Hey, listeners, we have a very, very big announcement before we jump into this week's episode. As you've heard, as we've told you, Zack and Said and I will be live in Los Angeles at the Ford Theater on Sunday, July 14th. This is a reminder to get those tickets, come join us.

Yeah, go get them before they get got, as they say. We can now announce, finally, after many weeks of baited breath, that our guest for this show is the incredible Lacy Moseley, who will be joining us on stage at the Ford Live and in color. If you were not aware of her work, she's an actress, she's a comedian, and she's the host of the amazing podcast, Scam Goddess. We're going to have such a great time. I can't tell you what we're going to talk about, but you you have love for, but you don't want to see succeed because you feel like if they succeed, you won't succeed. All of that, which many of us can relate to those complex feelings.I want to just read the lyrics for our listeners because they make it so plain. Can I read the Charlie verse and then perhaps you read the Lord verse? It's so beautiful. The Charlie verse starts out, Yeah, I don't know if you like me. Sometimes I think you might hate me. Sometimes I think I may hate you. Maybe you just want to be me. You always say, Let's go out. So we go eat at a restaurant. Sometimes it feels a bit awkward because we don't have much in common. People say we're alike. They say we've got the same hair. We talk about making music, but I don't know if it's honest. Can't tell if you want to see me falling over and failing, and you can't tell what you're feeling. I think I know how you feel.This is deep, Zack. Oh, it's deep, and it goes deeper. Charlie releases those lyrics. They go viral. Everyone assumes as Lord. Then she sends Lord a voice note letting her know what she's done. Lord decides to jump on the song and work this out. I'll read a snippet of Lord responding to what Charlie wrote. For people to understand, Charlie wrote this by herself with her team, put it out, and then Lord, within days, writes this response and records it. She says, I was lost in my head and scared to be in your pictures because for the last couple of years, I've been at war in my body. I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back. I was trapped in the hatred, and your life seemed so awesome. She goes on to say that what she was going on internally kept her far away from Charlie, and then same on Charlie's side. You have these two women who are believing the projections of these pop stars as truth and not having a conversation, as you said at the beginning, Hey, girl, this is what's going on in my head. What do you need to be in this friendship?What do I need? They weren't doing that. Because of that, I mean, 10 years. That's 2013. That's a while. They have this internal feud, and they're now working it out. Before we run out of time, I'd be remiss without pointing out that these pop stars are coming together and talking about how they actually feel about each other in a year in which people aren't really talking with each other. They're just talking at each other. I'm looking at Thursday's debate with the presidential The candidate and the current president. What is this moment in pop culture telling us about larger culture? Are we moving to a moment where people are going to start having honest dialog about wrongs they have faced? Or is this just specific to the pop girlies?It feels very pop-specific, But I will say it represents what I think we try to always get to on this show, how to communicate openly and with love. What I like about what Charlie and Lord are doing is that they're not just saying, Here's what you did, here's what I did. They're saying, Here's how I felt when all of these things were happening. Conversations where you can talk about how you feel are so much better and richer than ones where you just talk about who did what and you litigate. I would love to see our politics, our society, our culture, have conversations that nuance. I doubt it. If anything, I think the unity of this current pop music is a refuge from the nastiness of our politics. But yeah, I don't expect the Charlie and Lord energy to rub off on Donald Trump and Joe Biden. They're not going to be up there on that stage being like, Girl, here's how I feel. Could you imagine? It's not going to have to. Oh, God.How radical that would be. The healing circle. Joe Biden is like, When you said they inject me with drugs to get on stage, I felt this. I felt. That is actually camp. They should do that in SNL. I'm calling Bovina. I need that. That's amazing. Well, the elephant in the room to close on with all of this conversation of camaraderie and feminist community and each other, is Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift, as we've talked a lot in the show in different ways, is a star. She is singular. I would argue she is her own music industry. I think she even takes up, I think, 3% of all streams globally for all music channels. I believe that. She's a titan of music. But with the rise of Charlie XCX and even Billie Eilish this year, and I don't even want to say rise, but the release of their albums that have been doing quite well, Taylor has continued her dominance on the charts. Many fans online are arguing that Taylor is Taylor is not being a girls' girl by supporting the release of these new works, but instead blocking them from going number one. So she continues to be number one.By blocking, she'll release another version of the newest album. And then that sales jump, fans say, was purposely done to keep Charlie from a number one album or to keep Billy from a number one album. We don't know whether that's true or not, but a lot of folks on TikTok say. But I will say, when I think of the ways that Taylor Swift has talked about friendship and female friendship, it does feel much more one note. A lot of her lyrics are about breakups and getting over them and holding grudges. But when she was