It was Lilith, not Eve, who was the first woman in the Garden of Eden, according to myth. But Lilith refused to take orders from Adam and was banished.
Sarah McLachlan felt much the same a couple of years ago, fed up with a male-dominated music industry that suggested she was nuts for going on tour with singer Paula Cole. “The idea of doing a tour with two female artists or even playing two female artists in a row on the radio was just not allowed,” McLachlan says. As for her plan to hatch an all-female rock festival: “We were laughed at.”
McLachlan forged ahead, anyway. She put together the first Lilith Fair for female rock artists in 1996. When it succeeded, she returned last summer with a 38-date tour that included a Who’s Who of chart-topping performers: Jewel, Fiona Apple, Joan Osborne, Sheryl Crow, Cole and McLachlan herself.
Lilith outperformed every other festival last summer, taking in more than $16 million. It has since spun off a live double-CD, a book and a follow-up 57-date tour, including a show Wednesday at the New World Music Theatre. Yet from the start, Lilith was hounded by criticisms from writers and performers that the festival was too aesthetically and politically narrow, with its focus on white, guitar-strumming, folk-oriented singer-songwriters. Others called its exclusionary premise a setback for feminism.
A number of female performers, while careful to praise McLachlan for turning the infant festival into a commercial juggernaut practically overnight, question the need for any kind of festival based primarily on an artist’s gender.
“For women to do something like this is a step backward,” says Bjork, the Icelandic singer whose edgy, boundary-pushing albums are musically far removed from Lilith’s more traditional fare. “We were in a cage and now the cage door is wide open because our mothers and great grandmothers opened it for us. So I don’t see any point of screaming, `I’m in a cage, I’m in a cage.’ Just get out of the cage. The minute women do something like (Lilith Fair), they’re isolating themselves again.”
Bjork says if she were asked to play Lilith, she’d flatly turn it down: “I work with people as humans. I want to work with people that are interesting musically. If I worked only with men or only with women, I’m in trouble. There are too many years of people saying, `Only if he’s a guy.’ So I don’t think saying, `Only if she’s a girl’ is any solution.”
Shirley Manson, lead singer of electronica-powered rock band Garbage, calls Lilith “a great celebration of talent,” but also has doubts about its focus: “I think it’s ghetto-izing women, once again, within the mainstream,” she says. “As wonderful as Lilith is, it helps to feed the belief that men and women cannot work together. I don’t think that’s the case. I think we need to find our common ground.
“I would be so annoyed and disgusted if there were an all-male festival. Therefore, I have to take the stance that it’s also offensive to have a purely female festival that excludes men. In a different era, it might work. But right now, we have too far to go before women are truly accepted in the mainstream and I think we should be forcing the issue that we can stand on the stage just as well as a man can.”
But Liz Phair, one of the artists who will appear on the Lilith main stage this year along with McLachlan, Natalie Merchant and Bonnie Raitt, among others, says such criticisms miss the point.
“I remember last year being really annoyed that no one asked me to be on it,” she says with a laugh. “Last summer, I just had my baby and I was listening to the radio a lot making the 15-mile commute between my house and my mom’s house in the (Chicago) suburbs, and Lilith had everybody that I listened to on the radio. It was a line-up of pop stars.”
Phair is one of the performers on the ’98 bill who should expand the festival’s artistic boundaries. She’s far edgier than most of the artists on last summer’s bill, and what’s more this year she’ll be sharing quality time with other performers who significantly broaden Lilith’s racial and musical makeup. Among the new faces (who will not appear on the Chicago date) will be hip-hopper Missy Elliott, R&B newcomer Erykah Badu, soul spinner Me’Shell Ndegeocello and Irish iconoclast Sinead O’Connor.
“The festival is evolving,” says Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, who played Lilith last year and rejoined it this year for some dates (though not in Chicago). “It’s always hard to break down barriers in the first year and include as many different genres and people of color as you would like. I think it has proven this year that it intends to be more diverse. Now they’ve got stages for local acts and underground bands–it’s not exactly a punk festival, but it’s recognizing a lot more styles of music than ever before.”
The Indigo Girls will cut short their Lilith commitment to headline another all-female festival, the inaugural Suffragette Session Tour, which plays the Riviera on Aug. 25-26 among 12 North American dates. The line-up includes Lisa Germano, Hispanic performer Lourdes Perez, quirky singer-songwriter Jane Siberry, Come vocalist Thalia Zedek, Mecca’s Jean Smith, Luscious Jackson’s Kate Schellenbach, the Breeders’ Josephine Wiggs and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey.
Ray says Lilith and the Suffragette tours are good ideas because, “although we need to evolve to a place where women are truly equal to men . . . the reality is that men have dominated all aspects of the music industry, from the media to the technical stuff. I think women are just now starting to get some of the notoriety they deserve, and maybe they’ll get it for a while, and then it’ll be called a trend, and then we’ll have to go back and reassess again. But for every trend that happens like that I think there’s a small step forward. I don’t see this as marginalization or a step back.”
The danger is that Lilith will be viewed as a major advance for women in the music industry when in reality it does little to alter the power structure that underpins the industry. Most of the women at Lilith have men managing their careers, booking their tours and overseeing their business at record companies.
As Phair says, “I think now there’s a feeling of `we love female artists.’ And it’s fine for the industry, because it’s not really impinging on the male area of power. There are just more pretty ladies in front of us. But behind the scenes, different story. Power never wants to let go.”
In designing and profiting from a major tour, McLachlan has cut into some of that power. “She’s opened a window, but rock is still a boys club,” Phair says. “It’s late night, it’s loud, it’s smoky, and there are knobs to turn. There’s aggression to be vented. This stuff will change. How we hear music and in what way people attend concerts is going to change if women are involved. They’re more creative in how they experience music in their lives. It’s going to manifest in the way they choose to perform. There are going to be new venues, new ways of hearing music, because they’re involved. I can feel it. I think it’s an exciting prospect.”
The question remains: Will they get the chance? Only if Lilith is viewed as a modest start rather than a triumphant arrival.
