‘Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery’ Review: Music Doc Recalls a ’90s Festival That Made It Feel Like Women Might at Least Save Rock, if Not the World
The Lilith Fair music festival of the late 1990s was named after Lilith, a figure of ancient myth who gained a modern cult following as the biblical Adam’s supposed first wife, who was more interested in setting up her own Eden than going along with her husband’s. Now, Lilith Fair itself nearly feels like the stuff of myth, almost three decades after the festival’s brief three-year heyday. In a new Hulu documentary, “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery,” current pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo expresses her wonderment at having only recently learned of the existence of such a thing as an all-women festival featuring most of her musical heroines. Whether you were around at the time or are learning about it afresh, like Rodrigo, you may spend the entirety of the doc wishing we could get ourselves back to the garden.
Director Ally Pankiw does a solid job of setting up the seeds that led to Lilith becoming a cultural phenomenon and global meme. Co-founder Sarah McLachlan, who’d been a star for a few years by 1995, took Paula Cole out on tour as her opening act, and at that time two women on the amphitheater circuit together seemed almost like a revolutionary act (something that may be hard to fathom for the kids of today, accustomed to seeing Taylor Swift employing women in all of her support slots). That led to a few test dates in ’96 with an all-day, all-female lineup that still lacked a name, followed by the formal launch in ’97 of a truly ambitious, all-summer-long Lilith Fair. Sold-out amphitheaters populated mostly by delighted packs of female fans quickly came to fascinate the American media. Of course, there was plenty of sexist underbelly to be exposed, in the dumb questions from reporters in the traveling festival’s local press conferences, or in late-night comedians’ icky, gynophobic jibes.
A low point comes when the Grammys squeeze three Lilith acts who happen to be up for record of the year into a single “you go, girl” performance segment, during which Cole raised her hands and exposed an unforgivable sight: unshaved armpits. That resulted in jokes, like Jay Leno quipping, “I think I know why the cowboys aren’t coming around” (in reference to Cole’s hit “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone”), and “at first I thought she had Don King in a headlock.” Obviously, bro culture was not about to be usurped. In 1999, the same year that Lilith Fair came to a close after three lengthy seasonal outings, Sheryl Crow also played Woodstock ’99, which became the poster child for a new wave of misogyny. “Something out in the world is shifting,” McLachlan is seen warning herself in a journal entry on the final date of Lilith 1999, taking the festival out on a high but wondering whether the effort had achieved any kind of long-lasting victory.
It was a sweet dream while it lasted, anyway. It’s heartwarming to see the entire Lilith cast breaking into a backstage group-sing of “Big Yellow Taxi” backstage, instigated by the Indigo Girls, the gregarious duo whom the shyer Jewel recalls as “the greeters of the tour.” (“I had a sense that people were a little scared,” says Indigo Girl Amy Ray, “because we were so gay and so puppy dog-like”; judging from the filmed camaraderie, everyone got over it.) Emmylou Harris talks about “so many crystalized moments of pure joy,” and it wasn’t all just about the music, Erykah Badu recalls bringing her newborn along and having the hormonal changes she was going for uniquely recognized and catered to in a way she didn’t find in other settings. For gay men in the audience, too, as producer Dan Levy testifies on-camera, Lilith Fair served as an antidote to rock’s growing toxicity.
There was widespread sexist backlash, but also flak from the left, as the first Lilith lineup led to the press nickname “Lily-white Fair.” McLachlan and her team made a course correction in year two, bringing artists like Badu and Missy Elliott aboard. Not every sticking point was smoothed over so easily. Pro-life protesters picketed festival dates over Planned Parenthood having a booth in the concourse, and tour producers issued what was meant to be a peace-keeping edict, keeping the booths as they were but disallowing participating artists from talking about it from the stage. Joan Osborne ignored those orders, decking out her entire band in pro-choice shirts, and McLachlan eventually admitted she was too much the people-pleaser to have known how to handle that rift in the moment.
In the end, anyhow, the film makes Lilith Fair seem like a wonderful idyll, as we can attest it really was IRL. So why not bring the concept back? McLachlan gives one obvious reason: She did revive Lilith Fair in 2010, and it was a big bomb, with poor sales and canceled shows. This failed revival is brought up and dealt with in less than a minute; you can reasonably wish the film didn’t so quickly skip past this asterisk, so that some kind of judgment could be made as to whether what didn’t click 15 years ago would still flame out today. The doc offers conflicting reasons for why Lilith’s time might have passed: the waning of singer-songwriters as hitmakers, and the concurrent rise of female pop superstars who brought their own forms of feminism and stage-sharing. Then there’s the whole issue of whether singling out “women in music” is inherently important, self-ghettoizing or both … something not every female star who participated was of the same mind about.
