Charlotte Church questions ‘juvenile’ music industry during latest John Peel Lecture

Charlotte Church has said the music industry practices a ‘juvenile’ attitude toward gender and sexuality during her John Peel Lecture in London yesterday evening (October 14th).

Following speeches for BBC 6Music in past years from Pete Townshend and Billy Bragg, Charlotte Church debated the music industry’s attitude to women for her lecture, and also questioned Adele‘s lyrical subject matter which she believes focuses on ‘despair’.

“It is a male-dominated industry, with a juvenile perspective on gender and sexuality,” she stated. “From what I can see there are three main roles that women are allowed to fill in modern pop music, each of them restrictive for both artist and audience.”

“They are mainly portrayed through the medium of the music video. You’ll find them very familiar. I call them the ‘One-of-the-girls Girls’, the ‘Victim/Torch Singer’ and ‘Unattainable Sex Bot’.”

“The ‘One-of-the-girls Girls’ role is a painfully thin reduction of feminism that generally seems to point to a world where so long as you can hang out with your girls it’s possible to sort of wave away the evils that men do. This denigrates women and men equally, and yet is commonly lauded for being empowering. The ‘Victim/Torch Singer’ can be divided up into the sexy victim i.e Natalie Imbruglia in her Torn video, and the not-so-sexy victim.”

“Lyrically her songs are almost without exception written from the perspective of the wronged-woman, an archetype as old as time, someone who has been let down by the men around her, and is subsequently in a perpetual state of despair,” she continued when discussing Adele.

“But to me, The Unattainable Sex Bot is the most commonly employed and most damaging, a role that is also often claimed to be an empowering one. The irony behind this is that the women generally filling these roles are very young, often previous child stars or Disney-tweens, who are simply interested in getting along in an industry glamourised to be the most desirable career for young women.”

“They are encouraged to present themselves as hyper-sexualised, unrealistic, cartoonish, as objects, reducing female sexuality to a prize you can win.”