Women, Especially Women of Colour, Have Been Left Out of the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame

From Montecristo by Andrea Warner, originally published in 2018

While this year’s crop of Rock And Roll Hall of Fame nominees for induction is the most diverse it’s ever seen, and women are finally, nearly equally represented in the list of 16 hopefuls, the change is long overdue—and the voters have yet to actually cast their ballots (deadline is April 30). As of January 2020, women still made up less than eight per cent of the Hall’s inductees, and as of today Buffy Sainte-Marie, who just celebrated her 80th birthday, has yet to be nominated (though Whitney Houston finally cracked the glass ceiling last year). In this essay from our Autumn 2018 issue, music journalist Andrea Warner reflects on the women whose stories deserve to be honoured and told.

I remember the first time I ever heard Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s music. Though I can’t recall the exact online article I was reading, I’m pretty sure it was talking about the untold stories of female music pioneers of the 20th century. When I pressed play on the accompanying video, which was taken sometime in the 1940s or ’50s, I saw her: a gorgeous, vibrant African-American woman taking to a stage in what looked like a train station. She opened her mouth and her voice belted out into my headphones. I was swallowed whole.

When Tharpe got to her guitar solo, I felt like my head and my heart were going to explode. She was incredible—fearless and frenzied, but fully in control and such a dynamic entertainer. It was love, and it was unforgettable.

Tharpe was one of the blues and gospel greats, and she’s credited as the godmother of rock and roll. After all, this was a woman who absolutely shredded her guitar throughout the ’30s and ’40s. And yet, until April 2018, she was notably absent from the very music industry landmark that might never have existed without her: the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

In 1986, the Hall of Fame voted in its first class of musical acts and artists. There were 16 inductees in total—all male—many of whom were influenced and inspired by Tharpe and whose fame eclipsed hers. Thirty-two years later, women only account for about 15 per cent of the more than 300 musicians who have been celebrated in the iconic Cleveland museum.

Based on those numbers, the story of rock and roll would seem to belong to men. But that’s simply not the case.

I’ve always been interested in women’s narratives, and in helping give female artists the credit they deserve. That was one of my motivations in wanting to write Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography (Greystone Books, September 2018). Sainte-Marie is an Indigenous musician and activist, and while she is known for her jaw-dropping 1964 debut It’s My Way!, her larger contributions to rock and roll have been widely underappreciated. During one of our many interviews, she told me she is actually surprised when she receives any recognition. Her comment made us laugh in a way that said we knew there was a bigger picture beyond the frame.

Sainte-Marie was born in Piapot, Saskatchewan and has since made her home in both Canada and the United States (these days, she has a farm in Hawaii that she adores). She’s a folk music icon and was hugely influential in the ’60s protest movement, but she is also wildly contemporary and relevant. At 77 years of age, she is still putting out ground-breaking new songs today, and continues to tour and perform frequently—including at the recent inaugural Skookum Festival in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.

She’s considered a pioneer of electronic music; she co-produces her records; she won an Academy Award for best original song (“Up Where We Belong” from 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman) and has also composed for film; she has had her music blacklisted by two American administrations; and she was the first person to use a powwow sample in a song (“Starwalker,” off the album Sweet America, in 1976).

She has also written countless classic songs that have been covered by everybody from Elvis Presley to Bobby Darin to Donovan. All three of these men have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, and all three scored huge hits with Sainte-Marie’s songs—something she never experienced for herself.

Presley and Darin took her 1965 feminist pop standard, “Until It’s Time for You to Go,” and gender-flipped it into an epic ballad. In 1965, Donovan covered her powerful 1964 peace anthem, “Universal Soldier,” and made it a smash. To this day, there are people who still believe Donovan wrote the track himself. He also covered Sainte-Marie’s 1964 song, “Cod’ine,” which Janis Joplin adapted as well and turned into a hit. (Joplin, it should be noted, is one of the few females who has been included in the Hall of Fame.)

