Womanhood often feels like a performance of appeasement: We are always expected to be pleasant, lovely and benevolent, but women should not have to play a character! Our anger is empowering; it is the rejection of a fabricated gender role and the qualities we must embrace to fulfill it successfully.
Music has always been a vessel for emotion, and many artists feature feminine rage in their songs. If you are interested in feminist music recommendations, then you have come to the right place. These songs are from varying genres, but all of them integrate feminist themes.
Paloma connects her audience to past generations of women, singing from the perspective of a desperate woman trapped in a suffocating gender role. Her anger grows as she shoulders arduous physical and emotional labor and is scolded and unappreciated by the husband she once thought she loved. “labour” is a powerful commentary on patriarchy that climaxes with a collective chant of all the parts women have been forced to play: “All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid / Nymph then a virgin, nurse and a servant / Just an appendage, live to attend him / So that he never lifts a finger.”
Mitski perfectly articulates the stigma that surrounds aging as a woman. She describes her anguish as time marches on and her youth threatens to expire. Mitski captures the artificiality of beauty standards by characterizing herself as an “organism” rather than a human: she is “chemical, that’s all that is all.” She compares herself to a fruit at peak ripeness that is about to fall from its tree, begging someone to capture her, love her and photograph her before she cannot be deemed worthy of love anymore. This song is so raw in capturing the desperation that women feel to preserve their youthful beauty, struggling to grasp society’s attention like the ledge of a ravine.
I cannot get enough of Olivia Rodrigo’s satirical caricature of girlhood. Most of the song builds an image of this overly loving girl with no desires for herself except to be desirable. All her actions relate to being beautiful and likable somehow. For example, Rodrigo says she has “Coca-Cola bottles that I only use to curl my hair.” Instead of drinking the soda, she uses it to make herself look pretty. She also says, “I feel for your every little issue, I know just what you mean.” Rodrigo paints an exaggerated picture of how the media expects a young woman to be: “I’m grateful all the time / I’m sexy and I’m kind / I’m pretty when I cry.” However, inside, she is screaming, dealing with the disparity between her actual feelings and those she is supposed to have. She is fed up with contorting her actions to fit the mold of a perfect American girl.
I discovered this song when it played in “My Lady Jane” on Amazon Prime (which I highly recommend), and I immediately paused the show to add it to my playlist. “My Lady Jane” takes place in an alternative 16th century England, and “Holy Roller” plays after the protagonist, Jane, gets married against her will. It opens with heavy guitar and the lyrics, “I know that every woman has her day / She gotta praise a man to make her way / It’s no good, it’s no good, it’s no good / Don’t want to play this game.” The insurgent rock-and-roll guitar heightens the rebellious feel of the song, emphasizing the singer’s frustration with her lack of choice.
This sassy, sarcastic tune humbles all the condescending men Peters has met during her music career. She sits down with all the boys with big egos and tells them she “got this far, but I’m Joan of Arc, and you’re just a guy on a horse.” Peters knocks these men off their high horses, stunts their power trips and gives them a harsh yet hilarious reality check. This song is a more comedic brand of anger than the others on this list, but the underlying rage behind these lyrics is clear: Peters is tired of being perceived as less-than because of her womanhood.
The STEM major in me is particularly enamored with this song because it brands spite as a catalyst for achievement: “Every time you are succeeding / There’s an old man somewhere, seething / And spite’s as good a reason to take his power.” When my STEM classes get difficult, this song makes me angry on behalf of all the women who have faced discrimination in my field, which motivates me to succeed just to prove that I can. Even if your personal goals and experiences differ, spite is a powerful auxiliary motivator that can be applied to any aspiration, and this song clicks that switch on.
*Including two songs by the same artist was unintended, but Paris Paloma exemplifies feminist music (honorary mention: “boys, bugs and men”).
This song makes me feel like the protagonist of a dystopian novel. You know the archetype: she is small and timid, continuously underestimated and all the odds are stacked against her (Katniss Everdeen, Tris Prior, Violet Sorrengail, Fang Runin…need I continue?). Then she meets a mentor who realizes her potential, so she trains her body and mind, realizes her worth, and seeks retribution. This song is the underdog’s revenge against everyone who prayed for her downfall. It’s vengeful, it’s angry, and it’s amazing. Working out to this song makes me feel like I could run a marathon, ride a dragon or single-handedly dismantle a dictatorship.
This song is angry. That’s why I love it so much. Halsey’s music is the epitome of feminine rage. If I could pick one lyric to summarize this song, it would be, “I’ve waited a while for a moment to say I don’t owe you a goddamn thing!” Halsey is sick and tired of being pretty and polite, and she is done being told what to do. This song represents her breaking point: she has realized that she owes nothing to anyone, disregarding and reveling in society’s disapproval of her.
“King” reveals Florence Welch’s profound internal struggle with the sacrifices that come with creating art as a woman. In a press statement, Welch said, “Thinking about being a woman in my 30s and the future, I suddenly feel this tearing of my identity and my desires. That to be a performer, but also to want a family might not be as simple for me as it is for my male counterparts…I have to make decisions they did not.” The trials of womanhood pose barriers to Welch’s career. She uses the metaphor of a king to expose the trade-off of her ambition: “I need my golden crown of sorrow, my bloody sword to swing / My empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology.” By reaching her goals, she creates a disconnect within herself.
Women have been told to stay silent for as long as society can remember. We must be soft, affable, graceful and forthcoming, but this charade only lasts for so long. Alice Merton describes the experience of bottled-up anger that keeps pushing for escape until she finally needs to “Lash Out” and speak her mind freely. This song is about a sudden catharsis of emotional release that protests everything she has been told to do.
These songs explore a variety of themes. Some are more candid in their anger, while others are more subtle. But, they all draw from the multifaceted experiences of womanhood and explore the complex emotions it brings.