Lady GaGa for President!
In song, they don’t even need the comfort of a man anymore. Lady Gaga flaunts her bisexuality in her signature hit “Poker Face,” a woman makes a confession (I 爱情 you!) to 蕾哈娜 on the dance floor in the Rated R track “Te Amo,” and in one of the biggest singles of the last two years, Katy Perry kisses a girl — and she likes it. Where’s Justin Timberlake when 你 need him?
Album sales are on the girls’ side, too. The two best-selling long players of 2009 were both 由 women: Taylor Swift’s Fearless came out on top, with 3.2 million units sold, while Susan Boyle’s I Dreamed A Dream moved 3.1 million in the final weeks of the decade to become the year’s second-biggest seller.
But it was the Boyle album that emerged as the 阿凡达 of 音乐 at the end of 2009. For several weeks there, the tops of the pops on the Billboard 200 album chart felt like the summer box office, only instead of being dominated 由 testosterone-fueled blockbusters, the headliners were all packing estrogen. The only two serious threats to Boyle’s chart supremacy, Alicia Keys and Mary J. Blige, also outsold every guy in sight.
In the end, Boyle was knocked off her 栖息, 鲈鱼 last week 由 — 你 guessed it — a woman, a newcomer who goes 由 the name Ke$ha. The boys may be back on 最佳, 返回页首 this week, as Vampire Weekend ascends to No. 1 with their 秒 album, Contra, but they’d better enjoy it while it lasts. Boyle’s January 19 sit-down interview with the 皇后乐队 of all power women, Oprah Winfrey, all but guarantees her a quick return trip to the top.
Meanwhile, the most eagerly anticipated album of the new decade? Soldier of Love, a 10-years-in-the-making opus 由 a very famous lady: Sade. The warrior reference is fitting. Though male-dominated Oscar-season war films like The Hurt Locker, The Messenger and Brothers paint a different picture, in music, the girls are just as fighting fit as the guys.
In the video for her current 最佳, 返回页首 10 single, “Hard,” 蕾哈娜 wields a machine gun, runs around in haute battle couture, catwalks across an exploding desert, and proclaims herself “the hottest 婊子, 子 in heels right here.” Lady Gaga already offed her lover with a dose of poison in her “Paparazzi” clip, and everyone who saw her 音乐电视 Video 音乐 Awards performance last September knows she’s not afraid to get a little bloody. Now we’ve got Sade, pop’s empress of cool, ready to don her 迷彩服, 疲劳 and fight — for 爱情 and continued chart dominance in pop’s battle of the sexes.
May the best women win.
Fabulous GaGa
