“I want [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.”
The immediate success of what some are already describing as a feminist battle cry speaks for itself. The song has had more than 35 million streams on Spotify and has been used more than 40,000 times on TikTok, where it accompanies most of the videos on feminism, as well as more and more accounts of misogyny, domestic violence, assault and sexist and sexual violence. The song has thus become the voice of all those who identify with its lyrics, giving them or restoring their strength to fight, and binding them together with a common anthem imbued with a haunting “feminine rage”: they are not alone.
The chorus underlines the hell of systemic gender inequality, the hell of being marginalised, silenced, never believed in a society where we still have to fight to be listened to and heard: “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”. The occupations mentioned refer to the long history of this struggle: since Antiquity, women have always faced these affronts, seeing their rights and dignity trampled underfoot, again and again. And the word “labour” refers as much to the burden of tasks to be accomplished as to childbirth and the reduction of women to maternity.
“Labour” speaks for the nightmare that can surround womanhood, highlighting objectification, social oppression, inequality and physical and psychological violence. The latter is particularly evident in one of the verses in the chorus: “Just an appendage, live to attend him / So that he never lifts a finger”. Not only would you have to be at ‘his’ service, that of the man, bearing the mental burden of all the tasks alone so that he doesn’t have to do anything, but the phrase is double-edged. You would also have to do all these tasks properly, in the sole hope that he would be satisfied and not raise his hand against his wife.
All the feminine fury in the thousand voices of the “cacophony” version
“We minimize our anger, calling it frustration, impatience, exasperation, or irritation, words that don’t convey the intrinsic social and public demand that ‘anger’ does. We learn to contain ourselves: our voices, hair, clothes, and, most importantly, speech.”, Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger
A year after the release of “Labour”, Paris Paloma announces the release of a “cacophony” version: after a call for participants, she re-recorded the song with hundreds of women of all ages and backgrounds. The children’s voices underline the vicious circle, transcending generations, of a trauma that begins in childhood. This new anthem reveals all the rage built up over centuries, in a poignant cry of anger from thousands of women, bound together by a new rallying cry. In a society where some people seem to believe that men and women are finally equal, the song is a reminder that certain rights have still not been won, and that feminism is not and cannot be obsolete in the 21st century. It’s a call for change, for a fight, for the advent of a world where our children won’t be able to believe when they read their history books that this fight even had to exist.
The artist
The singer-songwriter’s art history studies shine through in her lyrics and music videos, with allusions to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and other striking visual analogies. The clip for ‘Labour’ depicts a dinner party where a man eats endlessly – symbolising patriarchal society – while Paris Paloma serves him, then grabs a pomegranate and bites into it. The pomegranate, the red colour, and the juice dripping from her mouth, evoking trickles of blood, give the impression of a painting depicting a mythological scene.
Her many other songs are just as bewitching as ‘Labour’, addressing gender inequality, mental and emotional burden and feminism with poignant lyrics in songs like ‘the fruits’ and ‘boys, bugs and men’. Her debut album Cacophony will be released on 30 August.
Paris Paloma, “Labour”, Cacophony, 2023
To go further…
Mylrea, H. (2023). Paris Paloma: ‘When people listen to “Labour”, I want them to feel like their anger is valid’. [online] NME. Available at: https://www.nme.com/features/music-interviews/paris-paloma-artist-labour-song-interview-tiktok-radar-3449655
Sarino, A.L. (2024). The Return of Female Rage: A Year Into Paris Paloma’s ‘Labour’. [online] Erato Magazine. Available at: https://www.eratomagazine.com/post/paris-paloma-labour.
Young, M. (2023). Paris Paloma: ‘I don’t want to reduce the meaning of being a woman to our capacity for pain and anger’. [online] Dork. Available at: https://readdork.com/features/paris-paloma-interview-oct23/.
Translated by Samantha Frary–Aubert