![]() ![]() But in fact, the group presents a more genuine and compelling face of millennial girl power than anything else currently on the radio, filling the last decade’s depressing void of viable girl groups. On paper, they may not seem like the most obvious candidate for feminist pop heroes: the group was born on "The X Factor" in 2012, ostensibly as a female answer to One Direction’s breakaway success (both groups were masterminded by Simon Cowell and placed third in the televised competition), a creation story that comes with an implied soullessness to a cynical eye. Why does mainstream media champion this kind of body positivity and hand-wring over this kind? Where had big butts allegedly gone from which they "returned" in 2014? And why does clickbait-era "empowerment" seem to rely on either pitting women against each other, or painting them in reductively broad strokes, as though artistic agency is dictated by some gender-ascribed hive-mind? To complicate things further, 2014’s bumper crop of ham-handed "Feminism on fleek!" trend pieces were offset by an incessant barrage of think pieces detailing the death of culture via selfies, Instagram filters, and other habits of young women thinly cloaked in terms of "millennials." It’s a baffling, and revealing, juxtaposition: bulk-value Kirkland Signature "empowerment" alongside constant reminders that, to adult male media gatekeepers, teen girl culture has no redeeming artistic value.Įnter Fifth Harmony, the five-piece girl group comprised of Lauren Jauregui, Camila Cabello, Dinah Jane Hansen, Normani Kordei, and Ally Brooke Hernandez. ![]() Desperate for a snappy, condensable headline under which to lump pop’s female success stories, its complexities were glossed over. ![]() For one, its breed of feminism was uncomfortably second-wave: it’s not hard to notice that the women reaping the benefits of pop’s reinvigorated interest in the female perspective were overwhelmingly white, and often selectively mining from black culture while shirking its accompanying baggage. Upon closer consideration, the "girl power 2.0" narrative began to deflate. For one, it was a narrative spun by a predominantly white male media, and as such, often felt try-hard and devoid of nuance, a one-size-fits-all empowerment comprised of little more than a perfunctory "you go girl." And yet something felt off about the media’s flippant insistence that the ladiez had so neatly seized the zeitgeist, powered by the spirit of #girlpower and sips from their mugs of male tears. Last October, solo female artists held down the top five slots of the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks straight for the first time in the chart’s 56-year history, setting into high gear an overarching media narrative along the lines of "girls rule, boys drool." It was a compelling angle, with more than enough evidence to support it: Taylor Swift’s 1989 almost singlehandedly kept the record industry afloat "Bang Bang" presented itself as a millennial "Lady Marmalade" Beyoncé reset the standard for album rollouts Nicki Minaj, Ariana Grande, Meghan Trainor, and Iggy Azalea sat comfortably atop the charts. Women reclaimed the pop charts in 2014, sparking a renewed interest in "girl power" as a concept, a marketing strategy, and as clickbait fodder.
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