The Making of the “Women’s Empowerment Anthem”

Throughout history, there haven’t been too many things that have garnered near-universal acclaim. However, in the summer of 2023, Barbie seemed to be the center of the pop culture universe. Now in 2024, British hyperpop artist Charli xcx’s album BRAT has cemented itself as Barbie’s successor. The main difference? This time around, pink has been substituted for a peculiar, accidentally-on-purpose uninviting lime green color as an emblem for what will be remembered as “BRAT summer” for generations (and even U.S. history books) to come. The album is now Charli’s most critically and commercially successful album, with a Spotify popularity index of 93/100. 

But it is the album’s second single “360” — currently Charli’s most streamed track from BRAT — that warrants a closer look, primarily for how it approaches one of the music industry’s oldest, yet tried-and-true formulas. Enter the so-called “Women’s Empowerment Anthem.”

In the context of the musical landscape of the 2020s, it’s worth examining why the sonic and lyrical elements of “360” worked, and why those of Katy Perry’s “Woman’s World” didn’t.

“Woman’s World” is another 2024 song that was positioned as a “Song of the Summer” hopeful in an unusually competitive season (by post-2010s standards, that is). It was intended to be part of Perry’s elusive comeback, an artist poised to bring back the camp, kitsch, and galore of the 2010s musical landscape in all its glory. 

This attempt at a feminist hype song, however, was deemed a colossal crash-and-burn on all fronts by critics and casual listeners alike. This partially had to do with its dated production (complete with sarcastic insinuations that the song sounded like it was from a feminine hygiene product commercial, the insult du jour for pop music that does not seem to break any new ground in terms of how it is written and produced). Critics also slammed the ironically heavy involvement of controversial music producer Dr. Luke. 

The juxtaposition between both Charli XCX’s and Katy Perry’s efforts could simply be attributed to a zeitgeist blind spot on Katy Perry’s end, having been a mainstream hitmaker for longer than Charli XCX and belonging to a different generation of pop stars. It could, however, and by reading in between the lines of the seemingly-endless criticism of “Woman’s World,” point to some of the ebbs and flows within the very microgenre these two songs fall into — or at least, attempt to fit into.

“You don’t have to try so hard”.... to be “so Julia”

The anatomy of many songs that fall in line within the micro-genre of “Women’s Empowerment Anthems” is predominantly, if not almost exclusively, lyrical by nature. Usually, it emulates the very string of words that many women, regardless of their backgrounds, would wish to hear while existing in a society that hasn’t always been too accommodating or even welcoming to women. In fact, another Charli XCX effort off the aforementioned BRAT titled “Girl, so confusing” also garnered critical, fan, and commercial acclaim for its exploration of the complex dynamics of many female friendships, especially after retroactively turning it into an effort to, paraphrasing New Zealander singer-songwriter Lorde, “work [things] out on the remix”. The Lorde tack-on actually followed rampant speculation that the song was written about her, which was all but confirmed by Charli XCX herself to Vogue Australia.

Now, it is not so much the concept that is expected to draw listeners in, but the execution. It’s a matter of toeing the line between creating a sentimental product that is both palatable for every woman on this planet in a manner that toyfully emulates the Mary Sue-esque Y/N subjects of 90% of One Direction’s discography, and yet is tactfully parasocial enough to fall in line with the aforementioned baseline of a women’s empowerment anthem. One approach to this that has experienced relative success throughout the past decade is body positivity, seen with songs like Colbie Caillat’s “Try” (2014) and Alessia Cara’s “Scars to Your Beautiful” (2016). Both ballads approach the theme with a surface-level chastisement of the increasing pressure on women to conform to certain ideas of so-called “beauty” that could normally be found in cosmetic conglomerate campaign press releases or anti-bullying PSAs — which only felt natural for the decade that followed almost 20 years of size-exclusive Davide Sorrenti-isms throughout fashion and pop culture. 

With that in mind, look-centric women’s empowerment anthems, or similar songs of that nature that primarily focus on physical appearance, have not disappeared. Rather, in the style of the typical “makeover montage” that was a cornerstone of nearly every coming-of-age teen movie until the early 2010s, they got a long-overdue revamp that makes the singer sound less like a shoulder to cry on and more like one’s inner hypewoman. These revamps now also come with one-liner-ized braggadocio that function like an Instagram caption listicle by day and 15-second TikTok clips poised for a metaphorical 15 minutes of fame by night. It’s a package deal, one might argue, with the aforementioned “360” by Charli xcx serving as a prime example of such (the opening verse alone pronounces “I'm your favorite reference, baby” and “I'll always be the one”). 

