More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Taylor Swift commands a lot of attention. In mere days since its release, her 11th album The Tortured Poets Department, which is a lengthy 31 songs and runs over two hours, became the most streamed album in a single week and the first to reach over one billion streams on Spotify.
To some, such success seems … well, excessive. It’s hard not to notice such takedowns targeted at Swift amid her breakneck success might have something to do with her gender.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.
This week: Women’s college basketball smashed viewership records; France passed a constitutional amendment protecting abortion; Florida will soon have a six-week abortion ban; Beyoncé makes history on the country album charts; IWMF honors Palestinian journalist Samar Abu Elouf; Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) managed to include $1 billion for childcare in the fiscal year 2024 appropriations bills; federal employees will soon have access to insurance plans that cover fertility services; President Biden announced a new plan to cancel student debt; the Supreme Court allowed Idaho to maintain its ban on gender-affirming care for minors; and more.
Beyoncé’s much-anticipated country album, Cowboy Carter, drops on Friday, March 29. Beyoncé’s immense success in country music is a clear signal that there is a huge audience for country music around the world, but that audience won’t settle for the music’s often conservative conventions. Black music and musicians are at the heart of country music, and recognition of Black women’s music on this scale is long overdue.
Beyoncé doesn’t need country music. But, if it’s going get the global traction the CMA and other parts of the industry desire, country music needs artists like Beyoncé.
Beyoncé’s depicting herself as a (Black) Lady Liberty is a choice, and a powerful one that seeks to not only rewrite history for racial inclusion but to reclaim our rightful place in the pantheon of American symbols and heroes while also resisting expectations for purity.
Singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer has been making music that inspires, challenges, questions, and affirms for nearly 40 years now, and she just released a new album, A Great Wild Mercy, in late 2023.
Susan M. Shaw sits down with Newcomer to discuss her songwriting process, what it’s like being a musician at 65, and just what it means to have, or show, “great wild mercy.”
The narrator of “Fast Car,” who finally finds the strength at song’s end to tell her no-count trifling lover to “take your fast car and keep on driving,” is an earlier version of Sza’s narrator on the heartbreak and revenge-fantasy songs that comprise her Grammy-nominated album SOS—a worthy project that many had hoped would break the 25-year-drought of a Black woman winning the Album of the Year Grammy, since Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
Still, we have come a long way from passively waiting for someone else’s “fast car” to move us out of poverty—and failing to doing so—while the latest songs imagine us killing our exes or shimmering like diamonds once we move on. We have arrived at that moment in which we are more than eager to celebrate the women who can drive in their own fast cars—accrued debts and generational poverty be damned.
In a year when women seemed to dominate both culturally and economically, it was not hard to find many feminist moments in pop culture that defined 2023.
Here are our top 10 favorites—including Rihanna’s historic Super Bowl performance; breakthroughs for women in TV, film and music; iconic moments in women’s leadership, and more.
Renaissance—Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s fifth self-directed film—is about how to shine your light, how to give others shine, and how to sit in darkness until the light comes again.
In this season of light, we have a tremendous opportunity to observe a Black woman in her prime at 42 years old making art, working at her craft, raising her children, and surrounded by a strong network.
Both a product (albums! cassettes! posters!) and a destination (rallies! concerts! festivals!), women’s music fused feminist politics, woman-staffed sound production and grassroots folk traditions to create a bold new recording and performance network. When we had no rights at all, women’s music was also the sound and site of the lesbian revolution. This year we celebrate the musicians and producers who, across five decades, gave us the soundtracks and spaces affirming our lives.
In Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion’s “Bongos” and Flyana Boss’ “You Wish,” Black women hip-hop artists create spaces for pleasure, joy and sisterhood. If this is what hip-hop’s feminist future looks like, we’re here for it.
