Turning Female Rage into Art: An Interview with Paris Paloma

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Labour" by Paris Paloma is a powerful song that speaks to the experience of female rage. The lyrics are a raw expression of the anger and frustration that many women feel in a world that coerces them into performing uncompensated labour in the private sphere, without even being credited. It's an ode to mothers, daughters and wives.

The song is especially relatable to Middle Eastern and South Asian women, who are pressured into performing excessive domestic and emotional labour, even when they are working the same hours as their male peers outside their homes. The value of this shadow labour is expected to be $10.9 trillion according to a

Yet women are socialized into being subservient and doing it without complaining. It’s essentially viewed as an integral part of womanhood, of femininity. Paris challenges this archaic idea in “Labour”, embracing and channeling the rage of generations of women around the world. The song is a stirring anthem for women who have felt burdened by this gendered labour, and a call to action for a world that still has a long way to go.

We sat down with Paris and dove deeper into the song, to understand the meaning and inspiration behind this feminist anthem, along with Paris’s personal experience as a young female artist in the music

Q. How do you feel when you see all the TikTok videos that use your song?

Paris: I feel incredibly grateful that this song has become a lot bigger than me because it's a shared experience of so many women and girls. This stuff starts at such a young age where we are presented as being caregivers in a household. I feel incredibly grateful that it has been taken by so many women who share the same feelings I have been having. I just wrote this song because I was frustrated and angry with how I felt as a woman and I think those feelings can be so isolating. When all of these women are taking in this song and using it to make these amazing trends off of it, it makes us all less alone in our quite rightful anger about the way we are being treated.

Q. That is so right. It’s like a community that we have built as women and it feels much less lonely. I would like to go to the very beginning, when did you think you wanted to pursue this career, and what inspired you? Where did this all start? Paris: I think something about being heard is particularly what appealed to me in songwriting. I have written songs since I was very young. They were terrible back then obviously, because I was really young.

Back then, I was actually doing fine arts and history. I started university and I started going a bit public with my music when it was more of a hobby, this was around the time of the pandemic. It was one of those things where if you have such a passion for something, it feels very fulfilling and that’s what I experienced through my songwriting.

I just wanted to pursue it and give it any energy I had. I’m really glad I did because I almost didn’t. I remember ridiculously being 20-years-old and thinking I hadn't started early enough which is so, so funny to me that I was 20 and thinking that I had taken too long. I’m glad I didn’t because obviously that is still so early

Q. I’m so glad you didn’t seriously consider it too late because then we wouldn’t have had such a beautiful masterpiece today. There is a consensus nowadays that the industry is less exploitative because of the technological advent, especially TikTok. Now you as a young woman, what was your experience like while navigating the industry? Would you say that there have been improvements or do you think that the exploitation has taken other shapes and forms?

Paris: I definitely think there is so much more room for women in the industry. I think in the creative industry, and in other industries, it’s so often viewed as a tick box thing where if a set amount of things are done to include women or other demographics, people put their thumbs up and think, ‘Great, now it’s inclusive and we have solved the problem!” But it’s not solved because obviously there is still so much room for them to be more included. Personally, I have been really lucky because I’ve not had any exploitative experiences. One of the things that prompted me to start going public with my music was the month-long women’s only music mentorship program I had during the pandemic. It was remote and it was run by HyperDrive. They are doing great work and they run a mentorship program for women in music where you get paired with another woman in the industry who mentors you.

I had Chloe Diana who is an amazing singer from Essex and she taught me about the industry. The whole point is that these women are teaching fellow female singers how the industry works and helping us help each other so that we don’t get exploited. Things like distributors and releasing music and gigs and streaming platforms, I didn't know any of this before because the knowledge really isn’t that accessible. So this set me up to have amazing luck with the people I worked with.

