'Girl Group' vs. 'Boy Band'

There’s no doubt that the alliteration in both these phrases is pleasing. But, as with any phrase, different words bring with them different implications.

A band is a group of people that write, compose and sing their own songs as well as play their own instruments.

A group, on the other hand, is composed of performers that sing (and maybe dance) who receive lyrics and instruments ready-done.

There are plenty of bands with female members and plenty of groups with male members. Yet, colloquially, the male ensembles are ‘boy bands’ even if they just sing/dance and female ensembles are ‘girl groups’ even if they drive the creation of their own songs.

So, as a band does more, people often equate bands with being more talented than groups.

This strikes me as odd. In life, people often specialise in one thing during their career/hobbies, so whilst bands may express more skills, this can’t sensibly be used to detract from the talents of group/solo artists.

(The amount of times I’ve heard people criticised artists as ‘not real singers’ is bizarre, especially because their reason for this is ‘They don’t write their music or play instruments: they just sing.’ So, singers aren’t real singers because all they do is… sing? Just a side note.)

Fact One: people think bands are better than groups.

Fact Two: men are always ‘boy bands’ and women are always in ‘girl groups’.

So this unfortunate association means that male artists are subconsciously thought of as better than female artists.

Removing the label ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ for groups and bands would be one solution but perhaps targeting band/group talent level dichotomy would be more productive so that artists are judged on their talent, not their labels.