performing female friendship, it was the squad. If you remember the squad, it felt very one note. Me and all my cool model friends and Lena Dunham, and look at us. You like it or love it or hate it or whatever, it didn't have the depth that I'm seeing with what Charlie and Lord are doing right now. I will say that.Yeah. Why I wanted to close this, is there is that I do think even in the face of Taylor Swift's puritanical pop music and her way in which she is the historian of her life, she's the first to write the version that she wants us to understand, and it's from her POV. She doesn't take a lot of perspectives from others. She's not writing from her boyfriends that have wronged her perspectives and trying to contextualize it. What Charlie is doing, what Billy is even doing, all these people are doing are saying, I feel this way. Sometimes my feelings are bigger than fact. I think that's radical.Yes. But what I also think this is all pointing to, and Sam, you talk about this a lot, is that streaming has really rocked the publishing, the music publishing industry. It's really hard to be a singular star now. Now they're having to band together and really work with each other if they want to survive. That's what this moment feels like. Yeah.The margins are so low now, and it's so hard to make it in this era of everything on demand and endless content. If you don't unite with some of the other pop girlies, it's going to be harder to get noticed. What Charles Holly and Lord get out of both of this is more attention. It's helpful to both of them. 20 years ago, it felt like the women in pop would feud to get more attention, and now the vibe is come together to get more attention. I like that better. I like it better.I like it better. And that, our friends, before we go to break, is a wink at where we're going with this conversation. Because if you notice, we didn't say what the second half of the show is. The second half of the show is going to get a little, I think, fun and very feminist and scholarly because what we to talk about is, has the diva as an icon in culture, the woman that's by herself that is so extraordinary that no one can understand her and that she gets what she wants at all times without ever apologizing, is that now dead? And is the future of being a woman in culture all about camaraderie?We shall see. Come back after the break.Yeah, come back after the break to see how we walk through this. So don't go anywhere, listeners. We'll be right back.All right, we are back, and we're going to call this segment, and this is the title given to us by Zack. It's so beautiful. Death of the Diva. Is that the current moment. Are we in a moment of diva death? We're going to talk now about how this Brandy and Monica reunion, and Charlie and Lord working things out on the remix, how that compares to the way a lot of women's singers and pop stars feuded back in the day when I was coming up. Zack, it was truly a different time, no?Yeah, it was such a different time in one where we, even as fans, felt like we had to choose teams. Oh, yeah. So one of the biggest feuds that you and I grew up with, and one that I feel very deeply connected to, is the Britney Spears versus Christina Aguilera feud.You had to pick a side.Yeah, I was team Christina. What side were you?You know what it was? I think if I had to pick one of them to sing at my Black church, it would be Christina. One thousand %. But so much of early Brittany was just Janet drag, and you know how much I love Janet, so I had to pick Brittany.It makes sense. But listeners, if you don't remember, this was what the conversation was like. If we had Vibecheck back then, it would have been every week us picking our warriors and been arguing to the death about who is better, why they're better, who's going to do better with their album.There was a whole pop media machine that had endless articles about these performed feuds. It wasn't just Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears beefing for seemingly no reason for years. It wasn't just Monica punching Brandy backstage at the VMAs. It was Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey beefing even after they made a hit song together. It was Aretha Franklin out singing Céline Dion very purposefully at a VH1 Diva's Live concert. It is really hard to overstate how most of the '90s and early 2000s, the pop music industry was held by the performance of really talented women fighting each other.To add to that, we even had moments where them coming together was the big TV moment. There was VH1's Diva's Live. Sam, what was that event and why is it so iconic? Oh, my goodness.I mentioned Diva's Live, and I realized a lot of you all have no idea what I'm talking about. Vh1, back when they were the thing, they had a music doc series called Behind the Music. They showed a lot of music videos all day and a lot of adult contemporary videos. They also had a concert series once a year called Divas Live, and they would just bring together amazing women singers and let them do a concert together. You had the likes of Mariah Carey and Céline Dion and Aretha Franklin and Shania Twain one year and others. But the year that Céline and Aretha were both part of this Diva's Live concert, instead of just singing together, solo, or sharing the mic, there's one moment where you clearly see Aretha get a little, I don't want to say jealous of Céline singing, but she's like, Girl, not on my watch. As they're going to commercial break, you just hear Céline and Aretha going back and forth, trying to out sing each other. Finally, the cameras have to just wrap. It was so awkward, it was so weird, and it was so unnecessary because no one's going to sit here and say that either of them beats the other.They're just great in different ways. But that was the energy, and that was what was pushed as must-see TV.Yeah, it was a huge thing. The reason why is because we all buy into this culture idea that divas, and the term diva