Let’s Ride: Feminist Revolution or Half-Baked Dissidence?
Make it stand out
From the mainstream to the margins of pop music, vehicles have been at the centre of album aesthetics over the past year. The choice of wheels is as varied as the artists who adopt them: whilst Dua Lipa opts for a sleek and sexy vintage model on the cover of her nu-disco album Future Nostalgia, Ashnikko’s motorcycle in Tantrum is as bright and futuristic as her neon-blue hair and streetfighter-esque aesthetic, and Tkay Maidza’s flower-adorned tanks show the artist playing with our expectations in both the album’s art and its content.
Technological influences are nothing new to the world of music, and the 2010s is an era full of prime examples. It would be almost sacrilegious not to mention Lady Gaga in this discussion, an artist who played heavily with technology in both the musical and the physical during the release of her futuristic and genre-shifting album ArtPop. Launching both an interactive network-based application of the same name, as well as a flying dress named Volantis under the technical division of her brand Haus of Gaga, the Lady of Pop adourned this musical era in all things high-tech.
But just how did pop artists end up so hooked on wheels? Be it Charli XCX atop a bloodied and beaten Corvette, or Rosalía cruising around the streets of Kyiv with her band of biker chicks, the vehicles recently embraced by female pop stars have a particularly gendered history. From flag girls through to car models, female sexuality has long been employed as a marketing tool which establishes a love triangle between the male target audience, the automobiles being sold, and the women which form a central cog in the appeal of this purchase.
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Charli XCX and Rosalía are two influential pop artists who have shaped their album aesthetics around automobiles. Charli’s “career-long love of cars” recurs in a destruction of the vehicle throughout her discography, from describing crashing a car into a bridge in her 2012 single I Love It, through to basing the album aesthetic of her fifth studio album Crash around car wreckage. Yet, for an album so steeped in cars, the vehicle has never been more absent. Apart from the occasional white Corvette here or red Beemer there, the presence of the car in Crash remains lyrical. The car does not matter anymore - what matters is its destruction. It is, after all, the crash which characterises the album’s artistic trajectory. In the love triangle between men, women, and cars, Charli forefronts herself, shaking up the image of the passive female object in automobile advertisements and destroying the desired object: the car. As a final nail in the coffin of this love affair, the Crash album art sees Charli mounting the car’s mangled body to stare down the lens of the camera; whilst this male gaze seeks sexuality in this arena, Charli instead supplies savagery.
Rosalía’s third studio album Motomami bases itself on different wheels – motorbikes. Directly translating to biker chick, Rosalía perceives this personality to be a fusion of masculine and feminine traits, with force implied in “moto” yet fragility shown in “mami”. In her Motomami inspiration playlist, Rosalía gives us an insight into the foundations of these traits, showing influences which are, however, not so subversive. The alternative “moto” side is characterised by latinx cultures that Rosalía arguably has no affiliation with, being Barcelona born and raised, whilst Disney princesses and ultimately westernised and Caucasian renderings of femininity are used to articulate the delicate and contrasting “mami”. Rosalía’s so-called subversive aesthetic props itself up on the very structures it claims to break down. Critical response to gender binaries is attempted through a persona which is itself binary-ridden, and the latinx cultures to which she owes a lot of her musical success find themselves pigeon-holed in the alternative “moto” side, apparently incapable of articulating the delicateness of “mami”.
Subversion registers as acts of reclamation to these artists, with Charli meeting the male gaze head on to critique imposed female passivity and Rosalía integrating femininity into the stereotypically male biker aesthetic. However hard they may try to push back, such a recipe too often produces half-baked dissidence. These are aesthetics that ultimately want to rebel, they want to challenge, but they refuse to step far enough out of the structures that they criticise to have this desired effect.
Should women on wheels, then, be cast off as another event in a trend of quasi-feminist reclamations of masculine aesthetics, destined to live out its days next to its peers ‘girl boss’ and ‘gym girl’ in the land where superposing binary attributes is the ultimate feminist antidote? We might be getting ahead of ourselves. Although Charli and Rosalía’s aesthetics sit comfortably in patriarchal constructions, they nonetheless highlight the cracks forming in these foundations - cracks that can be exploited.
“The power and provocation of gender representations in Titane rest in their indefinable nature, one which interactions with automobiles help Ducournau to showcase.”
In true Donna Haraway cyborg-esque style, Julia Ducornau’s Palme D’or winning film Titane forefronts the subversive capabilities of automobiles. A tale of violence, cars, and questions of gender and sexuality, the body in Titane – from that of the protagonist Alexia/Adrien to the character of Vincent Lindon – is uncontrollable and undefinable. The human-machine fusion supersedes binary notions of gender, as pregnancy no longer denotes femininity, nor is a sculpted body synonymous with masculinity. The power and provocation of gender representations in Titane rest in their indefinable nature, one which interactions with automobiles help Ducournau to showcase. Ducornau’s art, Haraway’s theorising, and broader xenofeminist narratives are proof that women on wheels can go further than the binary – it is up to us to push it there.
Fluidity and transformability are intrinsic to relationships of human-machine fusion. Indeed, just because the history between women and wheels is rooted in a binary love-triangle, this does not mean it should stay there. Controlled by the aesthetic desires of the patriarchal pop industry, it is unsurprising that Charli XCX and Rosalía would be reluctant to burn down the house they live in. Yet, their renderings still hand us the matches that we could light.
Words: Lucy Lawson
