As more and more women are coming together to say ‘Times Up’ to sexual harassment in the entertainment industry, women in country music are beginning to bring the conversation into a genre so plagued with misogyny and harassment.
Country music’s lack of female representation has been a problem for as long as this website has been around, and for as long as the genre has been around. It’s been years since #SaladGate, but we’re still in the same spot we were in back then. There are currently three women in the Top 30 on country radio, an abysmal number for a time when women are putting out some of the best music in the genre. The reason for this sexism and lack of representation has always been assumed to be the fault of the radio programmers and the label heads and the people that run the industry. Marissa Moss’s stellar piece for Rolling Stone delves into the sexual harassment surrounding radio in country music, and very strongly hints that this may be a major part of the reason women don’t get played on the radio.
But it doesn’t stop at radio. Saving Country Music recently delved deeply into the curated country playlists on Spotify, noting that the four major country playlists all have extremely few women on them. Streaming seems to be the future of music, but it has the same issues as radio does with sexism.
The question is, what are we going to do about it? How do you mend a system that’s so hopelessly broken?
The Song Suffragettes in Nashville did something about it, and the reactions have been extraordinary. The weekly female singer/songwriter show brought more than twenty of their artists together to sing a song titled, “Times Up,” written by two songwriters Kalie Shorr and Lacy Green. The chorus proudly sings, “Now the way it is, becomes the way it was.” It’s a compelling song and video, with all of these women fighting to get their voices heard in Nashville walking down a road, clad fully in black. They’ve had enough like all of women in Nashville and they’re not waiting anymore. Alternating lines, they sing: “They say good things come to those who wait, but we’ve waited long enough / Our time is here / Our time is now / Our time has come / Time’s up.”
If you’re frustrated like all of us are, and you don’t know how to help, the best way for you to help is to keep buying the music you love. Keep supporting the artists you love. Share articles, share the Song Suffragettes video. Speak out about the misogyny that is rooted so deeply in the genre we love so much. It’s 2018. It’s time for country music to wake up.
But it doesn’t stop at radio. Saving Country Music recently delved deeply into the curated country playlists on Spotify, noting that the four major country playlists all have extremely few women on them. Streaming seems to be the future of music, but it has the same issues as radio does with sexism.
The question is, what are we going to do about it? How do you mend a system that’s so hopelessly broken?
The Song Suffragettes in Nashville did something about it, and the reactions have been extraordinary. The weekly female singer/songwriter show brought more than twenty of their artists together to sing a song titled, “Times Up,” written by two songwriters Kalie Shorr and Lacy Green. The chorus proudly sings, “Now the way it is, becomes the way it was.” It’s a compelling song and video, with all of these women fighting to get their voices heard in Nashville walking down a road, clad fully in black. They’ve had enough like all of women in Nashville and they’re not waiting anymore. Alternating lines, they sing: “They say good things come to those who wait, but we’ve waited long enough / Our time is here / Our time is now / Our time has come / Time’s up.”
If you’re frustrated like all of us are, and you don’t know how to help, the best way for you to help is to keep buying the music you love. Keep supporting the artists you love. Share articles, share the Song Suffragettes video. Speak out about the misogyny that is rooted so deeply in the genre we love so much. It’s 2018. It’s time for country music to wake up.
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