comes from 19th century opera world. It was a term used to point to a woman performer who was just so exceptional that she was a diva, and it comes from the Latin word, goddess. That's how it began. I did not know that. Yeah, goddess is diva. Isn't that crazy? Why we use it in culture, it was a moment for us as it continued on into the 20th century, it was a way for us to label women who are breaking boundaries. As we know through feminism, women who break boundaries are always not treated so well. The diva diva itself as a term is a great way to chart that because in the beginning it was, Okay, girl, you're doing great. Then after a while, these men were like, You're doing too great. You're making too much money. You expressing what you need, how you need it is too much. You're being too loud, too feminist, too these things. So diva continued, but diva is also something we, as gay men, are obsessed with.I mean, you look at Ryan Murphy's show, Feud, it's all about divas, famous divas, and how they fought over the years. But what we saw forever, and what Sam is pointing to is that how diva functions within a cultural landscape is that a diva needs to have a foil. There has to be two divas going at each other, so it's something for us to watch and be entertained by. To our own credit, everyone, diva was always about a performer. So it's not our fault that we look to these performers themselves to be battling on stage or to be giving us a show. However, these famous women, Janet Jackson, Madonna, are people at the end of the day. The diva-ness became so big around each of them that we began to not see them as people, but rather these projections of a person we thought they were.Well, The way you set up this idea of the diva, one, to point out that it's historic, that blows my mind. But two, when diva becomes a negative connotation, oh, if you're a diva, you're nasty, you have an attitude, you're too demanding, these are never the terms that we give men in pop who are performing at diva level. Yeah. Name a male pop star, a massive, huge male pop star that has ever been titled or hung up with diva behavior. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but everyone has their things. He was never called out for having diva behavior. I can think of so many men who have become pop stars. I think of Justin Timberlake before the last few years. I think of Harry styles. I think of a lot of other men in pop who have reached the level that the Mariahs and the Janet's reach. They never deal with the critique of their personas and identities. Entities in the way that the diva moniker automatically does to women. We don't have male divas. We don't have them.Why that's so important, what you're bringing up to, is what you're talking about is perception and agency in the artist itself. As we've talked about with musicians, during this height of big feuds, especially in the '90s with VMAs, these artists didn't control their careers in a real way. They were built by labels. You look at Backstreet Boys, literally built. Insink, literally built. Christina, literally manufactured out of a Disney World. When these stories about them feuding and what they think, those were all also built by a media-industrial complex.Monica spoke to that. Monica said, They created this feud between me and Brandi. We didn't create it. It wasn't just creating the feud, it was creating these archetypes that these women were forced to fit in. Brittany is the good girl. Christina is the dirty girl. Brandy's Squeaky Clean. Monica is street. That is created.What's bad about this creation is that these people are women that who don't have a lot of control over their lives and are having to bow to larger powers and play a role that doesn't speak authentically to themselves. As this has been thrown against certain bodies in pop music, you've seen some pushback, and the most famous pushback to all of this was Beyoncé Knowles Carter in the late 2000s with her I Am Sasha Fierce album where she said, Diva is the female version of a hustler. Because there you go. Because what you're going to say to Sam, while this term is really glamorous and wonderful, it was really confining for them. They felt so boxed in. Just thinking about their lives, like Mariah Carey needing something for her voice to be ready. Is that really diva behavior if she needs it to be cold?No, that's just a professional.That's just someone that's working because men always make demands. What's so dangerous about how we think of divas in popular culture is when we assign a woman a diva, it's not so much about like Barbra Streisand being a diva or Cher being diva. It's more about how when we hear people talk about Cher being high maintenance and needing all these things, the message to everyone else who aren't famous as a woman, I shouldn't be asking what I want. Or as a woman, I shouldn't be demanding things that if it's changing, Zack, is that the pop media landscape that used to gin up these feuds, that media is slowly dying. The entertainment media, the music media, it's a lot smaller and less powerful than it used to be. So much of the way that pop stars are perceived is not through a media lens anymore. It's through their personal social feats.Yeah. about this show.Yes, do it. A huge thank you to our producer, Shanta Holder, engineer Rich Garcia, and Brenda Burns, and Marcus Hom for our theme music and sound design. Special thanks to our executive producers, Nora Richie at Stitcher, and Brandon Sharp from Agenda. And shout out to Ayesha Ayub, who creates our social content and our intern Ella Barnes. And as always, we want to hear from you. So don't forget, you can email us at vibecheck@stitcher. Com. Keep in touch with us on Instagram on our page at vivecheck_pod and our Patreon, where for $5 a month, you get direct access to our group chat. That's patreon. Com/vibecheck. Stay tuned for another episode next week with Elope. Until then, have a great week, you all. Bye. Stitcher.

