Sinéad! Missy! Erykah! The Live Concert Footage in Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery Is Pure Gold

It was at an adult girls’ sleepover a few weeks ago that I discovered Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery. Husbands out of town and corn freshly popped, my best friend and former roommate JJ and I were just about to press play on a Madonna classic when she wisely suggested we watch the Lilith Fair rock doc together. She’d witnessed the scene as a teen in Dallas, while I had missed every wave of the tour as a late adopter of Sarah McLachlan’s music. I didn’t even realize that it was all McLachlan’s idea, sparked at a time when most radio stations wouldn’t play female artists back to back, much less put more than one on a lineup for a live show. Oh, the tears we shed! The lessons we learned!

Like me, you may have missed this September debut altogether, since McLachlan and Jewel canceled their premiere-night performance in support of free speech when Jimmy Kimmel was suspended from his late-night post, and then ABC News Studios canceled the film’s red carpet the day before McLachlan, Jewel, Mýa, and director Ally Pankiw were meant to appear before reporters and photographers. That didn’t stop the film from activating Reddit, however, with one user urging readers to “especially watch it if you thought [Lilith Fair] was for hippie, unshaven, lesbian feminists, because it wasn’t the touchy-feely, hippie dippie concert series mass media made it out to be. It was real rock and roll celebrated in a way that was safe and honest and healthy in a time where other festivals turned into nightmares, like Woodstock ’99, and it created a cultural shift in the music industry.” Truly, I came to that understanding myself the moment we pressed play.

The name rocked me first. Lilith, as McLachlan explains, comes from ancient mythology, where she’s described as Adam’s first wife—made from the same dust—who refused to submit to a man before she fled Eden. I’d never heard a whisper of this, growing up in the Texas Bible Belt! And “fair” is a play on words for equality, gathering, and beauty. It makes so much sense!

I also had no idea that Tracy Chapman, Pat Benatar, The Cardigans, and Dido were part of the original tour. (During that era, I fear that I was more influenced by misogynistic headlines about Paula Cole’s unshaved underarms—now, very en vogue—than by a greater message, or even an artist lineup.) Or that when faced with criticism of having a “lily-white” set, McLachlan came back with artists like Des’ree, Erykah Badu (she brought her baby on tour!), Queen Latifah, and Nelly Furtado. You could watch the film for the historic festival footage alone—of Sinéad O’Connor’s voice piercing the veil, Christina Aguilera’s side-stag debut, or Missy Elliott, who counted Lilith Fair as one of her first-ever live performances, dancing in her iconic inflatable suit after pulling up in a sports car when her bus broke down.