Watched: 09/28/2025
Viewing: First
First - it's remarkable how messed up the music industry was in the 1990's that I realize I kind of disliked some of the music from the artists in
Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery (2025) not because of the music, but because if a song was any good in the 1990's, you kind of couldn't escape it for months at a time. I think half of why I got weird about music in college and decided "I'm gonna go listen to
Cole Porter standards" was because if I heard
Hootie and the Blowfish one more time, I was going to shove pencils through my ear drums. On the whole, radio, Muzak and MTV had a real "you like ice cream? Great. We're force feeding you a gallon of mint chocolate chip every hour for the next two months" sort of vibe.
It did not help that I was working in a
Camelot Records during the period when the artists who would become the headliners at Lilith Fair in the first years were releasing their music. (So tired were we of
Paula Cole's "
Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" that, behind the counter we would whisper to each other in response to Cole's query, "Up my butt". But almost 30 years later, that song is a-ok, Paula Cole.)
The documentary of
Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery charts the origins, rise, challenges to, and eventual final wrap-up of the initial go at Lilith Fair, and its place in culture in the 1990's. It shows how the very suddenly popular
Sarah McLachlan parlayed both her position and organization into recruiting other female artists and playing multiple summers of tours from the mid-90's to 1999. Along the way, luminaries like
Patti Smith,
Bonnie Raitt,
Erykah Badu,
Emmylou Harris,
Suzanne Vega and countless others joined McLachlan on the road to help change perceptions of how women fit into the music industry.
