Entering the era of Gaga

By Jordyn Marcellus

Music industry bigwigs are complete misogynists. This isn’t a new sentiment. Label heads and A&R representatives are always looking for the next big thing by looking backward to past trends and this time they’re looking for ladies to rule the charts.

With Lady Gaga’s incredible breakthrough, as well as Susan Boyle and Taylor Swift capturing the hearts of millions this year, it appears that the labels have made their choice: women are the key to financial success in 2010. In a recent Reuters article with Q Magazine, editor Paul Rees said that, “If you look at all the things that are being teed up by the major labels, most of them are solo female artists.”

It’s disgustingly condescending to say that artists like Boyle, Swift and Lady Gaga are famous because they’re female. It’s even worse that industry execs believe that, through the transitive properties of their sex, a bunch of new female artists will satisfy the bottom-line. Many of the young up-and-coming artists promoted due to their gender have worked hard to get to the place, and being picked up by a record label because they have breasts is incredibly depressing.

This isn’t really surprising, though. For years, the pop music industry has been focused on women in music as sexual objects. Everyone from the pop-tart years of the early aughts to modern artists like Rihanna and Beyonce are hypersexualized. Even squeaky-clean artists like Miley Cyrus have a faint, childish edge of sexuality to them. The modern recording industry is, and has been for the past decade, focused more on their artists’ genitals than their musical talent. This recent move is a more bald-faced method of the music industry trying to promote women not by their talent, but by their gender.