Rolling Stone is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics and popular culture. It was founded in 1967 and it was the creators' intentions to make it a wide ground of artistic taste and political beliefs of the student generation of the time.
Whilst the front cover containing the music icons Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift may appear simplistic in style, however, this may draw focus on the ideology which may be trying to get across: that men and women now being equal in the music industry. We see a clear equal balance between each subject at the centre of the composition with both figures dominating the space that they're in. They even appear to be close to similar height - again reinforcing this ideology.
Paul McCartney is among many things a British vocalist whose work with the Beatles in the 1960s helped lift popular music from its origins in the entertainment business and transform it into a creative, highly commercial art form.
Kenneth Womack, a leading figure and biographer on The Beatles and their enduring cultural influence, states in an interview with the Harvard Gazette:
“Rock ’n’ roll, or even popular music, [was] often highly gendered and sexist...it certainly was paternalistic in the Sixties and prior, in terms of songs being directed at women as objects, women as needing to be ‘counselled’ about love, [or] it was about coming on to them, even if it was just something innocent and romantic.”
Womack believes that with the 1965 album Rubber Soul Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting began to break free from rock ‘n’ roll’s previous attitudes and goes on to explain:
“The Beatles very consciously in 1965 began to change their tone...They created a very specific type of female character who would think for herself and did not need a man.
It is said that The Beatles, as individuals or as the band, have appeared over 30 times...perhaps this reinforces their true iconography within the music industry throughout the years.
Taylor Swift, who is seen posed next to Sir McCartney, is an American pop and country singer-songwriter. Since the beginning of her long-standing career, the subject matters of her (perhaps more specifically earlier) work has led to an abundance of criticism. It was often seen in many media magazine the current updates of her changing relationship status more so than her actual craft.
Recently clearly fed up with the constant ridicule, Swift released “The Man” on her album “Lover” in Aug. 2019. This song details the struggles that she faced throughout the entirety of her career and how differently she would be portrayed in the media if she was a man. The tone of the song shows her clear frustration that male celebrities are not judged for their numerous relationships while she has yet to escape that image.
In this same feminism-driven period of her work, “Miss Americana,” a Netflix documentary detailing Swift’s fight with misogyny throughout the recent years of her career, was released on the 31st of January last year.
The documentary not only focuses on how her own life has evolved but her own strong beliefs on politics, gay rights and certainly the mistreatment specifically within the music industry. She draws attention to the much darker side of the industry: how women are often silenced, forced to impossibly reinvent themselves countless times and are even treated as commodities in a larger patriarchal scheme. There's even a great focus on her public legal battle against Denver radio DJ David “Jackson” Mueller, who groped her in 2013—a case which has, quite rightfully, come to be seen as an act of solidarity with other women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted, both in and out of the music industry.
We can view the magazines choice of using the two artists, who many may argue have influenced or even revolutionised music across the decades, as a specific choice to possibly reinforce ideologies of the ever-evolving equality of the music industry - although there's still a long way to go.
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