Women Will Dominate—and Dismantle—the Music Industry in 2019
When Ariana Grande issued thank u, next earlier this month, she was staying true to a long-held promise. In a move rarely seen from an artist of imposing status, the album marked the pop enchanter's second studio release in just six months. (Her previous album, Sweetener, dropped last August.) Still, if you've followed the whirlwind that is Grande's day to day, new songs made perfect sense. In an interview with Billboard, she expressed a desire "to put out music in the way that a rapper does."
The goal, Grande contends, is to dispose of a double standard that has contaminated the music industry for decades. "I just want to fucking talk to my fans and sing and write music and drop it the way these boys do," she explained of the release schedule women artists are often held to. As she tells it, men are allowed much more freedom with album rollouts. "Why do they get to make records like that and I don't? So I do and I did and I am, and I will continue to."
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The assertion detonated in the form of prophecy: No longer will music's center hold. And no longer will women like Grande let it. Elsewhere, pop aspirants of uncanny talent—Noname, Cardi B, Mitski, Hayley Kiyoko, Rico Nasty, and Tierra Whack among them—are demonstrating an immodest, near-singular, anti-populist aptitude for industry-wide reinvention. Collectively, their work suggests not a move toward a new center but a removal of it altogether. It augurs a year wherein women will further dominate the charts and anchor the cultural conversation. They're not just taking the reins; they're showing us, in form and theme, that to embrace the industry's conventional structures is to bet on a decaying establishment.
Today, in music, to long for a center is to misunderstand where music itself is headed. Consider Tierra Whack, the Philadelphia shape-shifter who interrogated the complex and curious tangle of our age with Whack World. Released last May, the project was blistering and spare—its 15 songs were capped at one minute apiece. It was a sly, challenging experiment as much as it was a deeply engaging one (almost perfectly suited for our internet-addled consumption habits). When Whack spoke with The New York Times, she detailed the physical and emotional boundaries of her impressionistic world as "down, then up, down, then up. It's scary, it feels good, it doesn't. It's crazy, it's calm. It's everything. That's exactly me." A pocket-sized masterpiece, the album remains one of 2018's most surprising concepts, its existence seeming to destabilize pop music's natural bent toward maximalist narratives. Here was Whack, in her miniature universe, dreaming and building and wandering, just being herself.
Compression is an interesting concept in music mostly because it demands of the artist a certain aesthetic virtuosity. For Whack it appeared to come with ease. The result was an album that read as a critique on the dangers of structure—and one that offered a kind of blueprint to build new, necessary edifices of dissent. (Last year's releases from male counterparts Earl Sweatshirt, Pusha T, and Kamasi Washington also flirted with a disregard for structure, thematically and narratively, by testing the limits of paucity, excess, originality.)
Reality wasn't always inviting to artists like Whack. In 2018, Briana Younger investigated hip-hop's taste for repression, making note of how it had evolved into an ecosystem "that has kept women at bay, never allowing for more than one female superstar at a time while treating the other women as incidental, pitting them against one another, or ignoring them entirely." (A Billboard chart analysis conducted by Pitchfork further substantiated the claim.) Perhaps by some unknown miracle, 2018 hinted at a future where the cage of history no longer barred female progress: Cardi B, Nicki Minaj, and Beyoncé all commanded public consciousness with comparable and lasting resolve (to read Everything Is Love as anything other than a rap album is to misread Beyoncé's artistic mastery of genre). Similarly, Noname, with her deft poetics, Maryland trap-rager Rico Nasty, and femme-futurist Janelle Monáe all helped to scrub the center into nonexistence with albums that tested personal truths and elevated our understanding of womanhood ("Reading Toni Morrison in a nigga canoe/ 'Cause a bitch really about her freedom," Noname rapped on "Montego Bae"). Likewise, in September, when The Fader published its list of "31 Rappers to Feel Excited About Right Now," there were no men to be found amid the ranking.
This break, this decentering, is more than symbolic. Often a spectacle of embarrassment and missed opportunity, the 2019 Grammy Awards hewed closer to reality, reflecting the notable strides of its women artists. There was soul enigma H.E.R. winning for best R&B album. Cardi B again made history and became the first woman to win best rap album as a solo artist for Invasion of Privacy. The night's top honors went to country royalty Kacey Musgraves as she won Album of the Year for her magnetic folk incantation, Golden Hour. It was, as several critics and fans noted, a year for women.
In many ways, it's just a beginning. Or a restart. As more women artists like BbyMutha, Lor Choc, and Kali Uchis infiltrate the mainstream, we'll be thankful we have their voices to lean on. Without a center, without the old structures of the music biz in place—and with artists like Grande sidestepping them altogether—we can begin to look elsewhere. To seek out artists of all colors, religions, sexualities. To find new sanctuaries of sound. In April, Minneapolis-via-Houston rapper Lizzo will release her third studio album, Cuz I Love You. This week she posted the cover art across social media and premiered the project's eponymous music video to the delight of fans. In an interview with The Cut she described the project as "if Aretha Franklin made a ratchet-ass rap album in 2019." It was all I needed to hear.