In recent years, music hasn’t served women. Thousands of songs get released yearly, but only few of them make a positive impact on women’s lives. The majority, especially rap music, made it their goal to objectify women. It became the norm for a song to discuss a woman’s body or insult a woman. Clubs played such songs. The rise of TikTok brought forth a new wave in how music spread. But this wave didn’t leave a positive impact on women’s lives. Instead, TikTok music became a genre criticized by many. A song was reduced to 20 seconds and its worth was based on whether it went viral or not. That is until Paris Paloma released a new song.
In March 2023, Paloma started teasing a song that was different from the majority of songs found on TikTok. The rallying cry in the song, titled “Labour”, was a hint at what was to come. A foreshadowing of sorts. Labour gradually spread all over TikTok but for the right reasons. It wasn’t a song made to objectify women, but rather, a song that was made to unite them. It was a feminist battle cry.
The chorus made the rounds on TikTok, and suddenly you found yourself memorizing the lyrics. Women found it easy to learn the words Paloma sang because they were inspired by their own lives.
“All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid / Nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant / Just an appendage, live to attend him / So that he never lifts a finger / 24∕7, baby machine / So he can live out his picket fence dreams / It’s not an act of love if you make her / You make me do too much labour”
These words moved women all over the globe and the rest of the lyrics transcended any barriers language could possibly create. Suddenly, women came forth to share the message included in the reality of all women. A reality filled with misogyny, domestic violence, sexual violence, and other things that no one wishes to understand from a young age.
Paloma’s song didn’t just unite women, it changed the way TikTok songs were perceived. It wasn’t a song made to move bodies, it was made to move minds – which it did. The success Labour found only increased after the full version was released. The song passed all of Paloma’s expectations, and suddenly it had a life of its own. “It’s become something that’s a lot bigger than me,” the Derbyshire-born artist told NME in an interview.
The rallying cry in Labour isn’t the only interesting part, but the lyrics themselves hold a kind of power that women need. These lyrics were shouted by women from everywhere as they faced the same wall with barbed wires. It’s a wall made of systemic gender inequality, sexual violence, physical violence, objectification, and many more terrors that form shadows in womanhood. It’s a wall that stands between women and freedom, between women and safety. Women’s movements have been making cracks in this wall for centuries, but it’s not broken yet. Paloma’s Labour made its own cracks in this wall as women kept shouting the song.
Labour has been embraced by women no matter where they are from or how old they are, because the nightmares women live have no language or age restrictions. Paloma’s powerful lyrics can be seen from many roads, and every road leads to the same end. A destination where women have a song that understands the ugly side of being a woman. This side is forced upon women, and Paloma is one more woman who knows this well.
One of these roads is the simple one where the lyrics can be looked at and understood at first glance because women’s pain doesn’t need a dictionary. Another road is that of double meanings, and this adds to the beauty of Labour. Women’s abuse has been normalized to the point where it has layers, and Paloma captures these layers. The word “labour” doesn’t just mean the tasks women are forced to do as if their only worth is cleaning and cooking. It also implies how women’s worth is reduced based on whether they are capable of childbirth or not. In Egypt, many women face verbal abuse because they are infertile. The same women might go through divorce because their husbands care only about having a child.
The double meanings continue in “Just an appendage, live to attend him / So that he never lifts a finger.” Many men get with women not because of love, but because they are looking for someone to serve them. They don’t want to lift a finger. The other heartbreaking meaning is that many women have to serve men or else they will be abused. Both meanings are true no matter how ugly they are, and women are tired of experiencing them.
“Women are just doing more and more, and men are not doing any more than they’ve ever done. There’s still expectation for women to have this very traditional archaic role as a caregiver and a servant and a wife and a mother and a homemaker,but women have had enough of existing to serve other people,” Paloma said in an interview with Big Issue.
Labour documented women’s experiences in around four minutes, but these experiences have been around for ages. This is why the song feels like it carries years of ancestral rage. It’s an anthem that can fit in any era. It isn’t weakened by the restrictions of time. It isn’t just a song.
Labour is a lot more. It’s a shout, a rallying cry, an anthem, a song representing female rage, and many more things. All these things brought women together and formed a community where pain is shared because women feel it together. It is a song that can inspire change, and Paloma believes that music can cause change.
“I feel like a small part in a big community that has grown around my music. I’m incredibly humbled by it, and watching how people take and grow a song that you feel is important – how could that not inspire social change?” Paloma said in an interview with Notion.
But Paloma wants the song to be about more than female rage. “I think I want them [people] to feel heard, or held, and whether they’re listening to something like ‘Labour’ and it’s something so angry, I want them to feel like their anger is valid. If it’s something else, I want them to feel comforted, if it makes them cry I want them to feel held while they do that. I hope that my music can serve as a vehicle for a protective sphere in which to feel any emotions that need to be felt,” she said in her NME interview.