I consider Sainte-Marie to be among Canada’s four most iconic artists—the other three being Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen—but of that peer group, she is the only one not part of the Hall of Fame. She has never even been nominated.

Someone equally deserving who did get inducted in 2018 is the late Nina Simone. An exasperated “Finally!” could be heard around the internet when the news was announced, along with a flurry of fingers typing about how long overdue her inclusion was and unpacking some of the barriers that kept the incomparable vocalist, songwriter, and activist—who died in 2003 at the age of 70—from receiving the honour sooner.

Simone was known as the high priestess of soul, and whether I’m listening to her recordings or watching archival footage of her performing—well, both are transfixing, mesmerizing experiences. Simone’s powerful contralto burns with intensity, an inferno of feeling bursting free from her body. She was a master of passionate, provocative, reckless authority, refusing to brace for impact whether she was commanding her piano or the mic stand. Her music bridged and boldly redefined genres, eradicating barriers between soul, classical, jazz, R&B, gospel, folk, blues, and pop, and her legacy continues to impact countless present-day artists.

More than three decades went by without the Hall of Fame properly honouring Tharpe’s or Simone’s legacies. Sainte-Marie is still waiting, as are thousands of other influential women, and especially women of colour: Ella Fitzgerald, Whitney Houston, and Queen Latifah, to name a few. What makes these omissions all the more glaring is the fact that 22 artists hold the distinction of having been inducted twice—and all of them are men. Eric Clapton has actually been initiated three times.

When women, particularly racialized women, are relegated to the margins and the footnotes, their contributions are minimized and invalidated. Awarding organizations like the Hall of Fame are perpetuating the closed-minded belief that influential musicians are men, and that women musicians are extraordinary exceptions to their usual roles: muses and groupies, backup singers and bass players, cultivators and supporters and enablers of artistic genius but never the sources of it. I don’t want to care about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but I can’t help it. Whether I like it or not, it is recognized around the world as an important marker of musical greatness. The problem is that it is missing so many greats.

All my life, people have waxed on about the likes of Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Elvis—and they are undeniably great, but their mythologies take up all the space. I’ve always wondered about the stories I wasn’t being told. Stories about women who, like Simone, Tharpe, and Sainte-Marie, didn’t just shatter glass ceilings, but were forced to build new worlds in order to thrive. Women who were doing the work for just a fraction of the recognition and success, and whose contributions matter, perhaps today more than ever.

This essay from our archives was originally published in our Autumn 2018 issue. Read more personal essays.

For decades, Buffy Sainte-Marie has had to navigate systemic barriers to cultivate her art

Special to The Globe and Mail | Published February 19, 2021

Andrea Warner is the author of Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography, now out in paperback.

Buffy Sainte-Marie celebrates her 80th birthday on Feb. 20, a towering and rich legacy of breakthroughs and transcendent moments behind her and countless possibilities ahead in the seeds she’s planted so far.

She is iconic, and yet her genius is wildly under-acknowledged. In part, this makes sense. Genius, and the myth of the tortured male genius, is like every colonial invention: toxic, deadly and boring. Sainte-Marie’s genius cannot be fully appreciated by such a system. But what if genius divested itself of white supremacy and the patriarchy? What if, culturally, genius was decolonized and radically reimagined as a celebration of brilliance without brutality, cultivating creativity and knowledge, and generating hope through accountability to community and the land? These are the tools of real genius, and they’ve been integral components of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s artistry since she began her career almost six decades ago.

I interviewed Sainte-Marie for the first time in 2015 and my usual deep dive research techniques weren’t turning up the goods. Even accounting for legacy music journalism and entertainment media’s historically racist, misogynist coverage, it was almost like Sainte-Marie had been erased. I was shocked, and then I was angry. Sixty years in the music industry and Sainte-Marie was largely absent from the big lists of greatest songs or best songwriters; there were no features in Rolling Stone or critical evaluations of the wild tangle of her influences; there was very little scholarship about her contributions to the recording industry or her innovation as a recording artist. There was one book about Buffy Sainte-Marie before my authorized biography in 2018. There were at least 70 about Bob Dylan.

