Coachella 2018 Artist Spotlight: The Black Madonna

PALM DESERT, CA – On International Women's Day, music streaming platform Spotify partnered with Smirnoff to confront listeners with their music prejudices. The "Smirnoff Equalizer" showed the percentage of female versus male musicians the listener streams through Spotify – those that favored male artists got a more balanced playlist generated for them.

The underrepresentation of women in music isn't new. In January, Glamour made infographics to show how few women have been nominated in key categories at the Grammys since 1959, and the results are disheartening. Across the field, only 21 percent of the nominees since 1959 have been women, and only 23 percent of winners were women.

However, 41-year-old DJ and producer Marea Stamper has emerged as one of electronic music's advocates for change. Stamper, better known as The Black Madonna, offers an alternative to popular electronic music – one that takes the genre back to its queer, multi-racial roots through classic house and disco tunes of the '70s and early '80s, according to Los Angeles Times.

"Change is an ongoing process," Stamper told the newspaper over the phone last week. "The important thing is to leave the ladder down for the next one behind you and lend a hand."

She's used her growing popularity to bring historically marginalized groups into the limelight, the newspaper reported. Stamper has co-organized the Daphne festival, an annual series of workshops and parties that began in 2015 to focus on women and non-binary artists.

She's also championed women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and people of color in her shows on BBC Radio 1 and in London's XOYO nightclub.

"An illusion a lot of people have is that there's only one seat at the table," Stamper told Los Angeles Times. "There's a bench, and I can share it."

Stamper most famously flexed her feminist ideals just days after audio surfaced of Donald Trump bragging to "Access Hollywood" about grabbing women without their consent. She took to Twitter, writing "How much of the world is held together by the silence of women," a sentiment that would later be retweeted by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

While fans wait for her debut album, they'll be able to catch The Black Madonna at Coachella, a two-weekend music festival from April 13-15 and April 20-22. There, they'll see Stamper positioned behind her array of mixers and controllers, smiling behind her thick-black framed glasses while dancing and singing along to dance music made by groups that are often overlooked.

Main photo via Youtube screengrab