Not Your Muse: How 2019’s Alt-Pop Musicians Redefined Womanhood
Photograph of FKA Twigs ℅ Grammy’s
When FKA twigs stepped on stage at Kings Theatre in November, she didn’t speak. Bass and strings filled the space as she began to sing, twirl and slice her way across the stage, but she didn’t address the audience until the second half of the show, pausing in between two of the songs from her exquisitely sad breakup album. Almost whispering, she posed three questions:
“I was wondering how many people came here alone tonight?” she asked, prompting a handful of people to cheer.
“And then I was wondering how many people tonight are single?” she continued, receiving a louder response.
“And then I was wondering how many people tonight have had their heart broken?” she asked, as the mostly silent crowd erupted into screams of solidarity.
“I’ve had my heart broken, too,” she said before launching into “mirrored heart.”
“Magdalene,” FKA twigs’s second studio album, is a crash course in the way that breakups can also be rebirths. Her lyrics speak to how breakups become an opportunity to take stock; how they give us the space to think about how much love and energy we’ve poured into another person, and, more often than not, how the newfound space gives us the opportunity to breed resentment, as we realize how much of our love now feels wasted.
It’s exhausting to be heartbroken in the same way that it’s exhausting to be a woman. There’s a weariness that grows among women who are forced to be malleable; we’re taught from a remarkably young age that good women should be cracked and molded by men into the shapes of lovers, muses, caregivers and man-pleasers.
FKA twigs is certainly not alone in her decision to become a muse-gone-rogue. If art can be seen as a testimony then it’s almost impossible to argue against the fact that women are tired in the same way that they have always been. There are a handful of women who released albums in the last year that intentionally disrupt the idea of women as muses, and a sea of women who have been disrupting this narrative for thousands of years. Running all the way back to the discourse surrounding anything from Greek mythology to the Bible, there’s a consistent pattern: Women can be a part of the story, but we cannot claim in our own narratives.
But womanhood has never been that simple. Nitty Scott raps, “All the women in me are tired,” on Jamila Woods’ second album, “Legacy! Legacy!.” And Scott’s exhaustion — which echoes a poem by Nayyirah Waheed — runs through the veins of 2019’s musicians. The concept of women being deeply tired isn’t a new one, but feminine frustration is what links Woods to artists like FKA twigs, Lana Del Rey and Sudan Archives — the disillusioned yet hopeful women who set the new tone of music by reframing how tiring it can be to move through the world while maintaining a facade of acceptable womanliness.
Cultural icons and broken relationships inspire each of these artists as they deconstruct what it means to be a woman. Every track on “Legacy! Legacy!” bears the name of a writer or artist as its title. Mary Magdalene, a woman who appears in different Bible interpretations as everything from a prostitute to Jesus’ wife, is the titular core and inspiration behind FKA twigs’s album. Brittney Parks — who’s more commonly known by her stage name, Sudan Archives — offers listeners a new portrait of the Greek goddess “Athena,” a woman who has been painted as both a hero and a villain throughout history. And though her muse isn’t a woman, Del Rey kicks off her album by ripping apart a “goddamn man child” on the title track of “Norman Fucking Rockwell!,” referencing the American author and artist.
There’s something disturbing and beautiful about watching a woman unravel herself to recenter her power. It’s why everyone in the crowd seemed to hold their breath between songs, afraid to disrupt FKA twigs as she released her pain on stage. A girl sobbed at the end of “mirrored heart” and I grabbed my friend’s shoulder, pulling her closer, as if we could lose each other in the denseness void of heartbreak.
The icons that these women pay tribute to serve as anchors of identity; ways to retell a woman’s narrative with a woman’s tongue. And as the perspective shifts on these albums, these women are allowed to see themselves without the imposition of male spectatorship. As they relearn themselves, they’re allowed to ask: does being a muse give you the space to actually be a woman?
As these albums reimagine lives and legacies, they seamlessly unravel the ideals of ‘acceptable’ womanhood. FKA twigs begs women to remember who they once were before they lost their power and identity to the allure of being a “creature of desire” on her song “mary magdalene.” Throughout her album, she wrestles with her identity as a muse and a caretaker, unpacking the problematic nature of canonically feminine roles. As she fights through the “woman’s war” that lives within her, she dances on the fine line between nurturing another person and sacrificing herself, exemplifying the way that caretaking and martyrdom are fundamentally linked with conventional womanhood.
Woods, on the other hand, sheds an over-simplified sense of self on “Betty,” as she sings “I am not your typical girl/ Throw away that picture in your head.” Her disillusionment with half-baked femininity is also mirrored on “Athena,” as Parks builds her narrative around one of the most iconic muses of all time, creating a sense of depth for the two-sided goddess. Marrying the evil and good identities that live within her, Parks uses her album to create a portrait of a woman who carries uncompromised dualities. As she explained in an interview with Stereogum, by the last track of the album, “Pelicans In The Summer,” there’s no simple resolution: “No side really won,” Parks said. “The good side or the bad side didn’t win, but they came together.”
