Florence Welch from Florence + The Machine sings Saturday at the BottleRock Napa Valley festival in Napa. (Courtesy photo/Jon Ching)
An unusual thing happened Saturday at the BottleRock Napa Valley music, wine, beer and food festival.
Florence + The Machine, one of the three-day Napa event’s headliners, put on the best set of the weekend. With a shimmering curtain of yellow lights behind them, the British indie rock and chamber pop played a positive, life-affirming set of hits and favorites.
As they did, their singer, Florence Welch, owned Napa. Her soaring voice climbed scales as she prowled the stage in bare feet. She encouraged fans to hug, “touch each other’s faces” and love one another.
So what’s so unusual about this? That it was Welch – a woman – leading the way on the main stage of a major musical festival.
To anyone rolling their eyes at that, consider this: To compare to another, slightly larger Bay Area music festival, Outside Lands in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, BottleRock has had more women musicians leading its main stage headliners in the past two years than Outside Lands has in nine lineups, including this summer’s.
Zero isn’t a hard number to beat, though.
That’s not an aberration, either. It’s pretty common. Superfly, which presents Outside Lands as well as Tennessee’s Bonnaroo, one of the largest fests in the nation, also has never had a female artist leading the charge on a full day of events. In more than 15 years, Indio’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has had one female headliner, Icelandic art pop chameleon Björk, in 2002 and 2007.
Just last week, Huffington Post looked at 10 large-scale festivals – including ‘Roo, Outside Lands and Coachella – and determined that while more than 51 percent of their attendees are female, out of roughly 4,000 total acts, just 12 percent were female-only and 10 percent were mixed-gender groups, leaving just under 80 percent as exclusively male.
With two of its six headliner slots since in the past two years going to mixed-gender groups led by women, BottleRock is ducking those numbers.
It’s showed a willingness to see as viable main stage draws that aren’t exclusively men with Welch this year and the Gwen Stefani-led No Doubt in 2015. It’s also showed racial diversity in its headliners, booking OutKast in 2014 and Stevie Wonder this year.
“BottleRock’s diversity is a result of booking the best bands and musicians in all genres,” said Dave Graham, CEO of Latitude 38 Entertainment, the Napa-based firm which puts on BottleRock. “No Doubt and Florence + The Machine headlined the past two years because they were clearly the best choices to headline the festival. . . . We really do not think about gender or race when booking our lineup, but we put a lot of thought into what is the best fit for our attendees.”
Neither Welch nor Stefani needed to prove that women can hold down the main stage at large-size music festivals. Or, more accurately, they shouldn’t have to. It should be self-evident.
But as much as I want that to be true, why did it feel like such a revelation to see Welch commanding the crowd?
Because it doesn’t happen often enough. There shouldn’t be a shortage of female headliners or a broader spectrum of representation, for that matter. Those voices need to be heard.
Are we to believe that Madonna wouldn’t draw? That Beyoncé, who can sell out stadiums, can’t pull in tens of thousands? That Adele, who breaks album sales records, couldn’t carry a lineup? Puh-lease.
Yes, there are complexities and challenges to making a lineup, from “radius” clauses – exclusivity rules that limit where and when an artist can play before or after a festival – to artists who just don’t want to be involved in festivals due to branding or personal preference to cost to other reasons.
What Welch and No Doubt’s Stefani did was reaffirm that, indeed, the girls can hang with the boys. BottleRock sold out every day this year and on No Doubt’s day in ’15.
Sales often speak loudest, so while diversity is not the literal bottom line, inclusion is vital for fans of BottleRock and its organizers in the years to come as well as the music-listening public in general.
“The wonderful thing about music is that there is so much incredible talent out there, no matter what kind of music you are into,” Graham said. “For instance, my iPod is an eclectic mix of everything from Sylvan Esso to Gary Clark Jr. As long as artists continue to produce great music regardless of genre, we are confident we will be able to offer a quality, interesting and diverse lineup each and every year.”
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