This is a stark visual of how systemic barriers are upheld in countless ways. The rock canon is built to uphold these barriers, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is a perfect example. This year marked a historic number of women nominees (not inductees), but that doesn’t make up for its legacy. I did the math in 2018, and of its more than 300 inductees over 32 years, approximately just 15 per cent were women. That’s already an embarrassingly low number, but it also clearly illustrates how women are represented and valued in the music industry. Among those 300-plus inductees, 22 men were actually inducted twice in different capacities, and Eric Clapton has been inducted three times. Sainte-Marie has never even been nominated.

Her omission from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is galling, particularly when I think about Donovan’s induction. The one-time Dylan worshipper and Mellow Yellow singer-songwriter, Donovan broke through in 1965. Among his hits that year was a cover of Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier, a song she’d released the year before on her debut album. The song charted for Donovan, but not for Sainte-Marie, and I believe that sexism and racism were factors in why the song found a bigger audience coming from a young, white man than a young, Cree woman. Was it the authority afforded to his voice that allowed Donovan’s cover to supersede Sainte-Marie’s? Or was it also the fact that he tripled down on the song’s title, ensuring his was the only name associated with it thanks to his 1965 EP, Universal Soldier, and his 1967 compilation album, also called Universal Soldier? His whole career was launched, in part, on the back of Sainte-Marie’s brilliance, so where is her acknowledgement in the public record of rock ’n’ roll? Why is she a footnote in this man’s legacy and not the other way around?

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Buffy Sainte-Marie At 80

Chatelaine April 2021

By Andrea Warner

Buffy Sainte-Marie doesn’t think in milestones. She turned 80 in February, but the Cree artist feels pretty much the same as she always has.

“I wasn’t that different when I was 17 or 52,” Sainte-Marie says with a laugh, over the phone from her home in Hawaii. “It’s all the same.”

She is joking a little, but her statement is close to the truth. The iconic singer-​songwriter has had 30 lifetimes’ worth of accomplishments since the release of her debut album, 1964’s It’s My Way!, and she doesn’t intend to slow down any time soon. “I think a lot of people have the idea that the playground closes at a certain time in their life,” Sainte-Marie says. “And as an artist, as a thinker, as a learner—nah, the playground does not close for me. It’s open weekends and 24-7 and I’m really a glutton for experience and information.”

This is the open secret, at least in part, to her own feeling of eternal youth: Buffy Sainte-Marie is always a work-in-progress. In addition to writing and playing music, she has made a name for herself as an activist, an educator, a mixed media digital artist, a children’s book author and even a Sesame Street supporting player (she played herself on the TV classic for five years). She is insatiably curious and eager to innovate. Done is dead, and she’s too busy learning, creating and doing to spend time in a finite state. “It’s really a terrible disservice put upon youth to try and talk them into ending [their playful curiosity],” Sainte-Marie sighs. “They should stay like that forever! I’m having just as much fun at 80. I still ride horses and jump over fences; I’m still gonna run up and down stairs; I still dance and I still make music. I do exactly the same things, and many of them much better now than I did 10 years, 20 years, 40 years earlier. You can keep getting better in every way, including physically, and you can get smarter forever.”

Sainte-Marie is well aware that some people see her as frozen in time in the 1960s, rubbing shoulders and even occasionally sharing stages and songs with casual friends and fellow famous musicians, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. But that misses the bigger picture.

She has always been a radical musician. Aside from making what is widely considered to be one of the first electronic albums, 1969’s Illuminations, she was also one of the first people to use an electronic powwow sample in a song, in 1976’s “Starwalker.” Her 1992 album, Coincidence and Likely Stories, was the first to be delivered over the internet (Sainte-Marie recorded it in Hawaii, then sent it to her producer in London). In addition to winning six Junos and being inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, Sainte-Marie is the first-ever Indigenous artist to take home an Academy Award (she co-wrote “Up Where We Belong” from 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman). In 2015, she won the prestigious Polaris Prize for Power in the Blood—an electrifying album complete with club bangers and contemporary electronic powwow anthems.