Women are angry, but they are more than that, and that anger “doesn’t need to be romanticised.” It doesn’t need to be romanticized because women are more than their anger. They are hopeful, dreamy, courageous, beautiful, understanding, united, honest, loving, caring, amazing, and many more qualities. Qualities that aren’t appreciated by men and the patriarchal society that we live in.
Despite common belief, Labour is also directed at men.
“I am so moved at how empowered so many women feel through my music, and also how reflective a lot of men are when they listen to it, it’s the ideal response,” Paloma said.
“It [making change] starts with holding men and boys accountable for this behaviour, and making it less normalised and making them sort of aware that their actions or lack thereof have consequences. You don’t get to be in a relationship and treat another person like less than a human being and then be blindsided when that person wants to end that relationship.”
“I’ve got several messages from men who’ve realized [from the song] that they should be doing better in relationships,” Paloma says. “That’s amazing. Because I keep getting asked, ‘What can we do to solve this?’ And it’s not up to women: That’s the whole point. It’s up to men to listen and to take action,” Paloma told Billboard.
“Men should be picking up the slack.”
Even if the wall built by our patriarchal society won’t be brought down by Labour, and even if men don’t listen to Paloma’s cry, it’s enough that women have this song. It’s enough if this song makes cracks in that barbed wall instead of bringing it down.
Paloma’s concerts shifted after Labour’s release. They became a place where this community created by the song could thrive. Hundreds of women found a safe space in Paloma’s concerts to shout as loud as they wanted. Then, a new version of Labour was necessary to imitate how the chorus sounded like as hundreds of women shouted it.
A year after the release of Labour, Paloma asked her followers to send her recordings of them singing the song, and women from different backgrounds and ages met her request. Paloma then re-recorded the song, but this time her voice was accompanied by the voices of hundreds of women. The new version was titled “Labour (The Cacophony)” and it was part of Paloma’s Cacophony album.
If Labour was powerful in the first version, it became a lot better in the new version. Labour (The Cacophony) was the last chapter in a beautiful tale. The sounds of hundreds of women from all over the world coming together to recreate this feminist anthem. The different ages portrayed the truth about being a woman: the cycle of abuse and trauma starts from a very young age.
Another truth regarding Labour is that Paloma is the perfect artist to create such a song. With her background in fine art and history, her lyricism is unique and powerful. The singer-songwriter previously shared that Labour draws from Madeline Miller’s Circe. The gothic and powerful feelings in the song are probably inspired by how Florence Welch and Hozier influenced her.
Just like Labour (The Cacophony) made many voices become one, Paloma’s songs bring many genres together.
“I don’t feel very pigeonholed, and when I think about my genre, I think about so many words like ‘indie’, ‘folk’, ‘alternative’, ‘singer-songwriter’… I get ‘witch-pop’ sometimes. I’m looking forward to not being so prescribed to any single one thing,” she told NME.
Along with not prescribing Paloma to one genre, we can’t tie her to just Labour. She has other songs with strong themes and many of them talk about female experiences.
In “last woman on earth,” Paloma sings about how women aren’t safe even when they are dead and buried.
“That song [“last woman on earth”] is an entire metaphor for the way that people talk about women, view them and treat them. It’s so harrowing that that doesn’t even end in their death at all, whether it’s people like Marilyn Monroe or Amy Winehouse; they will continue to be exploited. It’s something that a lot of women and queer people are becoming incredibly vocal about, and the lack of tolerance that there should be for that. On a personal level, it’s the part of the album that deals with the role that patriarchal violence has played in stunting my personal growth. There’s just so much pain in that song that shouldn’t have to be there,” Paloma told DIY Magazine.
While in “boys, bugs and men” Paloma describes the ugly truth of how many men find delight in women’s pain and having power over them, or as Paloma described it “the quiet sadism of misogyny.”
But Paloma’s songs aren’t just about the ugly side of being a woman, there are ones about the beauty of it too such as “knitting song” which discusses female friendships. While “as good a reason” is “a song about the power of women learning from each other” as Paloma described it.
A trend in Paloma’s body of work is that all her songs are intertwined. “I think of my songs informing each other now rather than being specific. It’s now this considered thing which all have relationships to each other and inform each other. My next songs stand on the shoulders of my previous songs,” she said in her interview with Dork.
Just like Labour feels eternal, so does Paloma’s success. The song reached the Top 30 of the UK singles chart, but this is just the beginning for someone with Paloma’s talent, especially since she only started releasing songs towards the end of 2020. Even if Paloma won’t have any other song reach Labour’s success, it might be enough for her that she created a space for women to be heard.
Paris Paloma created the feminist anthem women have been looking for.
