A Girl of Constant Sorrow: The Sad Girl, Authenticity and Personas in Popular Music

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the music and careers of Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey to demonstrate how a wave of American female pop stars leveraged the Sad Girl archetype to inform their personas and gain mainstream popularity in the first quarter of the 21st Century. These artists rely upon a culturally constructed sadness that is associated with whiteness and femininity and their inherent privilege to curate their authenticity and market their vulnerability across media. However, artists who adopt the Sad Girl archetype can elicit polarizing appraisals from the public sphere; drawing on works in popular music studies, persona studies, and feminist media studies, I propose a layered approach to persona that divides the public identities of musical performers into a series of coexistent personas to determine that aberrations from audience expectations can confuse the collective consensus and negatively impact artists’ public perception.