Women Who Demand, and Command, Center Stage
Celebrating women on the edge, singing or playing their own work
By John Schaefer
The Cuban rapper Telmary Diaz cuts an unusual figure in the music world.
“It’s not common in a macho society like Cuba that you have a female rapper,” she says. “It’s always, ‘Girls go to the back to do vocals and dance.’” Make no mistake, Telmary does vocals and dances, but she’s up front. And being up front puts her on the edge.
As the award-winning documentary 20 Feet From Stardom showed, women’s place in music was often in the back — doing harmony vocals and dancing. But this edition of the Soundcheck Stream, called “Women On The Edge,” celebrates women who demand, and command, center stage.
Now, this is not a particularly novel idea. Ancient Chinese iconography shows that women were featured musicians in the royal courts, and once Europeans stopped castrating boys so they could grow up to sing really high notes, the world’s opera stages opened up to women. The early and mid 20th century was full of great pop and jazz singers from the distaff side as well.
But something has changed in the past few decades, and that’s what we’re hoping to illustrate with “Women On The Edge.”
Since I have a Y chromosome, it would’ve been presumptuous for me to program this whole thing myself, so we’ve invited a couple of our friends to contribute playlists. I did, though, choose several hours’ worth of songs that show how enormous and influential the impact of these women has been on our music and our wider culture. For better or worse, musicians like Madonna and Courtney Love have arguably as much or more fame outside the music world as inside. But what makes them so important, what puts them on the edge, is that they are performing their own music.
This is a new idea. All those great sopranos singing Mimi and Violeta and Elektra were singing notes written by men. The songs made famous by Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan were mostly written by men. Since we had to draw a line somewhere, I drew it here: I wanted to hear women singing or playing their own work. As soon as I made that decision, I realized how painful it was going to be. Some of my all-time favorite jazz records — Helen Merrill singing “What’s New” or Betty Roche singing “Can’t Help Loving That Man” — were immediately out. That old Maria Callas-Renata Tebaldi controversy? Delicious, but not gonna happen here.
So why is it important that these women be more than performers? Because they are not just interpreters; they are creators. And that is an idea that, apparently, was slow to take hold. Now look, I’m taking nothing away from all those great singers and musicians who have inspired male composers to write masterpieces, or convinced us that a song cranked out by a couple of guys on deadline in Tin Pan Alley is in fact a masterpiece as well. It’s just that we’ve had a place for those women in the musical ecology for a while. Women composers, songwriters, and let me throw in producers, record label owners, and conductors, have had a tougher time finding their niches.
But they have found their niches, and the proof is in the angry emails we’ll be getting that say “How could you leave out [Fill-In-Name-Here]?” because this Soundcheck Stream, extensive as it is, leaves out a ton of others. Further proof is in some of our in-studio sessions, where the fact that a woman is both a singer and a songwriter hardly ever comes up — because it’s just not strange or unusual anymore. Of course, Telmary, living and working in Havana, may have a different perspective.
But changing the world takes time, and that change had to start somewhere. Listen in to hear some of the pioneering women who forced change into the world of music, and some of the other women who stood on their shoulders and made their own art without having to explain themselves.
If you enjoyed reading this, please click “Recommend” below.
This will help to share the story with others.
John Schaefer hosts WNYC’s @Soundcheck. If you like what you’re reading, you should definitely subscribe to the Soundcheck podcast.
