Bring us back major concert tours from Hole, Veruca Salt, Garbage, the Breeders, and the Chicks, you cowards! (The Chicks are still filling arenas, actually, and they put on a really good show.)
Saying that “The objectification of women is at the heart of 90s pop culture” seems overstated to me. Of course there was sexism in popular culture, in particular 90s hiphop was almost universally extremely sexist, but there were also a lot of strong female presences and male media that challenged traditional masculinity.
As another commenter mentions, the 90s had a huge list of iconic female led bands that didn’t play into sexist tropes (The Breeders, Hole, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Bjork, Elastica, The Cranberries, Sonic Youth, Veruca Salt, Sleater Kinney…). Blur was famously neck-and-neck with Oasis for popularity and they are the antithesis of “lad culture”, which is what sparked the rivalry between the two bands and their fans. Nirvana’s lyrics often explored feminist concepts (though to be fair I assume those messages were lost on a lot of their fans) and issues like male isolation and mental illness. You could argue that grunge was in many ways a reaction against “lad culture” and mainstream ideas of masculinity.
I posted this two weeks ago: How Nirvana wrote feminist songs from a male perspective
Did the 90s have music beyond Nirvana and riot grrl? /hj