Yet for all of her innovation, there’s also a timelessness to Sainte-Marie’s music. She writes about everything from love and heartbreak and Indigenous joy to peace and political corruption and environmental exploitation. Many of her songs are nuanced illustrations of how these themes not only intersect but also inform one another in ways both big and small. In 2020, It’s My Way! won the Slaight Family Polaris Heritage Prize designation, which is awarded to albums that have remained culturally relevant decades after their release.

It is believed that Buffy Sainte-Marie was born in 1941 on the Piapot First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan, and taken from her biological parents when she was two or three. She was adopted by a visibly white couple in Massachusetts, though her adoptive mother, Winifred, self-identified as part Mi’kmaq. Sainte-Marie’s experience of being adopted out of her culture and placed in a non-Indigenous family by child welfare services is an all-too-familiar story in Canada. This practice was later dubbed the Sixties Scoop, referring to the decade in which it was most prevalent (though it had gone on well before the 1960s, and would go on for decades to come).

Sainte-Marie’s childhood wasn’t easy—she secretly suffered abuse inside and outside the home—but she says she was also able to cultivate a lot of happiness for herself. She was always close to Winifred, and credits her for nurturing and encouraging a lifelong love of learning. She also took comfort in solitude and, even as a little kid, always felt a strong connection to her inner creativity. Sainte-Marie surrounded herself with nature and animals and her own sense of wonder. She began playing piano when she was three, but school band and choir weren’t of any interest to her. The structured learning of traditional music classes were antithetical to Sainte-Marie’s natural gifts. She taught herself guitar but it wasn’t until she got to college that she began playing her songs publicly.

As Sainte-Marie developed as a songwriter and performed in Canada and the U.S., she also continued to research and reconnect with her Indigenous roots, meeting other young Indigenous scholars and activists on both sides of the border. She’d been told she was adopted from an Indigenous family in Saskatoon but didn’t know much else. After spending time at Toronto’s Friendship Centre (now the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto), two of her new friends suggested that Sainte-Marie was possibly the daughter of Emile Piapot, of the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley. (The connection was made after discovering that Piapot’s own story aligned with what Sainte-Marie had pieced together about her origins.) Sainte-Marie met Piapot at a powwow in Ontario, and a short while later visited the Piapot reserve for the first time. In the early 1960s, she was officially adopted back into the Piapot family and given the Cree name Medicine Bird Singing.

In 1964, Sainte-Marie stepped into the biggest spotlight of her young life with the release of It’s My Way! She had already established herself as an important voice in the coffeehouse scene, writing the anti-war protest anthem “Universal Soldier” in 1962 and performing it several years before America even admitted they had soldiers on the ground in Vietnam. She opened her first album with “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” singing, “Oh it’s all in the past you can say / But it’s still going on here today / The governments now want the Lakota land / That of the Inuit and the Cheyenne.” The song thrummed throughout the ’60s and ’70s as Indigenous activists across Turtle Island (the name used for North America by some Indigenous people) organized grassroots efforts to demand Indigenous rights and land rights—and it continues to echo today wherever land defenders are on the ground, including Idle No More, Standing Rock and the Keystone pipeline protest.

Sainte-Marie suspects it was, in part, her Indigenous rights and environmental activism that led to her music being temporarily suppressed by many U.S. radio stations: “The administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon didn’t want me opening my mouth about the environment,” she said in a 2019 interview with the McGill Daily. “They especially did not want Indigenous people interfering with their complete control of available land and natural resources.”

