Please Bring Back the Angry Female Pop Stars

During the last week of 1996, when I was 13, No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak,” Gwen Stefani’s mad but sullen love song to ex-boyfriend/bassist Tony Kanal, was the №1 song in the country. Also on the Billboard Top 40 that week: Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, Tracy Chapman, Melissa Etheridge and En Vogue. I was coming of age and the women on the radio were angry.

I didn’t understand women’s anger when I was 13. I screamed along to Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” at the top of my lungs with my friend Ashley in her basement while while we took turns riding her little sister’s Sit N Spin, whispering and giggling during the “Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?” part. After practicing cartwheels and eating too many Oreos, I walked home down my quiet street at dinner time, watched TV with my parents, and slept uninterrupted for nine hours. The next day I went to school to learn about tenements or plant cells or how to change into gym clothes without taking my regular clothes off first. I didn’t understand women’s anger.

I do now. A woman does not reach 35 without collecting a series of keys to her own deeply buried vaults of rage she didn’t know were her birthright. With each new key — a consolation prize for playing along with injustice, the undefeated winner — a new door appears, opening to a wider, hotter, redder pit of fury. It simmers inside her…