you have love for, but you don't want to see succeed because you feel like if they succeed, you won't succeed. All of that, which many of us can relate to those complex feelings.

I want to just read the lyrics for our listeners because they make it so plain. Can I read the Charlie verse and then perhaps you read the Lord verse? It's so beautiful. The Charlie verse starts out, Yeah, I don't know if you like me. Sometimes I think you might hate me. Sometimes I think I may hate you. Maybe you just want to be me. You always say, Let's go out. So we go eat at a restaurant. Sometimes it feels a bit awkward because we don't have much in common. People say we're alike. They say we've got the same hair. We talk about making music, but I don't know if it's honest. Can't tell if you want to see me falling over and failing, and you can't tell what you're feeling. I think I know how you feel.

This is deep, Zack. Oh, it's deep, and it goes deeper. Charlie releases those lyrics. They go viral. Everyone assumes as Lord. Then she sends Lord a voice note letting her know what she's done. Lord decides to jump on the song and work this out. I'll read a snippet of Lord responding to what Charlie wrote. For people to understand, Charlie wrote this by herself with her team, put it out, and then Lord, within days, writes this response and records it. She says, I was lost in my head and scared to be in your pictures because for the last couple of years, I've been at war in my body. I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back. I was trapped in the hatred, and your life seemed so awesome. She goes on to say that what she was going on internally kept her far away from Charlie, and then same on Charlie's side. You have these two women who are believing the projections of these pop stars as truth and not having a conversation, as you said at the beginning, Hey, girl, this is what's going on in my head. What do you need to be in this friendship?

What do I need? They weren't doing that. Because of that, I mean, 10 years. That's 2013. That's a while. They have this internal feud, and they're now working it out. Before we run out of time, I'd be remiss without pointing out that these pop stars are coming together and talking about how they actually feel about each other in a year in which people aren't really talking with each other. They're just talking at each other. I'm looking at Thursday's debate with the presidential The candidate and the current president. What is this moment in pop culture telling us about larger culture? Are we moving to a moment where people are going to start having honest dialog about wrongs they have faced? Or is this just specific to the pop girlies?

It feels very pop-specific, But I will say it represents what I think we try to always get to on this show, how to communicate openly and with love. What I like about what Charlie and Lord are doing is that they're not just saying, Here's what you did, here's what I did. They're saying, Here's how I felt when all of these things were happening. Conversations where you can talk about how you feel are so much better and richer than ones where you just talk about who did what and you litigate. I would love to see our politics, our society, our culture, have conversations that nuance. I doubt it. If anything, I think the unity of this current pop music is a refuge from the nastiness of our politics. But yeah, I don't expect the Charlie and Lord energy to rub off on Donald Trump and Joe Biden. They're not going to be up there on that stage being like, Girl, here's how I feel. Could you imagine? It's not going to have to. Oh, God.

