At the 60th Grammy Awards back in January, guests were encouraged to wear white roses in solidarity with the #MeToo movement. It was a gesture probably only intended to portray the music world as the part of the larger entertainment industry. Musical artists succeeded in supporting women when other sectors of entertainment (like Hollywood) hadn’t. As nice as the gesture to wear the roses was, it did absolutely nothing to show genuine support for women.
The rest of the Grammy night saw only one woman, Alessia Cara, win a solo award during the three-and-a-half hour telecast. According to Forbes, just 11 of 84 awards went to other female artists. With these already disappointing statistics, the most unjust part of the night had to be the fact that SZA, the first female TDE signee who released her critically-acclaimed debut album, "CTRL," in June 2017, went home empty-handed despite being nominated for five Grammys.
The awards progressed from bad to worse when Recording Academy President Neil Portnow topped the night off by telling reporters that women needed to "step up” into more male-dominated roles in the music industry after the hashtag #GrammysSoMale began to trend during the ceremony.
"The Grammys are just symptomatic of a large representational roadblock facing women in the music business," Dr. Stacy Smith, co-author of a groundbreaking study on gender and ethnicity in the music business for the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, told Forbes magazine. "The broader problem really lies in an ecosystem of artists and their ability to have access to opportunity."
All of this brings me to the newly-released line-up for the upcoming Soundset Music Festival. For those that don’t know, Soundset is a hip-hop music festival held every year in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area over Memorial Day weekend. This May, Soundset will return to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds and provide attendees a long day filled with hip-hop culture, food and musical performances.
The lineup, released on last Wednesday, included artists like Tyler The Creator, hip-hop legends, Wu-Tang Clan, newcomers Russ and Jaden Smith (how did we get so blessed? I don't know.) and headliner, Logic. And while this year's line-up isn’t terrible, I still have one issue: the lack of female performers.
This year's bill sees five women out of 37 performers gear up to take the various Soundset stages: Erykah Badu, Young MA, Rapsody, The Lioness and Kamaiyah. And while these women are extremely talented, Soundset needs to work on being more inclusive of female artists.
It would be amazing to see Rico Nasty, Kodie Shane, Noname, Leikeli47, Dreezy, Kari Faux, Princess Nokia and Minneapolis’ very own Lizzo take over the stages and captivate new fans with their versatile styles of music.This festival is supposed to be geared toward giving new artists a bigger platform to showcase their talents, and there are plenty of female artists in need of that exposure.
