My Favorite Female Musicians

I’ve always loved music. Always. I’ve played it and made it and listened to it and appreciated it. And when deciding that I’d like to make music part of my career (I’ll be entering college in the fall), I was a bit dismayed to realize that women are quite underrepresented in music. 

How many women music producers are out there? Sound engineers? Mixers? Backup and session musicians? Music magazine editors, or music magazine journalists? Well I’ve looked on the backs of all my favorite CDs and in the credits of all my favorite magazines, and the numbers are slim. 

That’s just talking about people behind the scenes. For the longest time, I struggled to find female musicians I could look up to. I remember going through a big style change in 2005 at age 13, especially musically. I turned on to quite a few alt-rock bands, who all featured guy-singers, guy-drummers, guy-guitar players, and so on and so on. I discovered, when I tried to pick up guitar, that guitar was not quite a “female-friendly” instrument– or at least that’s the term I’m going with, because every male I talk to seems so shocked and awed at girls who play guitar (in fairness to these guys, they were all encouraging, and seemed to find girl-guitarists intriguing, but their reactions made me deduce that they have had few crossings with girls playing and learning guitar). I limited myself to things I “was able” to do based on some unconscious gender-barrier I’d placed in my head. Well into high school, I finally realized that this thinking on my part was wrong.

By focusing on expanding my music horizons, I realized that not all women in music are Britneys and Christinas. I’m not saying being a pop-diva is a bad thing, but the amount of pop-divas that music consumers have shoved down their throats by media and radio is astounding. A much greater amount of female musicians exist who don’t fit this pop-diva mold and who don’t have as successful a chance at marketing themselves to the masses, which is unfortunate. If I didn’t have to go digging for gorgeous, intellectual female individuals making stunning music I whole-heartedly dig, perhaps I would have had quite a few more female idols earlier on in my life. 

My relationship with music has helped me to find and really think about feminism, especially over the last couple of years. I have put an effort into finding ladies who truly make me excited about music, ladies I can really idolize as a woman myself. I’ve just completed a blog post about my 10 favorite female singers over at my (infrequently visited) blog, and I invite you to go read it, check out some of my faves, and please, by all means, suggest more awesome women musicians to me!

Here’s the blog post!