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“Your smile is like a breath of spring / Your skin is soft like summer rain,” a wig-blonde 27-year-old Dolly Parton first sang in 1973. She has continued to sing out this country lamentation to masses of adoring fans for over 50 years, concluding with the lyrics, “And I cannot compete with you, Jolene.”

Among the hits to come out of the 1970s, “Jolene” has become an indisputably timeless classic — young women have flocked to the song and deplored the mysterious beauty with “flaming locks of Auburn hair” from car passenger seats and concert stages alike for decades.

“Jolene” is the perfect example of a narrative archetype which has informed the work of countless female artists: the “I Wish I Were Her” song. The tale of women expressing their sentiments of jealousy towards other women has been inherited through generations of storytelling. And, of course, the sexism which propagates this practice of pitting women against each other is also tried and true.

This tradition is embedded in music history not only with the eternal real-world framing of female popstars as rivals, but in the tracks themselves — the aforementioned “Jolene” being a prime example. Nina Simone’s “The Other Woman” is another enduring depiction; Lana del Rey’s cover of which went viral in recent years as women coped with their feelings of chronic inadequacy in the form of artsy edits featuring its lyrics.

In her ballad, Simone lists all of the things that a superior romantic competitor is and does. Simone comforts herself with an assertion that, while this mistress appears perfect, she cannot find permanent success with a man and ultimately “cries herself to sleep.” Thus, the narrator — the wife who is not as superficially qualified, but benefits from the valuable designation as an institutional partner — emerges victorious over the whore.

Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” offers a nearly identical, albeit contemporary, chronicle of the girl who is “not like other girls” and therefore “deserves” to win the affections of a man over a conventionally feminine adversary. The song contrasts the qualities of the supposedly dorky narrator with those of the popular-girl, offering a data-driven testimony as to why the narrator is superior, even if she claims to lack conventional attractiveness in comparison — and, of course, Swift does not actually lack beauty by any stretch of the imagination. This irony of the stunning woman bemoaning not being even more stunning is ever-present. This sort of framing is inherently only possible through a foundation of insecurity, Swift’s expression of which went seven times platinum and sold 4.9 million copies in the US as of 2019.

Feelings of envy and indignation are obviously not a new invention of the digital age, although social media offers a breeding ground teeming with highly infectious opportunities for comparison and insecurity. With these cultural developments, the “I Wish I Were Her” song has catapulted into a resoundingly successful genre for female songwriters, with more and more iterations of this plot popping up in modern day chart-toppers. Through examining these lyrics carefully, the ways in which cultural narratives surrounding the determinants of a woman’s success have changed and stayed the same are stated in clear terms.

Olivia Rodrigo’s “jealousy, jealousy” directly confronts the ways in which social media has heightened the reach and intensity of young insecurity, even for someone who seemingly complies with all of the demands of modern femininity. Rodrigo is rich, famous, youthful, relatable, and has the very same highly-coveted body which is relentlessly celebrated across social media and pop culture. Yet, the singer still laments wanting to “throw my phone across the room / ‘Cause all I see are girls too good to be true / With paper white teeth and perfect bodies.”

A development on the “I Wish I Were Her” song, Rodrigo also alludes to the relatively recent aggregate push for women to love themselves in the face of the unrealistic expectations to which they have been generationally subjected. “I know their beauty’s not my lack,” she sings, “But it feels like that weight is on my back / And I can’t let it go.”

In her sophomore album, “GUTS,” Rodrigo defines more clearly what constitutes this perfect woman she hopes to be on the track “lacy.” Of this idol, she sings “I try, I try, I try / But it takes over my life, I see you everywhere / The sweetest torture one could bear,” describing the habit of satisfying self-flaggelation that is the constant consumption of prettier, and therefore “better,” women on the internet — a persistent phenomenon among young women today.

Laufey corroborates this opaque association between physical attractiveness and success in her August release “Snow White.” “I don’t think I’m pretty, it’s not up for debate / A woman’s best currency is her body, not her brain / They try to tell me, tell me I’m wrong,” she sings, alluding to how society insists beauty isn’t an element of her success, despite the overwhelming real-world evidence of this state of affairs. “The people want beauty; skinny always wins / And I don’t have enough of it / I’ll never have enough of it.”

Rodrigo and Laufey, however, offer “I Wish I Were Her” songs with meaningfully different context than their predecessors. While the demand for physical beauty has not changed throughout the genre, their end goal of success has. Parton, Simone, and Swift all wrote their songs with their sights set on a man, rather than the career success or personal fulfillment alluded to by modern examples. This seems like a win — this shift embodies the celebrated feminist idea that champions women’s deriving worth outside of male validation.

However, these narratives also showcase that women have not yet been able to triumph over physical attractiveness as a requirement for success. While female singers used to aspire to be another woman because of her romantic success, they now mourn their perennially insufficient physical appearance because their beauty remains a condition of their total life achievement.

The comparative lack of “I Wish I Were Him” songs is so obvious that it need not be elucidated in detail, although the closest rendition of this genre in the musical male canon are, notably, written with overwhelming regard to wanting to be a different man so that one might gain access to a desirable woman. These include “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers, “Creep” by Radiohead, and “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield. None of these entries — or any entries into this category of song by male performers with mainstream popularity — mention, or even suggest, a crippling anxiety of not being attractive enough for professional success or personal confidence.

There are hopeful indicators in the music industry which suggest a cultural shift towards a more confident female canon, one predicated upon subversive power and agency from female pop stars. This includes Beyoncé’s version of “Jolene,” in which the lyrics take on an unapologetically violent and threatening tone; the narrator of this song will not be walked over, “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene / I’m warnin’ you, woman, find you your own man / Jolene, I know I’m a queen, Jolene / I’m still a Creole banjee bitch from Louisiana (Don’t try me).”

Recent sensations in the canon of girly-pop starlets, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, have shunned the “I Wish I Were Her” song out of their oeuvre almost completely, with many tracks tipping this very stereotype on its head, in fact. Roan’s “Giver” is more of a “You Wish He Were Me” song, in which the queer singer asserts that she is a better lover than any conventionally masculine man. Carpenter invokes a “She Wishes She Were Me” narrative in both “Taste” — “I heard you’re back together and if that’s true / You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissin’ you” — and even in her infamous single from 2021,“Skin” — “You can try / To get under my, under my, under my skin / Whilе he’s on mine / Yeah, all on my, all on my, all on my skin.”

This shift towards empowered sexuality seems to mark an improvement upon the “I Wish I Were Her” formula with its more robust confidence. However, the correlation between the physical beauty of Roan and Carpenter and their success in the industry cannot be understated. Not a day goes by that an article about how to achieve Carpenter’s bombshell look doesn’t come out, or a post about how Roan’s “body is tea” isn’t making the rounds.

So, have female musicians — and, by extension, American women — surpassed attractiveness as a prerequisite for achievement within the emboldened feminism of the 2000s onwards? Ask a teen girl if they desperately wished they looked like Carpenter — the enthusiastic “Yes” will elucidate a resounding “No,” and the persistence of the “I Wish I Were Her” song would certainly recommend otherwise.

—Staff writer Kate E. Ravenscroft can be reached at kate.ravenscroft@thecrimson.com.