One of the cruelest tricks played on the North American women’s movement is the way the caricatures, over time, have edged out reality: the ritualized bra burnings (never happened), the batik hemp dresses (not since the 1970s), the strictly enforced misandry (only on holidays). With regard to Lilith Fair, the late-’90s touring festival of female artists co-founded by Sarah McLachlan, so many jokes were made about “bi-level” haircuts and juice tents and “Lesbopalooza” that the purpose and power of Lilith have largely been relegated to the archives. “I just recently discovered there was an all-female music festival from 1997 to 1999, and I am shook to my core,” a young woman exclaimed on TikTok two years ago, prompting consternation from Millennial and Gen X elders at the loss of some of our crucial cultural herstory.
All of which makes Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a new Hulu documentary from the director and writer Ally Pankiw, particularly relevant—both as a corrective to the mocking mythology of Lilith, and as a distillation of what women have lost in the decades since. As a 14-year-old in 1997 who stayed up late to tape Paula Cole and Shawn Colvin songs off the one British radio show that sometimes played them, I was probably fated to cry all the way through Lilith Fair, and indeed I did. More than the music or the melancholic nostalgia, though, what felt devastating was the realization of how rare the festival’s sense of collective possibility feels today. “Being there was one of the earliest memories I’ve had of safety,” the actor Dan Levy, a producer on the film, tells the camera. Looking around at the crowds and seeing people smiling and celebrating and being fully themselves “felt like this kind of quiet revolution.”
The concept for Lilith, as McLachlan and her co-founders—her agent, manager, and road manager at the time—make clear, was less ideological than pragmatic. By 1996, McLachlan had released several albums, with 1993’s thoughtful, moody Fumbling Towards Ecstasy marking a breakthrough. But she kept encountering obstacles from the industry, which—despite a wave of new performers in rock, hip-hop, and indie—saw female artists as tokens at best. Radio stations, interviewees in the documentary explain, refused to play two songs by women in a row. Promoters wouldn’t put two women back-to-back on the same bill for fear of looking like they were hosting ladies’ night (or the less charmingly titled “pussy package”). The women who did succeed, as Liz Phair notes, were pitted against one another or publicly dragged by TV and radio hosts for not looking sexy enough. At 19, Jewel recalls, she was asked, “How do you give a blow job with those teeth?” Phair was asked to pose for a magazine wearing nothing but men’s pants and suspenders. “Everything that I was good at, that I was skilled at, that I’d worked my entire life for, boiled down to ‘Do her tits look good?’” she says.
McLachlan, lonely on the road, and disenchanted after her new American record label suggested that she fix her hair and lose five pounds, had the idea to tour with some other women, partly to prove promoters wrong, and partly out of the desire to have more women in her life. (Her co-founders were all men, and all three were instrumental in helping establish Lilith.) Touring festivals at the time were popular, lucrative, and impossibly male—Lollapalooza’s 1996 Los Angeles lineup featured more martial arts–performing monks than it did women. McLachlan suggested a tour in which she shared billing with other female artists, doing a test run of sold-out shows with Paula Cole, Patti Smith, Lisa Loeb, and Aimee Mann in 1996. Selling people on the concept wasn’t easy. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Loeb describes herself thinking when she was invited to join the tour. Having fought for much of their career to be seen as artists, not women artists, many were reluctant to silo themselves intentionally.
But from the outset, Lilith felt different to its performers. The festival was named after a figure from Jewish folklore, Adam’s first wife, who left the Garden of Eden because he refused to treat her as an equal. It was a demonstration not of secondary status, but of strength. The first show, at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington State, drew 15,000 people. The bulk of the next 36 shows sold out. There were female crew members, engineers, sound technicians—an “incubation of female talent,” as Catherine Runnals, the production coordinator, puts it. And the crew had extended health-care plans, which for many was unprecedented. (Dan Fraser, McLachlan’s former road manager and one of Lilith’s co-founders, recounts how “these grown men would be crying because they could send their kids to the dentist.”) The artists, more accustomed to the isolation of touring, quickly formed a community, practicing harmonies backstage for each show’s closing sing-along. “Whoa, is this heaven?” Emmylou Harris remembers thinking. “I think Lilith Fair is a symbol of hope,” Paula Cole says in an archival interview from before her set one day. “Not only is there a tremendous amount of support, but I think this is just a metaphor for what could be in other areas of life.”