How radical that would be. The healing circle. Joe Biden is like, When you said they inject me with drugs to get on stage, I felt this. I felt. That is actually camp. They should do that in SNL. I'm calling Bovina. I need that. That's amazing. Well, the elephant in the room to close on with all of this conversation of camaraderie and feminist community and each other, is Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift, as we've talked a lot in the show in different ways, is a star. She is singular. I would argue she is her own music industry. I think she even takes up, I think, 3% of all streams globally for all music channels. I believe that. She's a titan of music. But with the rise of Charlie XCX and even Billie Eilish this year, and I don't even want to say rise, but the release of their albums that have been doing quite well, Taylor has continued her dominance on the charts. Many fans online are arguing that Taylor is Taylor is not being a girls' girl by supporting the release of these new works, but instead blocking them from going number one. So she continues to be number one.

By blocking, she'll release another version of the newest album. And then that sales jump, fans say, was purposely done to keep Charlie from a number one album or to keep Billy from a number one album. We don't know whether that's true or not, but a lot of folks on TikTok say. But I will say, when I think of the ways that Taylor Swift has talked about friendship and female friendship, it does feel much more one note. A lot of her lyrics are about breakups and getting over them and holding grudges. But when she was performing female friendship, it was the squad. If you remember the squad, it felt very one note. Me and all my cool model friends and Lena Dunham, and look at us. You like it or love it or hate it or whatever, it didn't have the depth that I'm seeing with what Charlie and Lord are doing right now. I will say that.

Yeah. Why I wanted to close this, is there is that I do think even in the face of Taylor Swift's puritanical pop music and her way in which she is the historian of her life, she's the first to write the version that she wants us to understand, and it's from her POV. She doesn't take a lot of perspectives from others. She's not writing from her boyfriends that have wronged her perspectives and trying to contextualize it. What Charlie is doing, what Billy is even doing, all these people are doing are saying, I feel this way. Sometimes my feelings are bigger than fact. I think that's radical.Yes. But what I also think this is all pointing to, and Sam, you talk about this a lot, is that streaming has really rocked the publishing, the music publishing industry. It's really hard to be a singular star now. Now they're having to band together and really work with each other if they want to survive. That's what this moment feels like. Yeah.

The margins are so low now, and it's so hard to make it in this era of everything on demand and endless content. If you don't unite with some of the other pop girlies, it's going to be harder to get noticed. What Charles Holly and Lord get out of both of this is more attention. It's helpful to both of them. 20 years ago, it felt like the women in pop would feud to get more attention, and now the vibe is come together to get more attention. I like that better. I like it better.

I like it better. And that, our friends, before we go to break, is a wink at where we're going with this conversation. Because if you notice, we didn't say what the second half of the show is. The second half of the show is going to get a little, I think, fun and very feminist and scholarly because what we to talk about is, has the diva as an icon in culture, the woman that's by herself that is so extraordinary that no one can understand her and that she gets what she wants at all times without ever apologizing, is that now dead? And is the future of being a woman in culture all about camaraderie?

We shall see. Come back after the break.

Yeah, come back after the break to see how we walk through this. So don't go anywhere, listeners. We'll be right back.

All right, we are back, and we're going to call this segment, and this is the title given to us by Zack. It's so beautiful. Death of the Diva. Is that the current moment. Are we in a moment of diva death? We're going to talk now about how this Brandy and Monica reunion, and Charlie and Lord working things out on the remix, how that compares to the way a lot of women's singers and pop stars feuded back in the day when I was coming up. Zack, it was truly a different time, no?

Yeah, it was such a different time in one where we, even as fans, felt like we had to choose teams. Oh, yeah. So one of the biggest feuds that you and I grew up with, and one that I feel very deeply connected to, is the Britney Spears versus Christina Aguilera feud.

You had to pick a side.

Yeah, I was team Christina. What side were you?

You know what it was? I think if I had to pick one of them to sing at my Black church, it would be Christina. One thousand %. But so much of early Brittany was just Janet drag, and you know how much I love Janet, so I had to pick Brittany.