When I made Labour, it was my first time in a studio, ever. I had recorded music before but it was always in my own or someone else’s bedroom, even though I worked with very talented producers. It was my first time in a studio and I worked with Justin Glasgow. He also did NotreDame which came out- earlier this year. He is just the safest, kindest and nicest person. He also works with Annabelle Lee who is one of the backing vocalists in Labour and she makes these amazing rare tracks. For that reason, I knew that he was a safe figure and such a great ally for raging feminist music. In that way, I feel really lucky but I know that not everyone has such an inclusive experience of the music industry. In spite of that, I can still recognize that there is still so much that needs to be done to make women feel like they have a seat at the table.

Q. It’s nice to hear elaborate answers from somebody who is actually in the industry so that young girls who want to do this understand what they are getting into. In your song Labour, in a snippet of it, you say: “You make me do too much labour”, from that what would you advise about voluntary and involuntary labour?

What is the recognition between them?

Paris: I think passivity in relationships, especially in heterosexual ones, can be as damaging as active misogyny and oppression. We see people saying all the time, “not all men” but when all the other men sit by and do nothing, it might as well be. The same goes for domestic labour. The whole, “You make me do too much labour”, doesn’t necessarily mean being forced to, although that may be the case in some households. There's a dynamic and a misogynistic assumption in relationships that if the man doesn’t do a hair more than the stuff he absolutely has to or doesn’t do something without being asked; He knows that it will get done because the woman in the relationship will do it and carry out that domestic labour so that- they don’t live in squalor. She doesn’t deserve to live like that, he doesn’t deserve to live like that. In this case, his passivity is just as much of a vehicle to make someone do something as if he was forcing her to and I think that’s a universal experience. There are videos on tiktok where girls say, “I'll see how many days it takes before my boyfriend notices that I have stopped picking up his socks” or something, you know? I see these kinds of games of chicken everywhere in relationships and the passivity of men is powerful in a bad way. This is what, “You make me do too much labour” is referencing.

Q. That’s an amazing and really relatable perspective!

Now, there is also another interesting aspect that I want you to elaborate on: Most of our world is constructed around patriarchal constructs, as a brown woman, I live in a very patriarchal society where I have to take on the role of a therapist, making a man learn and understand things through the empathetic lens of a woman. What do you think is the best way to deal with this?

Paris: What an amazing question! Once again, I don’t pretend to be an expert. I’m just a songwriter and a frustrated woman, but I think this is one of those things where the solution doesn’t lie within the individual. There needs to be some collective accountability taken by the people who would normally sit back and let others educate them, when they should be the ones educating themselves and taking that initiative. In the same way, they cause the imbalance of domestic labour that happens in households, because instead of just kind of thinking for themselves about what needs to be done, they will wait for women to delegate them. In those cases, even though they are doing the chores, the mental load is still on her. So this is a collective thing, and it really is up to those same people to be educating themselves and showing empathy to others.

I mean, you hear all the kinds of hoops men jump through sometimes in order to teach themselves how to be empathetic, like: “What if it were your wife?”, “What if it were your sister?”. It’s like, what about considering women as people and that you should be empathetic towards them?

For many, a lot of frustration lies in the fact that it’s not up to the individual but it’s up to many individuals to change these dynamics.

Q. That’s definitely true! What is one advice you would like to give to young girls who want to one day become an artist like you? We would love to see more artists like you to be honest. That would be such a big win for women!

Paris: I think, if you want to be a songwriter, the one thing that I could say is that just write. It’s going to be really bad at first but write when you’re upset, write when you’re pissed off, write when you’re happy, write when you’re feeling anything that you can feel deeply enough that you can extend it beyond yourself.

Use it to sort of help yourself because that is when it becomes the most genuine; when you are using art as an outlet for your own pain, love, grief, and thoughts. This will also train you to think deeply through your artwork and music.

Just keep doing it and don’t penalize yourself if you don't like what you have written because you eventually will one day. People get frustrated when doing something new, it takes a while to figure out what works. I have written several songs, some of which I wouldn’t release work stylistically similar to now, but again it is there and it was a necessary part of the journey for where I am now. It’s a long and frustrating process to figure out what you want to put across but it’s really really worth it!