But can anyone look at the landscape right now — with women arguably represented less than ever in certain genres like rock and country, let alone dominating sociopolitical culture — and say we don’t sorely need it back? Beyond just providing a welcome dip into nostalgia, maybe “Building a Mystery” could go some way toward building interest in a reboot.
Director Ally Pankiw does a solid job of setting up the seeds that led to Lilith becoming a cultural phenomenon and global meme. Co-founder Sarah McLachlan, who’d been a star for a few years by 1995, took Paula Cole out on tour as her opening act, and at that time two women on the amphitheater circuit together seemed almost like a revolutionary act (something that may be hard to fathom for the kids of today, accustomed to seeing Taylor Swift employing women in all of her support slots). That led to a few test dates in ’96 with an all-day, all-female lineup that still lacked a name, followed by the formal launch in ’97 of a truly ambitious, all-summer-long Lilith Fair. Sold-out amphitheaters populated mostly by delighted packs of female fans quickly came to fascinate the American media. Of course, there was plenty of sexist underbelly to be exposed, in the dumb questions from reporters in the traveling festival’s local press conferences, or in late-night comedians’ icky, gynophobic jibes.
A low point comes when the Grammys squeeze three Lilith acts who happen to be up for record of the year into a single “you go, girl” performance segment, during which Cole raised her hands and exposed an unforgivable sight: unshaved armpits. That resulted in jokes, like Jay Leno quipping, “I think I know why the cowboys aren’t coming around” (in reference to Cole’s hit “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone”), and “at first I thought she had Don King in a headlock.” Obviously, bro culture was not about to be usurped. In 1999, the same year that Lilith Fair came to a close after three lengthy seasonal outings, Sheryl Crow also played Woodstock ’99, which became the poster child for a new wave of misogyny. “Something out in the world is shifting,” McLachlan is seen warning herself in a journal entry on the final date of Lilith 1999, taking the festival out on a high but wondering whether the effort had achieved any kind of long-lasting victory.
It was a sweet dream while it lasted, anyway. It’s heartwarming to see the entire Lilith cast breaking into a backstage group-sing of “Big Yellow Taxi” backstage, instigated by the Indigo Girls, the gregarious duo whom the shyer Jewel recalls as “the greeters of the tour.” (“I had a sense that people were a little scared,” says Indigo Girl Amy Ray, “because we were so gay and so puppy dog-like”; judging from the filmed camaraderie, everyone got over it.) Emmylou Harris talks about “so many crystalized moments of pure joy,” and it wasn’t all just about the music, Erykah Badu recalls bringing her newborn along and having the hormonal changes she was going for uniquely recognized and catered to in a way she didn’t find in other settings. For gay men in the audience, too, as producer Dan Levy testifies on-camera, Lilith Fair served as an antidote to rock’s growing toxicity.
There was widespread sexist backlash, but also flak from the left, as the first Lilith lineup led to the press nickname “Lily-white Fair.” McLachlan and her team made a course correction in year two, bringing artists like Badu and Missy Elliott aboard. Not every sticking point was smoothed over so easily. Pro-life protesters picketed festival dates over Planned Parenthood having a booth in the concourse, and tour producers issued what was meant to be a peace-keeping edict, keeping the booths as they were but disallowing participating artists from talking about it from the stage. Joan Osborne ignored those orders, decking out her entire band in pro-choice shirts, and McLachlan eventually admitted she was too much the people-pleaser to have known how to handle that rift in the moment.
In the end, anyhow, the film makes Lilith Fair seem like a wonderful idyll, as we can attest it really was IRL. So why not bring the concept back? McLachlan gives one obvious reason: She did revive Lilith Fair in 2010, and it was a big bomb, with poor sales and canceled shows. This failed revival is brought up and dealt with in less than a minute; you can reasonably wish the film didn’t so quickly skip past this asterisk, so that some kind of judgment could be made as to whether what didn’t click 15 years ago would still flame out today. The doc offers conflicting reasons for why Lilith’s time might have passed: the waning of singer-songwriters as hitmakers, and the concurrent rise of female pop superstars who brought their own forms of feminism and stage-sharing. Then there’s the whole issue of whether singling out “women in music” is inherently important, self-ghettoizing or both … something not every female star who participated was of the same mind about.
But can anyone look at the landscape right now — with women arguably represented less than ever in certain genres like rock and country, let alone dominating sociopolitical culture — and say we don’t sorely need it back? Beyond just providing a welcome dip into nostalgia, maybe “Building a Mystery” could go some way toward building interest in a reboot.