Shakira and SZA have also found recent chart success with songs celebrating female empowerment
According to the chart analyst James Masterton, breakup songs “date back to the dawn of pop music history”. The fourth song ever to top the British charts was Outside of Heaven, by Eddie Fisher, and one of the biggest hits of 1957 was Singing the Blues as performed by Guy Mitchell and Tommy Steele – both about the end of a relationship.
What’s most fascinating, he added, was the “gender divide” in the songs. “Breakup songs sung by men are [often] in the noble blues tradition of ‘my baby she left me’ as they sit feeling sorry for themselves. But while there are plenty of heartbroken women, there are just as many songs about a woman picking herself up and moving on. Both Gaynor’s I Will Survive and Cyrus’s Flowers are essentially feminist anthems. The women are empowered by their breakup, not destroyed by it.
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