Who Are Music’s Queens?

PLACE DIRECTLY AFTER TITLE: The Debate Nobody Can Actually Win

Give yourself one rule: pick only two female artists to represent an entire musical era. Sounds easy. It absolutely is not.

During the latest What’s In Your Earbuds?, what started as a conversation about musicians we haven’t heard from enough turned into our own musical version of an eras tournament. Suddenly Madonna, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and more were fighting for very limited space.

Nobody was throwing actual chairs.Yet.

Two Artists. That’s It.

Why Limiting The Choices Changes Everything

The fun isn’t naming every great artist from a decade. That’s easy. The problem begins when you’re only allowed two.

For the 1980s, Madonna and Whitney Houston immediately felt almost impossible to remove. Then Tina Turner, Paula Abdul, Cher, Queen Latifah and Cyndi Lauper entered the conversation.

Move forward and it gets worse.

Janet Jackson. Mariah Carey. Alanis Morissette. Britney Spears. Beyoncé. Taylor Swift.

Who stays? Who gets bumped?

This is exactly why music creates such great community conversation. A song isn’t simply a song. It can remind you of high school, your first concert, a road trip or the playlist that somehow carried you through a terrible long run.

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The Audience Took Over

And That’s Exactly The Point

The best part of What’s In Your Earbuds? isn’t necessarily where Joe, Santino and I take the conversation.

It’s where everybody else takes it. During this episode, the live audience kept throwing names into the debate and creating entirely new categories, including the greatest all-female groups from different decades.

By the end, we’d essentially invented musical WrestleMania.

So we’re handing the argument to you.

Pick your favorite musical decade. You get exactly two female artists to represent it.

Who are you taking? Choose carefully.

Somebody is absolutely going to tell you you’re wrong.

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