The suppression didn’t work, at least in the long run. Sainte-Marie has never stopped writing songs that demonstrate how colonization, Indigenous rights and environmental destruction are implicitly linked. Two standout examples are 1992’s “The Priests of the Golden Bull” and 2009’s “No No Keshagesh.” In just one verse of the former, she directly ties together colonization, greed and hypocrisy, the genocide of Indigenous people and environmental destruction: “It’s delicate confronting these priests of the golden bull / They preach from the pulpit of the bottom line / Their minds rustle with million dollar bills / You say Silver burns a hole in your pocket and Gold burns a hole in your soul / Well, Uranium burns a hole in forever / It just gets out of control.” In “No No Keshagesh,” Sainte-Marie uses humour to deliver a series of stinging truths about greed, capitalism and the environment, singing lines like “Got Mother Nature on a luncheon plate / They carve her up and call it real estate.”

Sainte-Marie in Vancouver in 2018, part of a photo series taken by Sacred MMIWG for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. (Photo: Nadya Kwandibens, Red Works Photography)

Residential schools­—and the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission—are also never far from Sainte-Marie’s mind. In 1966, she released “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” a six-minute-long living history lesson that covers—among other topics, including colonization and genocide—the devastation of residential schools. (For context, this was 30 years before Canada’s last residential school closed in 1996.) When we spoke for this piece, she had just started reading Tamara Starblanket’s 2018 book, Suffer the Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State. “She’s brilliant,” Sainte-Marie says of Starblanket, a Cree writer and educator who hails from Ahtahkakoop First Nation in Treaty Six. “There’s all kinds of opinions out there on the internet, and some people will say ‘Truth and reconciliation is dead.’ But truth and reconciliation is just step one and two, and it’s up to us to take steps three, four, five, six and forever.”

Sainte-Marie usually abides by one guiding principle: Stay calm and decolonize. But sometimes it’s easier said than done. “Right now I feel quite frustrated!” she says. “Since we just mentioned Tamara Starblanket’s book, you know, she’s the last surviving member of three generations of residential school torturees. They killed them all. Her parents, her grandparents, her brothers and sisters, they were all survivors of terrible things.”

These hundreds of years of colonization and violence stem from one source, and Sainte-Marie has spent years trying to bring more awareness to it: the Doctrine of Discovery. The doctrine was established in the 15th century and essentially granted Christian explorers the religious—and, therefore, ethical—justification to colonize and enslave non-Christian people and lands around the world. Sainte-Marie sees a clear relationship between the doctrine and the genocide inflicted by residential schools, and she would like to see it referenced prominently at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. (Indigenous nations and non-Catholic churches have asked the Vatican to rescind the doctrine, while the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called for Canada to repudiate it.) Sainte-Marie also wants the electric chair from St. Anne’s Indian Residential School, which was open in Fort Albany First Nation, near James Bay, from 1902 to 1976, on display as soon as visitors enter the museum. The chair was “homemade” and used to shock children, according to former students.

“The information itself is hard to stomach when I’m reading it myself, but it’s even harder to stomach to know that the impact of this difficult historical information is still in play today,” Sainte-Marie says. “Sometimes I’m such a jolly little Sesame Street entertainer. And then the other side of me is dealing with [this]. My own family and my own friends who have, all of their lives, experienced the poverty, the racism, just the pain of being Indigenous in a Canadian city, it’s just—it’s very hard and it’s frustrating.”

Without structural changes at society’s foundations, the colonial system is built to fail. Again and again and again.

“It seems like when you have a long life, things just keep looping around,” Sainte-Marie says. “We’re living in Machiavellian days, although most of the population never read The Prince.” She laughs. “That’s a blueprint for this current assholery. Historians will show you: Stalin and Hitler and, you know, just name ’em all. So, I guess, when you talk about songs lasting, if you’re the kind of person who notices classic human themes, then I guess that’s the kind of songwriter you are, too. It’s like examining trash. We’re doing colonoscopies on the human race!”

Singing truth to corrupt systems is one of Sainte-Marie’s superpowers, but she also wants to move the conversation forward and put her songs to work; particularly some of those “medicine songs,” like “Carry It On,” a soaring anthem about climate justice and taking care of our hearts. She invites the listener to step into hope, empowering us to collective action. But she’s not looking to get more famous, or even get more credit (though she absolutely belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame). She just wants her songs to do their jobs, whether it’s to inform, inspire, witness, fact-check, testify, advocate, resist, nurture, celebrate, rejoice and/or heal.

