Kathleen Hanna Weighs in on Today's Pop Stars

This is part of the quote posted to Jezebel (from a CNN article) that spawned a pretty interesting discussion about pop music, privilege, and why today's performers pale in comparison to the artists of yesteryear (read: the 90s).

If you're inclined to believe such things.

I mean, is it really that different when it's a skinny white woman in a bathing suit singing these things? None of these women ever wear pants, first of all. Second of all, just because you're wearing a goofy hat doesn't make it performance art. I mean, that's just my feeling about it. — Kathleen Hanna (Source)

Let's break this down. On the surface, this looks like a clear case of artist vs pop star (we've been through this before ), but Kathleen Hanna herself is a skinny white woman — quite a bit of privilege there. That's where the hypocrisy lies, not in her criticizing other performers, or even other women. This comment nicely sums it up:

But it seems to me that Hanna benefits from the same things that she's criticizing Ke$ha, Perry, and Gaga for. She's thin, white, and pretty, and from what I remember, wasn't that fond of pants in her heyday either. Riot grrl seems to have relied very heavily on shock value (like throwing a tampon into a crowd, which I realize was unusual, but it sure seemed iconic), which is just one way to get a message across. Sexuality was a huge part of how messages were transmitted, and while there was a critical eye as to the heteronormativity of the messages, it wasn't always successful at subverting the standards it claimed to. (Jezebel Commenter boxpelunker)

There's an unspoken tenet in feminism that says it's wrong to criticize other women. When it comes to performers, especially, what you're really criticizing is their product or their public persona. I think this is completely within the realm of acceptable, and even healthy, particularly when those artists rise to the level of "iconic.". But it's also healthy to remember who controls what's accepted into the canon and what's not. Without rehashing what I've already written, look at any critic's best-of list: it's always almost exclusively white, male songwriters. I cringe when I hear someone my age, particularly someone who maybe played with some of the same tropes, criticizing today's pop stars as less than substantial. Not because I think they are, but because I think the chasm between good (punk and indie) and bad (pop) isn't as wide as people want to believe. I think about this every time I sit down to write something about the trifecta of Ke$sha, Katy Perry, and Lady GaGa. The three of them inspire as much hated as they do adoration. I don't listen to their music, but I've refrained from criticizing them for those reasons.