Like the thwarted writers whom Virginia Woolf described in “ A Room of One’s Own,” the female pop original is “strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that”-by the refusal to please and accommodate that only a deep belief in one’s own gift can counteract. And such a musician, even today, is subject to the same pressures that have always hindered women’s artistic expression. Shape-shifting brilliance and an airy indifference to what’s expected of you are not the music industry’s favorite assets in any performer, but they are probably easier to accept in a man than in a woman. Female pop geniuses who exercise their gifts in rampant, restless fashion over decades, writing, performing, and producing their own work, are as rare as black opals.