The pandemic interrupted Sainte-Marie’s renew-and-regenerate vibe, but only temporarily. “When somebody kicks the anthill over, everything goes in different directions, and everybody is in survival mode and feeling disoriented,” says Sainte-​Marie, who has been based in Hawaii since the late ’60s. She is intensely private about her home life. She has community, including her son, Cody, and her friends, but just like when she was a child, she’s still content to be on her own for long periods—and to spend a lot of time in nature and with her animals (she currently has two Siamese cats, named Anderson Cooper and Penuche).

For the first two months of lockdown, Sainte-Marie sat on the couch. A lot. Then her body began to ache, and she knew she had to make a change.

“I said, ‘Okay, I gotta be my own best friend here,’ ” she recalls. She started working out, including seniors’ exercise classes via Zoom. She began electric guitar lessons online because she’d always wanted to improve that skill set, but her hands were out of practice, so she picked up CBD lotion at the pharmacy, which has helped. “So now I’m playing better anyway, and I feel really good. I’ve got no aches and pains. I just try to be a good mom to myself sometimes, you know?” she says. “I don’t think women do that often enough.”

She also released her debut children’s book, Hey Little Rockabye, in 2020. It’s an illustrated lullaby for pet adoption; Sainte-​Marie has devoted a lot of her downtime to working with the Humane Society of Canada. She’s also redistributing resources to other folks and has asked some of her friends to help her disburse funds in their communities, either directly to people in need or to help support grassroots efforts (like Idle No More) on the ground. “There are just so many falling through the cracks right now,” Sainte-Marie says.

She’s been sharing her resources in other ways as well, performing online throughout the pandemic, and has had to quickly adapt to 21st-century DIY home video production, sound design and self-direction. Sainte-Marie even continues to make music over the internet, remotely recording a song with Serena Ryder for Ryder’s new album, and collaborating on a track with Mohawk DJ and music producer DJ Shub, whose real name is Dan General. Both are thrilled to be working with one of their musical heroes.

“If you are an Indigenous artist, Buffy is the one person that has broken down so many doors and barriers for us,” General says. “Growing up, I didn’t know what activism was; through her music, she taught me who I was and what I had to fight for.”

Ryder calls her collaboration with Sainte-​Marie one of the greatest honours of her career. “I’ve been just so taken aback at how down-to-earth, kind and humble she is,” she says. The pair first crossed paths at the Montreal International Jazz Festival in 2008. “She met me with such warmth and grace—like we were old friends,” Ryder recalls. “She seems plugged into some source—something that is steering her ship. There’s a wisdom and divinity in her voice and words that have inspired me to tap into my own connection to spirit.”

General is similarly awestruck by Sainte-Marie’s range and vision. “It’s very rare to see artists evolve,” he says. “[They] get too comfortable doing the same thing over and over. Buffy is not one of those artists.”

Indeed, innovation and new information are two of Sainte-Marie’s biggest thrills. She knows exactly who she is and what her values are, but she’s always embracing new iterations of herself. Nor does she show any signs of slowing down just because it’s what’s expected of an 80-year-old woman. Until our conversation, she hadn’t given her milestone birthday a single thought.

“I always figured I would die young, so I better hurry up and do whatever it was I was planning to do. And then, whoa, holy smokes, 10 years went by, and then another 10 years, and they just keep on coming!” Sainte-Marie says with a laugh. “Like most things, it’s not what you imagine. I feel pretty much exactly the same way that I did years ago. I mean, there are still bullies in the world, there are still exciting, wonderful people and things in the world, and I’m still here.”

Céline Dion and the undeniable power of love

This article was published by Macleans on June 5, 2019

by Andrea Warner

Andrea Warner is the author of the bestselling book Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography and We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music. She identifies as a settler born and raised in Vancouver on what she acknowledges to be the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

In the last episode of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s television show, the brilliant and broken Fleabag, a character makes an incredible speech about love and how awful it is, but notes that it’s all any of us want. “Love isn’t something weak people do,” the character concludes. “Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope.”

