The Power of Adele and Grimes: How Pop Is Catching Up to Modern Femininity

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Adele and Grimes are different, but the same. Those differences—the ones that make you curl up your face and exhale an exclamation point out your nose when someone tells you they’re actually very similar—are just surface level things that don’t really mean all that much. For instance, visually, the two could not be more disparate. Adele is classic, with her cupid’s bow lips and lace dresses. Gimes looks like a post-apocalyptic cinema bricolage. The two are as polar in their aesthetic as is gets. Likewise, their music is as different as could be, Adele favoring emotional, sprawling ballads, while Grimes opts for cerebral, beat heavy pop.

But there are other things, more important things, that the two women have in common. They’ve both recently reemerged from self-imposed hiatus. They are both excellent, talented, relentless musicians. We’ll likely be talking about them both in both conversation and think-pieces for the next year or so, and scrambling to buy tickets to their shows. They’re both calling the shots in their careers. They both command ultimate attention without using, or allowing us to use, their bodies. And they’re both currently redefining what it means to be a woman in pop music in a very similar way.

While both women are undeniable beauties—because I feel I need to say that before a bunch of meninist white guys jump down my throat and tell me I am wrong because they still jerk off to the ladies in question, therefore rendering my female opinion obsolete—neither of them come even close to the established, arbitrary standard of how we’ve come to expect our female pop stars to look. Forget being a size zero with a perfect, flowing weave, bounding around a stage in provocative lingerie. Both Adele and Grimes provide an important reminder that cookie-cutter sexy isn’t necessarily the most exciting, and that “being provocative” can be as simple as one’s approach to the work that they do, and doesn’t require old fashioned titillation.

Since Madonna sang about her sexuality in pearls and pointy bustiers, we’ve come to associate “innovation” and “progress” in our female pop stars as directly correlating to how empowering their nudity is. Which is fantastic, and we can give Nicki Minaj a standing ovation for unapologetically wearing her ass on her sleeve, but that’s not the only type of empowerment for a woman. Both Adele and Grimes provide an antithetical, but equally valuable contribution to the revolutionizing of women’s bodies in pop.

Changing our perspective on female performers doesn’t necessarily have to do anything with their bodies at all. For too long, our culture has claimed the bodies of the women who dare to be seen. It tells us that a woman can be autonomous, but not too autonomous. There’s a part of her, no matter how big her empire, how chart topping her tracks (yes, the even ones she wrote herself), how militant her #kats #barbz #navy, that she will never truly own. Because even Beyoncé, dancing in front of her “Feminist” sign, isn’t immune from an errant, entitled hand reaching out to pinch her on the behind. With our lascivious gaze, we’ll always have a subtle grip upon her thighs, her hips, her bosom. But both Adele and Grimes haven’t let us sink our hooks in.

That’s not to say we haven’t tried. In 2013, just a little more than a year after Grimes’ Visions exploded, as she retreated quietly into what Flavorwire’s Matthew Ismael Ruiz calls, “Claire Boucher’s self-imposed exile”, she took to Tumblr to explain exactly how hard it is to be a woman in the music industry. On her personal Tumblr, she wrote [sic], “i dont want to be infantilized because i refuse to be sexualized. i dont want to be molested at shows or on the street by people who perceive me as an object that exists for their personal satisfaction. i dont want to live in a world where im gonna have to start employing body guards because this kind of behavior is so commonplace and accepted and I’m pissed that when I express concern over my own safety it’s often ignored until people see firsthand what happens and then they apologize for not taking me seriously after the fact… I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if i did this by accident and i’m gonna flounder without them. or as if the fact that I’m a woman makes me incapable of using technology. I have never seen this kind of thing happen to any of my male peers.” Grimes came up against the patriarchy, against the public who paw at bodies of “celebrities”, and she rejected it, whereas the female pop stars we’ve been most familiar with over the years since Grimes’ hibernation prefer to exploit and manipulate the male driven industry they’re in, from Katy Perry who’s predicated an entire career on kitschy costumes that have her breasts twirling, glowing or spouting foam, to Taylor Swift who has glorified the hyper-sexualized girl gang, coyly teasing every wildest lingerie/pillow fight wet dream there ever was.

