F Yeah Females Festival

Olive Sherman

“Girl music” has had a huge presence in the pop/punk/folk music scenes for quite a while. It more-or-less started in the fifties and sixties with artists like Lesley Gore, the Shangri-Las, the Angels, the Ronettes and the Supremes, and later moved into the seventies with folkier artists like Emmylou Harris, Joan Armatrading and Joni Mitchell. Then in the later seventies/mid eighties, there were a number of female punk and rock musicians like Patti Smith, Siouxie Sux and Joan Jett, who would influence artists in the Riot Grrrl movement of the nineties like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile and Sleater KinneyIn the past five or so years, there has been an emergence of music made by adolescent girls about what it’s like to be a young female. Bands like Frankie Cosmos, Cherry Glazerr and Girlpool have written and sung about growing up, going to parties, being bored in class and being disappointed with their selection of teenage boys, thereby helping their listeners (adolescent girls) feel less alone in their struggle — and yes, it really is a struggle — to survive high school.These girl bands also help to chip away at this idea that girls are pure, pretty and flawless young people who have no opinions on how the world works. Girlpool (one of the 14 female acts attending LA’s upcoming music festival FYF Fest), for example, uses sparse instrumentation and soul-bearing lyrics to bring out their flaws, rather than to conceal them, like many other bands do. Their imperfections do not isolate them, but instead make them unique, interesting and relatable.My issue now is that, despite their huge cultural importance, girl bands (specifically the ones part of this teenage girl movement) have been ignored by music festivals like FYF. Out of the 58 musical acts performing at FYF, only 14 (25%) of them include women and only 15% of the total musicians performing at FYF are women.The following playlist is a compilation of songs from girl bands new and old, popular and unpopular, at FYF and not at FYF. Through their music they have they have helped us empathize with the female spirit, and we, now, need to acknowledge that they exist, and celebrate them for goodness sake!**I want to note that I did buy tickets to FYF and I am excited to go and see all of the great people that will be playing there this summer, I’m just upset that so few women were involved.