The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper Page A

she’d attended private school.
    As we enter the new year with a clean slate and hindsight, it seems fair enough to chalk up our lil’ Lana freak-out to our long-standing weirdness with women’s ambition and the antiquated notion that image consciousness is somehow antithetical to the making of true art and is, in fact, a sin against rock’s visceral mandate. It’s a problem we tend to have with girls and women more than with the boys (word to Jack White’s continuing Campaign 4 Realness). This past year proved there is a special sort of animus reserved for women—Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift and Grimes’ Claire Boucher—whose ambition seems especially naked and, if you will, feminine.
    It’s only natural that young female artists engage us with and communicate through their image(s) as much as they do with their music. Image is a more effective vehicle for expression than songs. No girl escapes teenhood without a keen awareness of exactly how the world sees her, what it expects of her; she knows the weight of the world’s desire for her down to the ounce.
    When it comes to music, image is believed to be the teen girls’ area of fascination and special expertise; young women’s arduous fandom is often taken as the very proof of a performer’s artlessness. The perception being that girls are so rapt with an artist’s surface image that it supersedes any sort of real connection with or understanding of the music itself. Though Swift and Boucher placed high in this year’s Pazz & Jop—Lana less so ( Born to Die , #54 album)—the critique with all three has often regarded the seeming purposefulness of artifice in their image, as well as their dutiful maintenance of it.
    We took Lana’s ambitions personally—as if she was preying upon us, marking us as hornball simps so seduced by her porny licking of her fake/not-fake lips that we’d buy in on whatever it was she was selling. The offense being? That we’d actually fall for something so constructed? Or was it the fact of the construction itself?
    Part of what made Boucher’s work so exciting this year was her zealous courtship of the zeitgeist, the irreverence of her ambition, that her cultural reference points were young and female. She’s an autodidactic indie artist who pinpoints the unnatural qualities of Mariah Carey’s voice as her greatest influence. Subversion of manga imagery and lost-in-the-mix, baby-voiced cooing are far from the riot-grrrl-influenced rage that we commonly use to verify feminist artistry.
    Boucher’s merchandising of “pussy rings” was overtly feminist, though some still wrote it off as a ploy for attention. Boucher had the temerity to manufacture merch that wasn’t a T-shirt—a feminist rebuttal to the cock-’n’-balls scrawled on every dressing room wall. How is a plastic rendering of a vulva so utterly escandalo in the Internet age of 2012? (The gender divide on the pussy-ring reporting is stark and telling of just how and who Grimes connects with.) While Boucher can be faulted for some things—is that a rain stick sample on “Know the Way?”—would she really be a more credible artist if she showed less ambition?
    Swift, who is a little younger than Boucher and Del Rey, had a year of evolution for her image as well. On Red , Swift deflects power with a studied naiveté. Love is something that she falls victim to; men are fundamentally the bad actors. She’s amid an incredibly careful transition from pop’s Virgin Queen into young adulthood, so now it’s slightly less of a big deal to imply that she has had a boy sleepover in a song. Swift is nothing if not a cautious star, a multimillion-dollar industry unto herself—she is not going to pull a Miley in order to signal what a big girl she is now. Throughout Red , she is frequently seduced, victimized or unable to steel herself against her own desires, as if adult womanhood is a powerful undertow dragging her out to the sea. It’s a curious thing to watch such a