Lily Allen: “Men Get Credit For Female Pop Success”

For anyone that ever doubted the intensity of Lily Allen‘s feminist fire, the UK pop singer recently chastised the business side of the music industry for a lack of women in executive positions and has hit out at the tendency to credit male producers with the success of female singers and artists.

“I am signed to Warners and have been into many different record company buildings, but am astonished by the lack of female executives,” Allen told The Sun, via the Daily Mail. “I cannot understand or fathom it.” Allen’s then took on the obsession with men-behind-the-women stories.

“It’s interesting that some of the biggest artists, if not most of them, are women,” Allen said while appearing on Radio 2. “You’ll also notice, of those big, successful, female artists, there’s always a man-behind-the-woman piece. Whether it’s Beyonce it’s Jay-Z, if it’s Adele it’s Paul Epworth, with me it was Mark Ronson, same with Amy Winehouse. It’s sort of like you never get that with men.”

“You can’t think of the man behind the man because it’s never a conversation which is bought up. If you’re Ed Sheeran nobody talks about who produced his music,” she added. Allen’s comeback album will be titled Sheezus, a nod to Kanye West, and is currently slated for an early May release.

The singer raised a few eyebrows earlier this month when she told UK men’s magazine ShortList, “Feminism. I hate that word because it shouldn’t even be a thing anymore. We’re all equal, everyone is equal. Why is there even a conversation about feminism? What’s the man version of feminism?”

The comments prompted a raft of backlash from feminist bloggers, who Allen says took her quotes out of context. Allen even engaged Holy Moly! writer Becca Day-Preston in a war of words via Twitter, writing, “You’ve got no place telling me what kind of feminist I am or am not. F-ck off.”

Watch: Lily Allen – Our Time

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