Lest we forget the distinctive lime green shade and low-res, Arial-font words plastered across everyone’s social media feeds this summer, Charli XCX released her sixth studio album, “Brat” in June to resounding acclaim and commercial success. It instantly canonized “brat summer” as an epoch in the pop bible, making her just one of the many female artists who have made a mark in 2024’s pop culture.
Sabrina Carpenter earned her first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart with her album “Short n’ Sweet,” delivering goofy lyrics like “that’s that me espresso” which became instant memes. Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” gained a cult following this summer, despite having been released in September 2023. This June, a Google search of her name would prompt “Did you mean: your favorite artist's favorite artist?” in reference to Sasha Colby, the winner of season 15 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, who famously said, “I’m your favorite drag queen’s favorite drag queen.”
One need not look further than last summer when the record-breaking successes of Taylor Swift’s the Eras Tour and “Barbie” paved the way for the breakouts of many female creators. They have unabashedly undertaken meta-commentaries on the complexities of womanhood — the anti-heroic anxieties plaguing a larger-than-life Swift and the existential agony hiding behind a glossy, plastic smile.
This subverts portrayals of women in pop culture, in which women have long been pigeonholed into identifiable tropes: the manic pixie dream girl, the damsel in distress, the femme fatale, most of which were conceived and foisted upon women, almost monolithically, by male entertainment executives. In the face of creative restriction and a lack of representation of disparate female experiences, female artists have managed to continue pushing the boundaries in entertainment. Their conveyance of authentic stories, reflective of their own life experiences, has achieved exceeding commercial success, silencing the criticism from their male counterparts.
We can’t view this summer’s breakout stars in isolation, but we must consider them as part of an evolution in widening creative liberties for females and pay homage to those who have come before. We might not have had the opportunity to enjoy the campy and off-kilter persona of Chappell Roan if Lady Gaga had not first graced us with her outlandish garbs that seemed inconceivable by entertainment conventions at the time. “Bratty” unkempt hedonism might not have resurged if Kesha had not had the confidence to introduce an alternative version of a heroic club girl, experimenting as much with maximalist electro-pop as with her appearance. Female pop has fueled discourse that builds upon itself and lends a voice to female identities that do not fit neatly into conventional categories.
Today’s female pop conveys multitudinous female experiences in all their happiness, freedom, confusion and loneliness — a universality that transcends barriers of time and of generations, of language and of geographical boundaries, which has clearly struck a chord with audiences around the world. On a global scale, if we view our favorite female pop stars as thought leaders in an open marketplace of ideas, then the lyrics they sing and the words they speak carry hefty stock in influencing the trajectory of society, culture and politics. Notably, U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris leveraged the “brat” aesthetic in her campaign after Charli XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat” — a move intended to rouse the interest of young people, many of whom are first-time voters.
When Taylor Swift took to Instagram after the recent presidential debate, endorsing Harris and encouraging her nearly 285 million followers to vote for their preferred candidate, vote.gov saw more than 400,000 visitors overnight. Should this figure translate into voter registration, it has the potential to impact the results in swing states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
For Harris, who could be the first female chief executive of the United States, these votes of confidence from the world’s beloved female pop stars are a welcome embrace of sisterhood. More importantly, the liberty female artists feel in expressing their views today underscores a diametric shift in the societal position of women. It was only two decades ago when the Chicks publicly criticized then-U.S. President George W. Bush for his planned invasion of Iraq at a concert in London, causing their careers to plummet amid insurmountable backlash.
There is a critical theory in international relations known as suffragist peace — the idea that peace is corollary to increased political enfranchisement of females. While this theory is difficult to prove given the extant lack of females holding positions of political power around the world, one could hope that the informal leadership presented by our female pop idols could nudge the increasingly fragmented times we live in toward greater harmony.
To borrow from Chappell Roan, whose music I have grown to adore, the soft power of female pop could spark a “femininomenon.”
