I know Lilith Fair doesn’t exist anymore.
I was turned way off of Lilith Fair because it shifted from a cool festival created to give women musicians a huge platform to a middle-class white-womyn feminist extravaganza rife with indoctrination and classism, which hesitated to include some of the edgier angrier musicians or women of color in their shows. (Perhaps there never was a “shift”. Perhaps it always was a sort of Smith-College crunch-granola local co-op kind of music festival) The idea was cool, when it began, but once rap and hip-hop started taking over the airwaves, Lilith Fair didn’t want to open their arms to THOSE female artists. The festival wasn’t about celebrating women, it was about celebrating a certain KIND of woman and a certain KIND of sound. A gentle folky sound. Could you imagine Joan Jett on the Lilith Fair stage? Or Courtney Love? Or Chrissie Hynde? Tina Turner?
Read this for a great analysis on what went wrong with Lilith Fair.
Lilith Fair quickly became one of rock’s highest-grossing concert events, featuring many of the best known female rock artists. But it’s not been without its detractors, and many of those critics have been women performers. One of the main problems has been Lilith’s focus on white singer-songwriters in the folk and rock traditions. Organizers have said that they have been turned down by edgier artists. Long a critic, Courtney Love and her band Hole signed on, then off again without explanation, and L7, an all-woman punk band, hired a plane trailing the banner “Bored? Try L7” to fly over one Lilith Fair venue.
Many of the attempts to bring more artists of color onto the bill have smacked of tokenism, and for female musicians who exist outside the mainstream, Lilith represents the triumph of the goody-goody girls, whose safe, somewhat ethereal music doesn’t challenge the standard notions of how women players should present themselves.
I liked this quote, too:
…All three stages featured insipid folk-tinged music. The smaller stages were missed opportunities for risk taking — this is where grrl rock bands like the Donnas or Sleater-Kinney could have created some much-needed variety. I longed for something unruly — something that said it’s okay to be hairy and witchy and mad. Even the “womyn’s” fairs of the ’70s, with their drum circles and cervical inspections, started to seem appealing … Aswe were subjected to yet another song about angels during Sarah McLachlan’s closing set, I wished we could invoke some of the spirit of Woodstock ’99, and take all those Biore beauty products, tie-dye T-shirts and Camel cigarettes and light a huge bonfire. Then as the flames rose up, all the women would dance around it howling at the moon like crazed banshees. That’s my kind of Lilith!
Right on, girlfriend.
