Has anyone else sensed a change in the tides for the future of our pop girlies? After a short n’ sweet Brat summer, we’re starting to see a new age of pop girl unity. Women in music seem a lot more interested in uplifting each other than they have been historically, and it’s an exciting shift to see.
There is nothing juicier than a musical feud, especially when that bleeds into the output of the artists involved. Whether that be thinly-veiled messages in songs, torrid press campaigns, or the kind of tweets that become career-defining for their respective counterparts, female feuds as we know them have been making headlines and feeding stan accounts since the 1990s.
We could start with Madonna and Cher, who I’d argue are the harbingers of feud-alism (pun intended) for this modern era. Well, Madonna has been beefing with an endless cycle of pop starlets for her entire career, but this is arguably the first to hit our contemporary press cycle. In a 1991 interview, after putting forth her respect for Madonna as an artist, Cher calls her “mean”, “rude”, “a spoiled brat” (note this for later), and claims she should be “a little bit more magnanimous and a little bit less of a cunt”.
Biting. Whilst Madonna never directly responded to journalists about this, it speaks to the depth of character that both of these ladies have to either keep it to a private/musical sphere, or at the very least cushion these jabs with genuine respect (if not outright admiration) for one another.
Now, this dynamic only works when you’re punching up, or at least parallel. Cher and Madonna are the foundation of modern pop music; of course they’re okay to be beefing with each other. Look no further than Taylor and Katy for another example of two women, simultaneously in their (at the time) prime, who punched parallel.
You know it’s a good feud if you can refer to the artists involved mononymously and know exactly how it played out. What starts with background dancers and bad blood ends in… a burger and hot chips couples costume that looks perfect for a primary school costume day.
Remember when Swift gathered a legion of the most culturally relevant women — including the current reigning princess of pop culture, Zendaya, and two of the most prominent actresses on American television, whose respective characters she named her cats after — for her Bad Blood music video, and Katy Perry had the flossing kid for Swish Swish? Yeah, that was fun to watch.
Taylor and Katy made for an incredible feud because neither of them had to directly acknowledge the other — they were on the same playing field, so we knew that any shots they took were not only levied at the other, but were also fair game.
One exception to this dynamic is Rihanna’s magnificent take-down of Ciara in 2011. After instigating some Twitter beef, Ciara, not as relevant as she once was, pokes the bear by saying “Trust me Rhianna [sic] u dont want to see me on or off stage”, to which Rihanna replies “Good luck with bookin that stage u speak of”. A masterclass in shade, and in perfectly matching the insults thrown at you without punching down. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the other prominent feuds of our time, such as Britney vs. Christina, Mariah vs. JLo, or Miley vs. Nicki.
I won’t pretend that these feuds aren’t at least partly, if not predominantly, motivated by personal interaction and the innate human desire to be petty. Especially for those infected with the disease of celebrity, the potent combo of skill, stardom, charisma, and ego makes for an explosive yet subtle tool kit, and one that feeds perfectly into the hands of the rabid female and homosexual fans that often flock to these dramatic and soulful personalities.
Perhaps it’s a misogynistic assumption in itself that female artists should all get along and support each other. But for decades it has felt like all of the most famous pop girlies have been forced to fight to claim that single diversity position which is “woman pop artist”.
Female pop artists are expected to consistently honour and respect the lineage of “strong” female artists who’ve carved the path for their fame today, but imbued in this lineage is a sense that established artists are disposable. As our new icons emerge, we find easy ways to tarnish the images of the old guard. Ariana Grande is a homewrecker, Taylor Swift is a chart-topping attention whore, and Katy Perry’s new era is a shallow rip-off of pop auteurs like Arca and Charli.
I’d argue there’s definitive merit to critique of Perry’s new work (both artistically, but also with her self-proclaimed “feminist” branding that conveniently wipes away alleged rapist Dr Luke’s involvement on the album). However, this critique should not be levied as if to dismiss these artists from the current ranks of pop stardom to make room for new artists. There is room. There has always been room. We must let them take space.
These expectations are never put on male artists in the same capacity. Drake and Kendrick Lamar spent 2024 releasing diss tracks, taking potshots at their infidelities, their alleged plastic surgeries, and their secret children. They didn’t receive more than a “boys will be boys” shrug for their antics from the public, and now it’s just a fun quirk of their careers. Mick Jagger has eight children with five different women and has never faced any sort of significant public scrutiny for the number of people he’s dated. Hell, somehow Chris Brown still has a thriving career despite his extensive history of DV.
In a cycle that both victimises and is perpetrated by female artists, these women at the top of their game have had careers born from proving they’re “not like other girls”. Do we not like to see a woman who is successful owning her success, and bringing everyone else up with her?
Last year felt like a turning of the tide, a time when it became cool and preferable for women in music to uplift each other and care about their music and lives. Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo (primed for a “support artist overtakes main artist” rivalry) performed HOT TO GO on Rodrigo’s tour. Before that, Rodrigo gracefully skated through a potential love triangle turf war between herself and Taylor Swift, once Swift booked Sabrina Carpenter (her ex’s new partner at the time) to open her Eras tour. We still don’t quite know what happened between Rodrigo and Swift, a story that would’ve swept up news cycles for years in the 2010s but was delicately dusted under the rug when neither party took the opportunity to chat shit.
As we embrace a collective nostalgia for the 2000s, we’re still reckoning with how we treated Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and a legion of other women whose talent was distilled by their ability to make headlines. P!nk and Christina Aguilera have done the closest thing they can to making peace with their diva duel; Janet Jackson is finally starting to get her dues after the industry tanked her career following Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl performance; and artists like Natasha Beddingfield, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, and Princess Superstar are being re-discovered and recognised for their incredible work.
But the pinnacle of this new era would have to be found in Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat. I’d be remiss not to touch on sympathy is a knife featuring Ariana Grande, a soaring critique of the expectations put on two female artists whose only bridge is local homosexual Troye Sivan.
Our primary evidence is girl, so confusing featuring Lorde: a masterclass in pop music which ended a decade long “feud” and established a thesis on female insecurity. After a decade of comparison and critique which had clearly bled into an awkward and irregular personal relationship, Charli distilled her simultaneous jealousy of and superiority to Lorde – the antithetical “artsy girl” to her “party girl” – into a song that questions what it means to be a girl in the music industry. Within a week, Lorde matched that energy and hopped on a verse about her own experiences with these doubts and comparisons.
The song did something unique in the music landscape: it let the artists be messy. There is no purity or righteousness to Lorde admitting I was so lost in my head and scared to be in the pictures. There’s no winner in this war. Instead, there’s honesty, there’s sonic beauty, and there’s bridge mending.
This bodes well for a bright future in the world of pop music, and perhaps not an end to feuds, but a more diligent undertaking of feuds when they become justified.
We have the privilege of, for the first time in history, a canon of women-led pop music that is cross-generationally making waves. All of these artists deserve to live outside of the shadows, especially if these shadows are other women. These artists are brands, but they’re also people, and they can be friends, or enemies, or colleagues. We must find a way for these female artists to exist as themselves, to be recognised for their artistry, and for us to bathe in the effervescent joy of a silly and sappy pop song again.