Of these singers, Del Rey deals with the burden of femininity in the most complicated manner. Her music and persona has always been closely linked to the housewife-chic glamour of America in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and “Norman Fucking Rockwell!” is no exception. But as she leans further into her homemaker fantasy, she openly laments about the men who take center stage in her life. Beyond her surface-level affection, these men all boil down to being different versions of the same hollow, overconfident myth.
When Del Rey asks a man whether or not he wants her on “Happiness is a butterfly,” she sounds practically indifferent, admitting “If he's a serial killer, then what's the worst/ That can happen to a girl who's already hurt?/ I'm already hurt.” Deflating all of her fantasies, Del Rey ultimately reduces her love for this man to the bare bones of desperation. As she admits, “Baby, I just want to dance,” she’s aware of the simultaneous strength and weakness that’s necessary for her to love a man more than she loves herself.
It’s dangerously easy to love someone more than you love yourself. This habit — of funneling our care and energy into other people — lives deep inside the compulsory nature of mothers and muses. As FKA twigs performed “home with you,” the 3,000 person venue somehow became the loneliest place in New York City, and every body swayed silently as we listened to her confess, “I didn't know that you were lonely/ If you'd have just told me, I'd be home with you.
Though each of these artists chips away at the performative facade of femininity, the true catharsis of these albums is not just in the act of deconstruction, but in the hopeful reclamation of genuine femininity. When Woods sings, “My smile is not employed/ You can't police my joy, no,” on “Basquiat,” she’s rejecting the way that black women are forced to subdue their emotions in the name of making the people around them comfortable; When Del Rey sings about misguided faith on the final track of her album, she reckons with the personal sacrifice that many women make when we choose to put another person’s needs before our own; When FKA twigs sings about “A woman's work/ A woman's prerogative/ A woman's time to embrace/ She must put herself first,” on “mary magdalene,” she’s reflecting on the pivotal moment when she first realized that, though someone else needed her, she didn’t need to be the one to help them.
Though they’re coveted, muses are hollowed out shapes of women; outlines who carry enough substance to inspire other people, without the ability or desire to create art themselves. On “sad day,” FKA twigs makes the most direct allusion to the hollowness that comes with being a muse, as the chorus repeats “Ah, would you make a, make a, make a wish on my love?” This offer to grant wishes feels empty after the resentful pre-chorus on “home with you,” where she sings, “How come the more you have, the more that people want from you?/ The more you burn away, the more the people earn from you/ The more you pull away, the more that they depend on you.” Throughout her album, FKA twigs openly acknowledges how painful it is to realize that even as a muse, she doesn’t actually have the ability to grant anyone’s wishes.
Beyond the music, the positive reception of these albums suggests that mainstream pop culture has become more hospitable to complicated, honest reclamations of femininity. These four albums, in particular, made it onto an array of “Best of 2019” lists, and this recognition allows these women to be heard and celebrated, creating space for other women to step outside of their archetypal roles — of being the wife, the caregiver, the muse, the perfect woman — to achieve public levels of success.
When FKA twigs performed her final song of the night, she carefully collapsed herself into a broken spectacle. Her voice cut through the stillness of the audience as “cellophane,” tapered to an end, with her admitting, “They're hating/ They're waiting/ And hoping/ I'm not enough.
Though these albums each take us through different women’s wars, none ends with a clear victory or loss. They each begin and end in a space where the dust has finally settled; a moment where women can take a deep, reflective exhale, and look around an empty room, wondering what we’ve just ruined and how we will ever rebuild something even half as beautiful as the mess we once had. It’s here — as we sit alone with our bodies; the bodies we twisted in order to fit into someone else’s idea of femininity — where we’re forced to cling to whatever we have left, because we know that we will never have anything better to pray to than ourselves.
These albums resonated with listeners this year because they became opportunities for women to hear, in the simplest terms, that we don’t have to. They sweep away the broken shards of ‘acceptable’ femininity and give us permission to sit comfortably with the knowledge that sometimes we can’t rescue you; can’t save you; can’t fix you, especially when that means ruining ourselves.
About the Author
Julia Carmel (she/her) is a recent graduate from Binghamton University. As a journalism student, she became fascinated with how art and technology alter our social landscape, and her work centers around human connections that can be found at the intersection of identity and culture. She’s currently a Newsroom Assistant for The New York Times, but you can usually find her reading in public parks, eating Takis, and dancing at free concerts. You can check out her other work on her website.
