Cultural Lessons of 2014: As a new calendar year approaches, our writers reflect on what they learned from pop culture over the past 12 months. Here, Carly Lewis on how women killed it on the radio this year.
The year’s best album is a tie between the glamorous “sad girl” who played Kanye West’s wedding and a shrieking punk combustion revered at grungy makeshift venues where the beer costs $3.
Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence, a glistening requiem of scorn reclaimed, sits with good posture at the diametrical opposite of Priests’ righteous and frenetic Bodies and Control and Money and Power. Despite hailing from different planets, both share a “Rid of Me”-esque forthrightness: women enraged, declaring, “I am correct to feel hysterical and here is why.”
“Barack Obama killed something in me, and I’m gonna get him for it,” heaves Priests singer Katie Alice Greer, on an album that also blasts the line “no more arm wrestling your way inside of me.”
Del Rey, whose moxie is manicured and diamond-clad, vs. Greer and co.’s propensity for screaming in crushed velvet, bestowed upon us lyrics such as “everybody knows that I’m the best, I’m crazy” and “Hallelujah, I wanna take you for all that you got.”
There’s a madness — and please interpret this as both the state of being mad and what it feels like to be crazy — present that recalls the brooding solemnity of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed. “I can be sweet and charming, you know, if people aren’t too beastly to me.”
Priests and Del Rey are both firm in their varying rage. That they live in different music worlds confirms just how widespread this Year of The Crazy Woman was. It’s not about being sad per se, and it’s not always about being scorned. It’s about deservedly pushing back on a culture that boxes women in, one that offers women no other choice than to freak out.
This was certainly not the first year in which a woman-in-music felt angry and told us. But in 2014, there were fewer “hey sorry about last night” texts the next day. It was a year in which women went ballistic and owned their fury. In light of many cultural missteps — from sexual assault cases handled repulsively by the courts to Eminem’s lyric about wanting to rape Iggy Azalea — frustration, thanks in part to the digital back-having of social media, had a place to smoulder and be seen. Being mad became not a feeling to quench with yoga, but cathartic redemption to keep.
On “Pills N Potions,” Nicki Minaj sings that she’s angry but still loves the person who made her that way. She lays it out vulnerably by naming the emotion, without calling it anything other than what it is. Like Del Rey, her madness doesn’t mean she’s moping. Her sadness doesn’t mean she’s weak.
There exists a prevalent and incorrect assumption that an angry woman must just be sad or too sensitive — that the fury she’s conveying is petty, that “making a scene” is shameful. Women are scolded for the emotional responses they convey when putrid or anguishing things happen to them, as if going crazy isn’t a valid way through. In 2014, feeling crazy felt legitimized.
On this summer’s peak-madness revenge-pop anthem “Black Widow,” care of Azalea and Rita Ora, things got particularly P.J. Harvey. “I’m gonna love you until you hate me, and then I’m gonna show you what’s really crazy.” The woman capable of sheer terror was not dismissed for feeling turbulent, but feared and applauded for reclaiming her own ferocity.
Even Beyoncé’s “sometimes s–t goes down when there’s a billion dollars on an elevator” line on the “Flawless” remix shrugged off any shame after her sister, Solange, physically attacked Jay Z in that now infamous surveillance footage.
In her video for “Blank Space,” Taylor Swift mocks the jilted ex-girlfriend trope that’s trailed her career. “Got a long list of ex lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane,” she sings, before doing exactly the things one would expect from an “insane” woman scorned. She cuts up his clothes and throws them off the balcony; she stabs a knife into a heart-shaped cake. But we also see why and how the ex got jilted, which is what’s missing from all that bathos. There is a reason why fury descends. That reason is usually mistreatment.
“We are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak,” reads one tenet of the Riot Grrrl Manifesto, a screed first published in 1989. Twenty-six years later, that anger has not subsided. And while it would be difficult to find a realm of music more founded on furiousness than Riot Grrrl’s woman-led punk bands of the ’90s, in 2014 Priests, Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey and Nicki Minaj concocted elixirs that made patriarchy feel more negotiable.
In response to that Eminem line about raping Azalea, the 24-year-old singer responded by tweeting “I’m bored of the old men threatening young women as entertainment.”
As de Beauvoir wrote in The Woman Destroyed, “a woman alone gets spat on.”
Now she’s breathing fire back.
Tuesday: Our Cultural Lessons 2014 series continues with David Berry on how Nathan Fielder upended the comedy-as-embarrassment formula.