‘Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery’ Review: Mocked, Misunderstood, and Ultimately Vindicated

By the late 1990s—long before #MeToo and the cultural shifts sparked by that wave of feminism—there were already countless initiatives, informal networks, and grassroots efforts pushing back against the deeply masculinized nature of rock culture. Nobody was talking in theoretical terms, and the word “patriarchy” was rarely used, but the imbalance was obvious enough. The need to carve out space for women within rock music hardly required explanation. It was in that context, and as an extension of the female singer-songwriter movement that had been growing since the late 1980s, that Lilith Fair emerged. Created by Sarah McLachlan, the touring festival traveled across the United States and Canada and was organized in a way that was virtually unprecedented at the time: its lineup consisted exclusively of women artists.

In the documentary, McLachlan and her collaborators explain what drove them to create the festival in the first place. There was the lack of radio support for their music; an industry environment in which women were treated as exceptions rather than the norm, admitted one at a time (radio programmers routinely refused to play two songs by women back to back); and the desire to create a more welcoming space for a kind of music that didn’t always sit comfortably within the aggressive, male-dominated energy that prevailed in those years. Out of those frustrations came Lilith Fair, which ran between 1997 and 1999 and proved to be both wildly successful and deeply polarizing—hugely meaningful to those involved, and dismissed by some as little more than a punchline.

The documentary doesn’t spell this out explicitly, but Lilith Fair was not simply a festival of “women artists.” Most of the performers shared certain musical affinities: singer-songwriters, often acoustic, with carefully modulated voices, intimate lyrics, and a generally gentle, emotionally open sensibility—though not all fit neatly into that mold. What it did represent was a broader movement that included artists like Sheryl Crow, Suzanne Vega, Paula Cole, Lisa Loeb, Liz Phair, Jewel, Indigo Girls, Shawn Colvin, Joan Osborne, Natalie Merchant, McLachlan herself, and, on occasion, Black artists such as Tracy Chapman, Erykah Badu, and Missy Elliott, among others.

Long before social media and smartphones—lest anyone think hostility is a byproduct of those platforms—Lilith Fair was subjected to relentless media bullying, often steeped in misogyny or mockery aimed at the festival’s aesthetics and ethos. While rock culture has always made room for sarcasm and sharp commentary, the aggression directed at these artists frequently revealed the same strain of masculine toxicity they were, in their own way, pushing against (a toxicity that would become impossible to ignore at the contemporaneous Woodstock ’99). In an era without cancel culture or broader social constraints on public cruelty, McLachlan and the artists involved were met with irony at best and outright malice at worst. Time, however, has vindicated them: today, Lilith Fair is widely recognized as a reference point for many contemporary artists.

The film traces the festival’s origins, its difficult organization, its growth and evolution, its key performers and guest appearances, its controversies, and its eventual end. Successful and influential in its moment, yet largely forgotten by the 2000s, Lilith Fair is—according to the filmmakers—something few people today even remember, or know existed at all. For those who were there, and especially for those who took part, it remains a powerful and formative memory. There may be a tension between what is traditionally understood as “rock culture” and what we now call a “safe space,” but it is also worth acknowledging that music festivals have rarely been comfortable environments for women—whether as performers or as audience members. Lilith Fair managed to be precisely that: a space where those dynamics were, at least temporarily, reimagined.

Interviewed today, the participants—McLachlan, Crow, Vega, Cole, Loeb, Phair, Jewel, Colvin, Merchant, Badu, and elder stateswomen like Emmylou Harris, among others—recall the experience with joy and genuine emotion. While the cultural climate of the past decade might seem ripe for a revival of a festival like this, the reality is that women artists today—Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Beyoncé—are the biggest draws in live music and the highest-grossing performers in the industry, making the idea of “grouping them together” almost unnecessary. Even if Lilith Fair is now remembered by relatively few, its influence in challenging the ways women were marginalized within rock culture is undeniable. Today, no one would think twice about playing two, three, or more songs by women in a row on the radio—assuming, of course, that anyone is still listening to music on the radio at all.