Album packaging sends opposite of intended message
Mt. Lebanon’s own Grace Tandon has released her debut album under her stage name as Daya, and she continues to receive accolades for her performance talent.
The New York Times, for example, lists the recording among its “10 Fall Pop and Jazz Albums You Shouldn’t Miss,” and the online version of the story displays her photo in the prime spot near the top left of the webpage, next to entertainment industry veterans Kanye West and Beck.
The album is called “Sit Still, Look Pretty.” The cover features the teenager, well, sitting still and looking pretty.
To the casual observer – say, someone whose musical reference point pretty much stops with the Beatles breaking up – the title and presentation seem to sum up all that is wrong with what people end up listening to these days. The concept of a young woman in such a manner seems to be more in line with the ’60s than this supposed age of female empowerment.
Well, when you assume, you fail to take irony into consideration.
Daya fans know full well that the album’s title track, which has been on the market for nearly seven months now, has as its theme the opposite of sitting still and looking pretty. Consider these lyrics:
“I’m never gonna be that girl who’s living in a Barbie world”
And:
“I don’t wanna be the puppet that you’re playing on a string/This queen don’t need a king”
Then finally:
“No, I don’t wanna sit still, look pretty”
Now, there’s your empowering message for women of the 21st century. Good job, Daya!
The overriding approach to marketing music, though, appears to be stuck back in the 1900s, when good-looking ladies often were pictured gratuitously on album covers to help generate sales. Even female artists whose material merited better treatment tended toward the glamor-shot approach.
And so whoever makes those types of decisions in the Daya camp opted against calling the album “Don’t Sit Still and Look Pretty,” and opted against a cover that doesn’t feature her sitting still and looking pretty. As a result, those who don’t know any better will be thoroughly misled.
Maybe the Beatles got it right with that plain white cover, after all.