UCLA

Why Sad Songs?: Women’s Laments in Popular Music situates sad songs by contemporary female pop musicians within the lineage of women’s lament. This research aims to undo the common perception that female artists who sing sad songs express their own personally felt suffering. Instead, I posit that these pop lamenters, precisely because of their expertise in performing grief, instill the contradictory notion in their public that their acts are effortlessly real. Using practice-based methods related to my own work as a professional recording artist and by examining sad songs by singer-songwriters and producers Björk, Rosalía, and Sade, I challenge critical and scholarly approaches that assess these women according to a rubric of authenticity. I draw from ethnographic accounts of women’s ritual lament practices in both the ancient and modern traditions, utilizing what scholars define as the role of the professional mourner to highlight these pop lamenters’ agency and technical skill. I argue that female pop singers of sad songs are experts in mourning, who perform listeners’ most difficult emotions not only as a means to assist them in processing personal and historical traumas but also as a studied artistic practice.

By focusing on the labor and critical thought behind each performer’s set of sad songs, I consistently illustrate a disjunct between what the artist created and public perception. In the case of Björk, I discuss her role in the film Dancer in the Dark (2000) and her efforts to counter the interpretation—abetted by the film’s director, Lars von Trier—of her as an emotive vessel rather than a composer and actor. With Rosalía, I show how discord in purist flamenco circles regarding the artist’s authenticity overshadowed her vocal, narrative, and musical undertakings to critique Spanish patriarchy. In my study of Sade, I examine how derisive critical assessments of her work and vocality by prominent media outlets undermined her sorrow songs that were often political in nature and addressed to marginalized communities. Through these case studies, I reconfigure women’s sad songs in popular music by deemphasizing the focus on lamenters’ inner lives in favor of centering their agency and authorship.