It makes sense. But listeners, if you don't remember, this was what the conversation was like. If we had Vibecheck back then, it would have been every week us picking our warriors and been arguing to the death about who is better, why they're better, who's going to do better with their album.

There was a whole pop media machine that had endless articles about these performed feuds. It wasn't just Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears beefing for seemingly no reason for years. It wasn't just Monica punching Brandy backstage at the VMAs. It was Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey beefing even after they made a hit song together. It was Aretha Franklin out singing Céline Dion very purposefully at a VH1 Diva's Live concert. It is really hard to overstate how most of the '90s and early 2000s, the pop music industry was held by the performance of really talented women fighting each other.

To add to that, we even had moments where them coming together was the big TV moment. There was VH1's Diva's Live. Sam, what was that event and why is it so iconic? Oh, my goodness.

I mentioned Diva's Live, and I realized a lot of you all have no idea what I'm talking about. Vh1, back when they were the thing, they had a music doc series called Behind the Music. They showed a lot of music videos all day and a lot of adult contemporary videos. They also had a concert series once a year called Divas Live, and they would just bring together amazing women singers and let them do a concert together. You had the likes of Mariah Carey and Céline Dion and Aretha Franklin and Shania Twain one year and others. But the year that Céline and Aretha were both part of this Diva's Live concert, instead of just singing together, solo, or sharing the mic, there's one moment where you clearly see Aretha get a little, I don't want to say jealous of Céline singing, but she's like, Girl, not on my watch. As they're going to commercial break, you just hear Céline and Aretha going back and forth, trying to out sing each other. Finally, the cameras have to just wrap. It was so awkward, it was so weird, and it was so unnecessary because no one's going to sit here and say that either of them beats the other.

They're just great in different ways. But that was the energy, and that was what was pushed as must-see TV.

Yeah, it was a huge thing. The reason why is because we all buy into this culture idea that divas, and the term diva comes from 19th century opera world. It was a term used to point to a woman performer who was just so exceptional that she was a diva, and it comes from the Latin word, goddess. That's how it began. I did not know that. Yeah, goddess is diva. Isn't that crazy? Why we use it in culture, it was a moment for us as it continued on into the 20th century, it was a way for us to label women who are breaking boundaries. As we know through feminism, women who break boundaries are always not treated so well. The diva diva itself as a term is a great way to chart that because in the beginning it was, Okay, girl, you're doing great. Then after a while, these men were like, You're doing too great. You're making too much money. You expressing what you need, how you need it is too much. You're being too loud, too feminist, too these things. So diva continued, but diva is also something we, as gay men, are obsessed with.

I mean, you look at Ryan Murphy's show, Feud, it's all about divas, famous divas, and how they fought over the years. But what we saw forever, and what Sam is pointing to is that how diva functions within a cultural landscape is that a diva needs to have a foil. There has to be two divas going at each other, so it's something for us to watch and be entertained by. To our own credit, everyone, diva was always about a performer. So it's not our fault that we look to these performers themselves to be battling on stage or to be giving us a show. However, these famous women, Janet Jackson, Madonna, are people at the end of the day. The diva-ness became so big around each of them that we began to not see them as people, but rather these projections of a person we thought they were.

Well, The way you set up this idea of the diva, one, to point out that it's historic, that blows my mind. But two, when diva becomes a negative connotation, oh, if you're a diva, you're nasty, you have an attitude, you're too demanding, these are never the terms that we give men in pop who are performing at diva level. Yeah. Name a male pop star, a massive, huge male pop star that has ever been titled or hung up with diva behavior. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but everyone has their things. He was never called out for having diva behavior. I can think of so many men who have become pop stars. I think of Justin Timberlake before the last few years. I think of Harry styles. I think of a lot of other men in pop who have reached the level that the Mariahs and the Janet's reach. They never deal with the critique of their personas and identities. Entities in the way that the diva moniker automatically does to women. We don't have male divas. We don't have them.

Why that's so important, what you're bringing up to, is what you're talking about is perception and agency in the artist itself. As we've talked about with musicians, during this height of big feuds, especially in the '90s with VMAs, these artists didn't control their careers in a real way. They were built by labels. You look at Backstreet Boys, literally built. Insink, literally built. Christina, literally manufactured out of a Disney World. When these stories about them feuding and what they think, those were all also built by a media-industrial complex.

