Taylor Swift and Alanis Morissette spoke Thursday night about their experiences as female artists in the male-dominated music industry.
Accepting the Billboard Woman of the Decade award, Swift said: “Some people will always have slight reservations about you. Whether you deserve to be there, whether your male producer or co-writer is the reason for your success, or whether it was a savvy record label. It wasn’t.
“I saw that people loved to explain away a woman's success in the music industry and I saw something in me change due to this realization. This was the decade when I became a mirror for my detractors. Whatever they decided I couldn't do is exactly what I did. Whatever they criticized about me became material for musical satire or inspirational anthems.”
The singer, who turns 30 today, said songs like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space” were her responses to things people said about her.
“Have you ever heard someone say about a male artist, 'I really like his songs, but there’s something about him I don’t like'? No, that criticism is reserved for us,” she said.
Swift acknowledged she was not the only female artist treated unfairly. “In the last 10 years I have watched as women in this industry are criticized and measured up to each other and picked at for their bodies, their romantic lives, their fashion," she said. This is changing, Swift added, and women are stronger than ever in the music industry.
“Why are we doing so well? Because we have to grow fast. We have to work this hard. We have to prove that we deserve this. We have to top our last achievements,” she said. "Women in music, onstage or behind the scenes, are not allowed to coast. We are held at a higher, sometimes impossible-feeling standard.
“It seems that my fellow female artists have taken this challenge and they have accepted it. It seems like the pressure that could have crushed us made us into diamonds instead. And what didn't kill us actually did make us stronger.”
Swift used her moment in the spotlight to address her rift with her former label and its new owner, Scott “Scooter” Braun, who now controls her early recordings. She slammed the idea that music can be acquired like real estate.
“This just happened to me without my approval, consultation or consent,” Swift claimed. “After I was denied the chance to purchase my music outright, my entire catalogue was sold to Scoter Braun's Ithaca Holdings in a deal that I'm told was funded by the Soros Family, 23 Capital and the Carlyle Group.
"Yet to this day, none of these investors have bothered to contact me or my team directly to perform their due diligence on their investment. On their investment in me, to ask how I might feel about the new owner of my art. The music I wrote. The videos I created. Photos of me, my handwriting, my album designs.”
Morissette, who picked up the Icon Award, also gave a powerful speech at the gala event in Los Angeles. The Ottawa native recalled touring in the ‘90s and not being able to be friends with her male peers because if sex wasn’t involved, “they didn’t know what to do with me.”
Morissette also described the “one-dimensionalizing thing” she faced throughout her career – constantly being reduced to a single word.
“‘She's really, really angry…' OK... then a few years later, ‘she's very spiritual…' OK... Then I was was quirky, then I was really dumb, because of a malapropism. Then I was also, 'Isn't she like, 90?' I was called an elephant man, I was loved and ignored, and adored and hated, then I was considered really hip, and then totally irrelevant, and then totally relevant again, and then I was considered a boss, and a podcaster.”
Morissette wrapped up her acceptance speech by thanking the patriarchy “for crumbling and falling.”