Image via Instagram
The female image has long been a central, divisive aspect of popular culture, and the increasing ubiquity of Instagram has changed public perception of female music icons in complex, often conflicting ways. From Kim Gordon to Beyoncé and the leagues of female artists in their wakes, women have never had such an honest and real opportunity to portray themselves in the media: In a culture rife with airbrushing and paparazzo, Instagram is perhaps the only place on the Internet where women can project an image of their own design and control. But Instagram is also an excellent case study in the "myth of self"—offering a chance for women to tell a story about who they are that is nevertheless subjective and crafted (consciously or unconsciously) by an understanding that they are still being looked at. Instagram exists at the nexus of ego, artistic impulse, and immaculate self-conception.
The Instagram accounts belonging to St. Vincent’s Annie Clark, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon—I include their band names here only to emphasize that these are the three biggest women in rock—are interesting because of how they square with traditional depictions of women in media, their evolution as musicians, and online harassment for women writ large.
When it comes to portraying women, music media buys into the ideas of glamour just as much as the fashion industry, and Instagram feels like an opportunity to supercede the romantic manipulation of photo-doctoring. Airbrushing remains one of the few lies in the commercial economy that's allowed to remain unchecked even after the public is made aware of their own deception. By that I mean this: When a product doesn't perform as advertised, it is taken off the market; when an academic misrepresents his research, he is stripped of his title; when a media icon lies about a simple detail of his personal experience, he is suspended without pay. In music, the misrepresentation inherent to altering the female image is an accepted cultural norm despite the fact that in most other instances when people, commodities, or ideas have been publicly misrepresented, there are penalties. We are sold the myth of what women in entertainment are supposed to look like every day, and the fact remains that no one has ever revoked an advertisement or magazine cover because it physically misrepresented a (perfected) female icon. Airbrushing is designed to flatter and romanticize reality—but it’s also an act of deception, however benign.
As a contrast, the impulsive, documentary-quality of Instagram makes it feel like the only corner of the Internet where women can choose how they are portrayed; they can flatter the male gaze or subvert it. An interesting dimension of fame is that female musicians are in the unique position of having access to photos that other people of take of them; as such, their choosing to include photos from the press alongside, say, selfies with their dogs represents a new, highly-tailored way to curate their image. It says something about what women want to add to their own narrative every time a distinction is made between what does and does not get shared.
And yet, the aforementioned trio of artists seem just as obscured by Instagram as by popular media. St. Vincent rarely appears in her own photos, often choosing to hide behind pictures of humorous objects that make it feel like the image is a shield—there are no personal incursions here. When she makes jokes about a "butt[hole] repair shop," her corny charisma gives viewers the impression of intimacy through what is actually a smartly crafted, albeit sterile collection of photos. ("Cheese is usually so hard. Is there any solution?" she comments under a photo of a can of Easy Cheese™.)
Carrie Brownstein and Kim Gordon are similar in that how they are presented in social media fails to square with their archetypal presentation in the media, although the two go about it in different ways. For Brownstein, Instagram feels like a sanitized echo of the mainstream media that an older version of herself may have rebuffed: There are photos "behind the scenes" of the television shows, photo shoots, and vacations that Sleater-Kinney’s music seems to implicitly reject. If Annie Clark’s Instagram feels like a goofy counterpart to the highly-skilled artistic imagery parlayed in the press, Brownstein’s Instagram feels like a strangely conventional counterpart to the endearingly unconventional media darling that she has become. In one instance, she @mentions Chanel and gives a shout out to Sleater-Kinney’s David Letterman performance in a photo that seems strange coming from a woman famous for singing the line, "we’re not here because we want to entertain."
Kim Gordon, who at this point in her career is probably the most iconic of the three, also has the most tailored photostream. Many of the photos are simply re-shared images from magazines and other people; a template that feels somehow distant because of how closely it conforms to the myth of "social media as lifestyle" as popularized by Kim Kardashian and Beyoncé (whose controversial fake-Instagram thigh gap nearly crashed the Internet). For icons outside the commercial pop bubble, Instagram is sort of murky territory: On the surface it masquerades as a social forum that’s supposed to be impulsive and insightful, but really, it’s an exercise in a new kind of self-creation.
Since we’ve legitimized Instagram as a medium that purports to show "reality"—or some semblance of it—the community’s reaction to these images comes with a degree of entitlement. People want to feel close to their heroes, and Instagram feels more intimate than other media because it’s a phone-based technology—the photos are in your pocket rather than on a computer screen—and it's controlled by the musician and not their PR team (usually). It’s a window into the private lives of musicians that we can’t see on TV or in print. But even as Twitter officials are hunkering down on a serious dialog about Internet harassment and women, no such wide-scale discussion exists regarding the Instagram community and the trolls, pervs, and stans that female musicians tend to attract. Any Internet comment section will necessarily attract human seraphim, but the rabidity with which comments like "Kill Yourself", "Kim you are a goddess please notice me!!!", and "You are aging with such grace" appear on Kim Gordon’s Instagram—along with agonizingly depressing arguments between users defending Lana Del Rey’s honor (Gordon disparages LDR in an early draft of her recent memoir) reflect the kind of communities that different women attract based on how they present themselves. Kim’s audience often meditates on her looks because she posts a lot of glamour shots; St. Vincent’s audience speculate about her private life because she so infrequently exhibits her interpersonal relationships; and Carrie’s audience is full of crossover "Portlandia" fans who seem to know little of her music career—because until Sleater-Kinney’s resurgence, it wasn’t on display. ("I just don’t understand why Sleater-Kinney is worth attention," wrote some dude.) On Instagram, as with the rest of the Internet, what happens in real life is often played out in the arguments of anonymous cowards—from the merits of Carrie’s new hair color to Annie Clark’s sexuality and beyond.
Still, Instagram tends to compound real life opinion, even as it glorifies the depths of human narcissism. It could be that Instagram is so fast and immediate, its images posted without the visionary guidance of publicists, that it may have become a more accurate representation of the contemporary female icon than anything sculpted by the media—which is perhaps why public perception of women in rock so infrequently matches up with how they portray themselves on the Internet. But it also might be too soon to tell. All three artists have transformed so much in recent months that they are practically different people—St. Vincent is wildly ascendant in her "Bowie" stage, Sleater-Kinney have clocked mainstream, and Kim Gordon is newly independent from Thurston Moore and her past with Sonic Youth. Social media is playing an increasingly central role in determining how musicians like these are portrayed in popular culture, and Instagram is mapping their narratives faster than the press can evolve to tell them.