Likewise, there was a brief period when Adele first shot to fame in which we tried to set up camp on her body. Karl Lagerfeld had the audacity to call her “A little too fat,” (“but she has a beautiful face and a divine voice”) while Lady Gaga said in interview, “Adele is bigger than me, how come nobody says anything about it?” (“She’s so wonderful and I think her confidence is something I have to match.”) Both comments perfectly emulate the way we treat “bigger” (I hate defining women by size, hence the air quotes) women who dare to exist. We snatch away dignity with backhanded compliments, which is yet another way misogyny creeps into our visual lexicon, to make women that don’t fit masculine standard of beauty feel purposefully insecure (especially where they obviously have so much more to offer than their beauty, which is the most terrifying thing a woman can do). But Adele refused to let calculated body shaming upset her path, "I've never wanted to look like models on the cover of magazines. I represent the majority of women and I'm very proud of that,” she told People in 2012.

Both women found themselves butting heads with a glass ceiling, and neither took it lightly. Both chose the Peggy Olsen route when it comes to being a woman looking to succeed in a man’s world: If the bastards are trying to get you down, be better than them. Grimes, rather than relying on the men around her for her livelihood, does everything herself, from writing music to learning the instruments she needs to make it, to sound production. Ruiz writes, “in 2015, she’s in control. Boucher fought her whole career for this autonomy, and at this point, deserves it. No matter how much her music or her art means to any of us, we can never own her—we don’t get to decide what Grimes should or shouldn’t be.”

Meanwhile, Grimes is applying the same control to her music, and her new album, Art Angels, is being widely lauded for that assertion. Pitchfork’s Jessica Hopper writes, “Art Angels is a gilded coffin nail to outmoded sexist arguments that women in pop are constructed products, a mere frame for male producers' talents—that because their music is immaculate, they are somehow not authentic.” Indeed, Grimes is, despite her alternative image, a pop artist who draws a lot of her inspiration from the purest modern pop including Christina Aguilera, Beyonce, Katy Perry and Mariah Carey, while at the same time railing against the conformism that’s expected from women in the industry. Hopper continues, “Her conflicted, vertiginous relationship with the fast fame that followed Visions seems to have led her to a place of DGAF liberation. Some songs, like "Kill V. Maim", course with a thrilling rage, even a casual misandry. ("I'm only a man/ I do what I can," she sings on the hook). Yet, what's most exciting within Art Angels is the sheer will and fearlessness of Boucher's fight to be heard and seen on her own terms. She's not a "human Tumblr", as we called her (somewhat humiliatingly) in 2012; she's a human zeitgeist, redrawing all the binaries and boundaries by which we define pop music and forcing us to come along.”

Adele, in a slightly different industry landscape as a more commercial artist, simply claims her own power in the boardroom and the sound booth. Adele’s recent Rolling Stone interview includes the following anecdote, “She recalls not being taken seriously in business meetings full of men, of encountering an attitude of "what do you know?" "It's like, 'Well, I'm the fucking artist,' " she says, sitting up straighter in her chair. " 'So I fucking know everything, actually! Like, don't fucking talk down to me!' "” She also noted that working with another woman, in this case Sia, is threatening in the male driven landscape of pop music, “"I actually love the dynamic of us both being in there and just fucking being bossy," she says with a laugh. "And it's all these male producers, and they're all fucking shitting themselves 'cause we're in there."” Like Grimes, Adele too has control over her music, so much so that she only recently found out who Max Martin is (the guy who is responsible for writing and/or producing most of your favorite pop hits, for instance Taylor Swift’s 1989, Katy Perry’s “Part of Me” and most of Britney’s Femme Fatale). Adele, like Grimes, is more than capable making music her own way.

Neither Adele nor Grimes has ever given us the option of their bodies, and for women in the modern pop landscape, that might just be a radical act of defiance. Refusing to allow us to be distracted by their skin gives them both a unique platform from which to create and disseminate their music. Because we can’t stake our claim in either of them, through their intensely private lives or heavily guarded bodies, all we’ve got left to gorge on is what they’re producing for us. That’s not to say either woman is prudish or puritanical: It only takes a look at their respective bodies of work or a reading of their publically spoken/written words to know that these women don’t have judgement to smite on other women. Quite simply, they’re opening up the channel to another dialogue when it comes to female performers that does not revolve around what she is claiming or reclaiming by baring her derriere. They’re essentially allowing us to consume them the way we consume analogous male performers: for the music. And isn’t that the point anyway?

Kat George is a writer based in Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter.