Fair game

While diversity in age and race is all well and good, it can hardly be said that it translates into diversely innovative, diversely thoughtful, or even diversely good music. Overall, the type of "female" music being purveyed at Lilith is, not to put too fine a point on it, dull as ditch water, the type of folk-based fare that male critics smugly like to term weepy, emotional, and--in a cliche that has dogged reviews of many an artist on this bill--"like pages torn from a teenage girl's diary."

Where, some critics ask, are the Breeders, the Polly Jane Harveys, the Bjsrks? Where is Patti Smith? Lil Kim? Foxy Brown? Team Dresch? The Fastbacks? The Muffs, L7, Babes in Toyland, Etta James? And given Lilith Fair's confused policy of booking bands like the Cowboy Junkies--whose guitarist Michael Timmins writes all the songs for his sister Margo to sing--where is, say, Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, or Portishead? Where, for that matter, is Pulp?

According to booking agent Diamond, these people are absent because, for the most part, they want to be. "Garbage passed again. Bjsrk passed again. Patti Smith has done Lilith Fair--she was at our first date ever--and it's just not a format she feels comfortable with. Joni Mitchell--we're trying for her. We asked Annie Lennox. We asked an incredibly wide gamut of artists."

One left-of-center band that Lilith Fair did ask was the aforementioned Sleater-Kinney. The group declined because, according to Brownstein, its members "just don't feel part of what's happening at Lilith. It seems like they haven't really given credit to women in an independent milieu who have organized a lot of female-only shows for years."

Brownstein also says that she and her bandmates didn't get the feeling that Lilith Fair really knew who they were or what their music sounded like.

"If they did, why did they stop with us?" she says. "They're not going to ask the Donnas or someone, even though that would be awesome. I don't even think our music would be appreciated there."

Lilith Fair's organizers might pretend to disagree, but it's hard to imagine that they really do.

"You have to be mindful of your audience," McBride says. "Some of the people who came to Lilith Fair last year might be willing to embrace much harder, more difficult acts; they might be open-minded and get off on it. But some might not. It comes down to putting bums in seats. It's getting harder and harder to sell tickets, but we think we're providing good value for the dollar."

McBride also says that one of Lilith Fair's priorities is helping to break new artists. To that end, organizers put together a local-band showcase on the so-called "village stage" (read: third stage). Many of the artists who will be appearing on this stage were picked by contests put on by local promoters and radio stations, the idea being--according to their promotional spots--that any girl who'd been singing and writing songs in her bedroom might wind up on Lilith Fair, a putative star.

If the Dallas winner, picked in April, is any indication, we're not exactly talking plucked from hopeless obscurity here: franklySCARLET, the self-proclaimed "alt-pop" sister duo of Kim and Kelly Brown, has been together for years, releases its own albums, and has already opened for the likes of David Bowie, Joan Osborne, Lisa Loeb, and NRBQ--hell, they're the perennial bridesmaids.

Lilith's desire to break young female artists seems sincere, although anyone who's suffered through one of those Ticketmaster or Grammy showcases can tell you that these "winners" probably won't break much more than guitar strings. The conceit is also a bit strange: If McLachlan is indeed set on trying to recreate the industry in her own image, such a goal seems self-defeating in the long-run, as people--women, even!--tend to overdose on any one "category" of music if it doesn't change. Lilith Fair may yet manage to burn them out even faster.

Meanwhile, many musicians and insiders declare not that it's a good time for women to get signed in the industry, but that it's a bad time for anybody to get signed, male or female. Mare Winningham, who was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of a singer in the movie Georgia, has been trying for years to play one in real life; she just inked a contract with Razor and Tie after a decade of shopping her tapes. Winningham may finally have benefited from Lilith Fair's ethos, but she says that over the past decade, the comment she heard most often was that "the market was inundated with female singer-songwriters," she says. "Which always seemed kind of odd to me--they wouldn't say that about men, and surely there were more of them."

It's hard to see how Lilith Fair's boost of similar-sounding artists is going to help that situation. The truth is, as Johnette Napolitano points out, there are just as many young songwriters being ignored or discriminated against because of their age or looks or lack of juice as there are because of their gender.