to the top is unsurprisingly linked to female artists’ iconic personas and songs celebrating their success under a gendered scope.
ReplyDeleteTaylor Swift and Kesha’s rise in the early 2010s marks a time in American popular music which formally recognizes the impact women have made on modern music. “The Man” and “Woman” are essentially remarks to both artists’ apparent dominance in the field. Both overcame patriarchal roadblocks along their paths to stardom, but these two music videos mark something more significant. After achieving what Hopper describes as “girls learning to play a boys’ game by boys’ rules,” (Hopper 2019) these artists instead opted for singles that attacked the system they had to first navigate through.
In some ways, I think the Pazz and Jop era of polls is over because of singles like these. The overarching success of these two artists and their acceptance of femininity over a traditionally male-dominated network has all but solidified the idea that anyone can excel in the music industry. Pazz and Jop’s musical reporting needs to take a new spin on music in order to expand past the rise of Taylor Swift and Kesha. I think musical reporting has a significant place in popular culture — I am really interested in it — and the representation of femininity on the charts should spur a new era for this line of work.
Commenter: C.H. Henry
I loved reading this post. I'm not really a music person, but I'm decently into listening to Taylor Swift's music, and everyone in our generation has heard at least a few Kesha songs (side note — when did she change back from being Ke$ha? Is there a study out there on the semiotics of naming conventions/unconventions when it comes to singers' "images" in relation to their stage names? That would be really interesting, but I digress!) This post got me thinking a lot about Britney Spears and the #FreeBritney movement as of late, as well as the extended history of actresses/female singers deemed unstable and placed under conservatorships. People like Nichelle Nichols, for example. A conservatorship and an unfair/unhealthy relationship with someone who controls one's music is different, but the throughline of women's cultural and monetary capital being controlled by a man who gets granted a public pass to essentially have sole dictatorship over work that is not his own is representative of a passive culture of misogyny particularly when it comes to entertainment and pop culture, fields that are already not taken seriously and fields within which women in particular are not granted any semblance of serious consideration from the general public. The contentious relationship between feminism and the industry that you described made me think a lot about our reading from Turner on celebrity news. The way Turner talks about the "image" specifically interests me, as the relationship massive artists such as Taylor Swift and Kesha have to their music with regard to their physical appearance is always very much under public scrutiny (think the backlash Taylor Swift got from her Anti-Hero music video about the part where she's on the scale, for example). Additionally, the way Turner talks about gossip as news and the focus nowadays for sensationalism over fact particularly in the context of tabloid journalism and celebrity news got me thinking about the commentary these female artists make in their music videos about the coverage of them by the media and of the misogynyistic mainstream interpretations of their work/their image/their existence. In short, I loved this post and I loved the connections I was able to draw from it to a broader conversation about misogyny and celebrity in this day and age. - Isaac Pollock
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