Hallelujah. After decades of caustic hilarity, ironic detachment and the mere presence of feelings as a gendered insult, pop culture is finally embracing emotional complexity instead of weaponizing it. This might be why the world is only now ready to fully recognize the brilliance of Céline Dion, and reckon with the fact that she’s been trying to make us all better people through her songs for almost 30 years.

Dion is about to perform the final show of Celine, her second Las Vegas residency on June 8, and then kick off a world tour. This is her time. No person in the world has lived the love-is-hope life with as much fiercely earnest vocal fireworks and chest-thumping commitment than Dion. This has been her truth since the beginning, but neither her earnest embrace of love nor her music have been given their due respect until now. In fact, more often than not in the first years of her English-language career, Dion’s consumptive sincerity made her a target for derision.

Dion released Unison, her English-language debut in 1990, and right away fans flocked to the new pop princess whose voice seemed snatched from heaven. Her first single, “Where Does My Heart Beat Now” was a full-body performance: toes flexed, sweat behind the ears, her voice like a tidal wave that refuses to break, holding the tension and loneliness and hope inside every rhetorical question.

Dion’s fans could not get enough, and they made her a chart-topping machine, from singles to albums to sold-out tours. Critics, on the other hand, did not fall under her spell. They tore her down and frowned at the absence of edge or personality in her songs. In 1992 Entertainment Weekly wrote “clearly she has more voice than heart,” and in 1993, the Chicago Tribune described her hits as “sickly sweet and by-the-books standards” and called Dion’s attempt at soul “fairly shallow, sort of a female Michael Bolton.” In 1997, the Los Angeles Times declared “Dion’s voice is a technical marvel, but her delivery lacks the personality and intuitive sense of drama that are a diva’s stock in trade.” These assessments read like bad satire now, since the only true thing we know in 2019 is that Céline Dion is the very definition of personality.

This constant policing of Dion’s emotive capacity reveals more about the critics themselves than Dion’s performance. Listening now, it seems like the “technical marvel” of her voice created a disconnect between her and her critics who mistook a “perfect” voice for an empty vessel. Every slam—”sickly sweet,” “shallow,” a “lack” of “personality”—is a kind of coded rejection of Dion’s primary preoccupation: love songs.

Many critics hated her style of music already, and some were definitely more interested in gatekeeping than challenging their own bias about what qualified as good or bad. Music was supposed to be cool. Dion was not cool, and pop culture in the 1990s and oughts was obsessed with edge, absurdity and wry wit. It couldn’t contain Dion’s endearingly dorky personality, and it dismissed her desire to sing about love and relationships. It also made no allowance for the French accent that resulted in Dion’s unique enunciation, or the fact that she was singing in English, her second language. Her relationship to the material was less about metaphor and more about the specificity of direct translation, exquisitely communicating the sentiment but phrasing lines with occasional awkwardness.

Listen to Dion’s nuanced command of her bombastic 1996 power ballad, “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” and try to deny her brilliant articulation of pain and passion, the seemingly endless depths from which her voice draws its tender, hushed whispers and thunderous crescendos. No matter how one feels about the 1997 film Titanic, or the Irish penny whistle, Dion is one of the only voices that could elevate a song like “My Heart Will Go On” out of the sentimental stupidity of its lyrics and transform it into a soaring and wistful epic and a global hit.

A less self-assured person might have responded to the criticism by retreating from the spotlight, reinventing herself and her sound. Dion refused to doubt herself in public. She didn’t change her style for the critics or chase a coolness that was defined by anybody else. Dion was as devoid of irony then and she is today. She feels it all, without apology, and she makes it okay for the rest of us to do the same. In the space of Dion’s English-language career, we’ve finally arrived at a place in pop culture where wanting love is not a weakness but a strength, where love is hope. It’s a message Dion has been singing for almost 30 years, and it’s one we need now more than ever.