Best National Tour

Lilith Fair

Women Perry Farrell helped convince the world that alternative rock was a fertile, untapped market with his Lollapalooza festival tour eight years ago, and last summer Canadian songstress Sarah McLachlan did the same for female performers with what was billed as an all-women multistage festival tour -- Gynopalooza, as one friend of mine has taken to calling it. To the extent that it debunked the music industry's sexist notion that women lack the commercial clout of men, Lilith was an unqualified success. And for fans of songbirds like Paula Cole, McLachlan, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, and Jewel, it was a great day out. But it was hard not to take note of the fact that McLachlan's tour was almost exclusively a celebration of a very traditional role for women in rock -- that of the sensitive singer-songwriter backed by an all-male band. I counted 30 men on stage to 13 women at the Great Woods show, where there were no rappers (unless you count Paula Cole's pale imitation of hip-hop), no punks, and few real rockers. Against that backdrop, Juliana Hatfield's gritty cover of X's "The Unheard Music" served as a reminder that whole facets of female musical experience in the '90s were completely ignored at Lilith and on the Lilith Fair CD that Arista released last month. Still, in a decade that has seen women dominate rock and pop as never before, it was about time someone threw a party to celebrate.

-- Matt Ashare