Lilith Fair is partly adapted from an excellent 2019 Vanity Fair oral history of the festival by Jessica Hopper, Sasha Geffen, and Jenn Pelly, but the documentary has the benefit of being able to draw on raw footage of Lilith’s prize asset: its audience. “One of the things I was criticized the most for in my music was sincerity, which was kind of funny,” Jewel explains, over footage of her performing the painfully vulnerable “Near You Always” at the Gorge. “But I have to say that when I sang for Lilith, what I noticed in the audience was unabashed sincerity.” Pankiw cuts to scenes of young women watching and smiling with the unselfconscious radiance of oil-painted saints. But there are also plenty of men in the audience, and attendees wear not just tie-dye, but also Adidas and Gold’s Gym T-shirts. The idea propagated by Saturday Night Live skits and sitcom one-liners that Lilith Fair was a misandrist showcase for joyless, hormonal angst was totally alien to accounts of what being there actually felt like.
Lilith’s success spawned a backlash, which was inevitable, and the whiteness of its 1997 lineup led to valid criticism of its lack of inclusivity. In the Vanity Fair oral history, McLachlan argues that this wasn’t due to lack of trying to book a more diverse slate of artists; many people she’d asked to join turned her down. In the festival’s second and third years, it was easier to sell people on what Lilith represented: not just a community and a more nurturing touring environment, but an alliance. The music industry had doubted that women could have meaningful commercial clout, and Lilith Fair proved them wrong. (Erykah Badu notes that Lilith inspired her to establish the touring Sugar Water Festival in 2005.) It demonstrated the collective potency of women as artists, and as leaders. “We are businesswomen,” Sheryl Crow remembers realizing during the tour. “We are women who run our tours. We are women that make the creative decisions. We are women that set the tone for how everyone gets treated on the road.”
Watching from the perspective of 2025 is a discombobulating experience. Women have come to dominate popular music in the years since—the Eras and Cowboy Carter tours are maybe the only recent cultural phenomena to have conjured a similar camaraderie and delight as Lilith Fair—but they don’t tend to project as much of a shared sense of community or political intention. A 2010 attempt to revive the festival failed because, as the music critic Ann Powers theorized, “on the one hand, there are many, many more visible women at the top of the mainstream pop scene. On the other hand, I think it’s arguable that there’s less consciousness.” The earnestness and sincerity that characterized so much music from the late ’90s were overtaken by the sneering rage of nu metal. (“Take your Birkenstocks and stick them up your fuckin’ ass,” Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst screams in footage from Woodstock ’99, where women reported being harassed, groped, and sexually assaulted.) Today, the prevailing modes of popular culture are detached self-awareness and winking irony, defensive attitudes that hint at a feeling of helplessness—that nothing one does will really make a difference.
McLachlan says she has no interest in bringing back Lilith Fair, possibly because the 2010 failure was so bruising, but also because she clearly sees it as a group effort that someone else would need to steward to make it both relevant and significant in the 2020s. But it’s hard, watching Lilith Fair, not to yearn for some of what the festival conjured at the end of the 20th century: a sense of shared strength and communal agency. “These women can sell fucking tickets, and we proved that,” Marty Diamond, McLachlan’s former agent and Lilith co-founder, says at the end of the documentary. But what the festival was really about, he argues, was “the power of music. The power of women. And the power of purpose. But nothing lasts forever.”
Illustration sources: Tim Mosenfelder / Getty; Steve Granitz / WireImage / Getty; David Bergman / Getty; Bill Tompkins / Getty; Joe Fudge / AP.
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