Monica spoke to that. Monica said, They created this feud between me and Brandi. We didn't create it. It wasn't just creating the feud, it was creating these archetypes that these women were forced to fit in. Brittany is the good girl. Christina is the dirty girl. Brandy's Squeaky Clean. Monica is street. That is created.

What's bad about this creation is that these people are women that who don't have a lot of control over their lives and are having to bow to larger powers and play a role that doesn't speak authentically to themselves. As this has been thrown against certain bodies in pop music, you've seen some pushback, and the most famous pushback to all of this was Beyoncé Knowles Carter in the late 2000s with her I Am Sasha Fierce album where she said, Diva is the female version of a hustler. Because there you go. Because what you're going to say to Sam, while this term is really glamorous and wonderful, it was really confining for them. They felt so boxed in. Just thinking about their lives, like Mariah Carey needing something for her voice to be ready. Is that really diva behavior if she needs it to be cold?

No, that's just a professional.

That's just someone that's working because men always make demands. What's so dangerous about how we think of divas in popular culture is when we assign a woman a diva, it's not so much about like Barbra Streisand being a diva or Cher being diva. It's more about how when we hear people talk about Cher being high maintenance and needing all these things, the message to everyone else who aren't famous as a woman, I shouldn't be asking what I want. Or as a woman, I shouldn't be demanding things that if it's changing, Zack, is that the pop media landscape that used to gin up these feuds, that media is slowly dying. The entertainment media, the music media, it's a lot smaller and less powerful than it used to be. So much of the way that pop stars are perceived is not through a media lens anymore. It's through their personal social feats.Yeah. about this show.Yes, do it. A huge thank you to our producer, Shanta Holder, engineer Rich Garcia, and Brenda Burns, and Marcus Hom for our theme music and sound design. Special thanks to our executive producers, Nora Richie at Stitcher, and Brandon Sharp from Agenda. And shout out to Ayesha Ayub, who creates our social content and our intern Ella Barnes. And as always, we want to hear from you. So don't forget, you can email us at vibecheck@stitcher. Com. Keep in touch with us on Instagram on our page at vivecheck_pod and our Patreon, where for $5 a month, you get direct access to our group chat. That's patreon. Com/vibecheck. Stay tuned for another episode next week with Elope. Until then, have a great week, you all. Bye. Stitcher.

if it's changing, Zack, is that the pop media landscape that used to gin up these feuds, that media is slowly dying. The entertainment media, the music media, it's a lot smaller and less powerful than it used to be. So much of the way that pop stars are perceived is not through a media lens anymore. It's through their personal social feats.

Yeah. about this show.Yes, do it. A huge thank you to our producer, Shanta Holder, engineer Rich Garcia, and Brenda Burns, and Marcus Hom for our theme music and sound design. Special thanks to our executive producers, Nora Richie at Stitcher, and Brandon Sharp from Agenda. And shout out to Ayesha Ayub, who creates our social content and our intern Ella Barnes. And as always, we want to hear from you. So don't forget, you can email us at vibecheck@stitcher. Com. Keep in touch with us on Instagram on our page at vivecheck_pod and our Patreon, where for $5 a month, you get direct access to our group chat. That's patreon. Com/vibecheck. Stay tuned for another episode next week with Elope. Until then, have a great week, you all. Bye. Stitcher.

about this show.

Yes, do it. A huge thank you to our producer, Shanta Holder, engineer Rich Garcia, and Brenda Burns, and Marcus Hom for our theme music and sound design. Special thanks to our executive producers, Nora Richie at Stitcher, and Brandon Sharp from Agenda. And shout out to Ayesha Ayub, who creates our social content and our intern Ella Barnes. And as always, we want to hear from you. So don't forget, you can email us at vibecheck@stitcher. Com. Keep in touch with us on Instagram on our page at vivecheck_pod and our Patreon, where for $5 a month, you get direct access to our group chat. That's patreon. Com/vibecheck. Stay tuned for another episode next week with Elope. Until then, have a great week, you all. Bye. Stitcher.