“Female Rage” in Music Form

Another change that has had a noticeable impact on the landscape of women’s empowerment anthems is the current state of the music industry. Today’s musical landscape employs these songs to play a tedious game of “Tag, You’re It” with social media trends and algorithms that have quasi-democratized the endless experiences of womanhood across the globe. This warrants a substantial (if cautious) move to distance this micro-genre from its signature attribute of genericism, leaning more and more into the “if you know, you know” aspects of being of woman.

Such is the reclamation of the misogynistic overtones surrounding ideas or tropes like being a bimbo or “female rage,” the latter of which overtly serving as the direct inspiration behind “Labour,” the 2023 song by British singer-songwriter Paris Paloma. “Labour” is Paloma’s most streamed track thanks largely in part to virality on TikTok, where over 100k posts across different uploads of the sound were made by women using the song to soundtrack posts about their experiences with misogyny and their own achievements. 

The track, which heavily draws from folk sounds, laments societal expectations with regard to the emotional labor continuously ascribed to women, calling out how women are expected to simultaneously assume roles like those of “therapist, mother, maid,” “all day, everyday.” The song’s lyrics, coupled with shouty vocals from Paloma that evoke the senses and acts of protest has led to many content creators opting to use it as a backdrop for content about or advocating for certain social causes, specifically issues where women are at the center.

Paloma’s idea, while broaching the subject from a new angle, does not necessarily break new ground - it just pours new cement over it. As genres like pop-rock continued to dominate airplay and charts throughout the early 2000s, artists like P!nk and Avril Lavigne (with Olivia Rodrigo being a modern-day equivalent for and a byproduct of her Y2K-era worshiping generation) built their entire brands on this very idea of “female rage.” They have, however, chosen to approach it with a playfully angsty flair while trapezing between irony, sarcasm, and the legitimate anger that had always historically been spun out of proportion into the very trope of “female rage.”  

In fact, the trope also lent itself frequently to the type of women’s empowerment anthems most associated with the 2000s: The vindictive type, with one of the most defining hits during the aughts of this variety ending up as one of its artist’s greatest hits. That song, of course, is Carrie Underwood’s guiltily pleasurable ode to vehicular vandalism in (emotional) self-defense, “Before He Cheats.”

With that in mind, “Before He Cheats” is far from an outlier. Along with other tracks like “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child, it remains a prolific example of the early beginning stages of the solidification of the “Women’s Empowerment Anthem” as a microgenre of its own, specifically through the way it positions and markets itself as a breakup song rather than a feminist empowerment anthem. In other words: The “empowerment” in question was tied at best, or secondary at worst, to the break-up as a thesis statement. It was simply an earlier buy-one, get-one deal that proved successful for years, decades, and musical landscapes to come, with even another “Woman’s World” by a different high-profile hitmaker, namely Cher, getting in on that action more than a decade before Katy Perry did.

In response to the criticism, Perry has tried her best at damage control, which included claiming that the song and its corresponding music video were actually a grandiose satirical effort. She also released “LIFETIMES,” the next single from her album 143, a track that sounds heavily inspired by the EDM and trance music-heavy sounds of many pop hits from the early-to-mid 2010s. It inserted itself into the conversation nearly a month after “Woman’s World”, which did not garner the commercial or chart success it was intended to. Ironically enough, “Woman’s World” remains a more mainstream Perry track per our data at Chartmetric, with 29.9 million Spotify streams compared to “LIFETIMES,” which is at 12.4 million streams.

This isn’t so much a rejection of the idea of a “Women’s Empowerment Anthem” micro-genre as a whole, nor is it even a rejection of music that sounds “dated” as many have speculated. If anything, “LIFETIMES” became on the receiving end of better reception and anticipation from fans and casual listeners alike, even though it would not sound out of place in a 2014 summer movie. The swift backlash was more directed at how the combination of the song’s sonic elements and lyrical content bizarrely lends to a game of broken telephone between audiences, trends, and artists, where nostalgia-induced bodies of work are all kitsch, gimmick, and novelty with little to no substance. 

But so far, the musical landscape of the 2020s is still very much a “Women’s [Empowerment Anthem] World”, and you are, indeed, still “looking to be living in it.”

Visualizations by Nicki Camberg and cover image by Crasianne Tirado. Data as of Aug. 29, 2024.