Lenii: 'People don’t understand how much nerve you need to be a girl in the music industry'
Lenii, aka Ellen Murphy.
TikTok did not rank especially highly in the priorities of Cork singer and producer Ellen Murphy – aka Lenii – when she started writing a song late last year articulating her vexations about the state of the world.
But then she posted the opening verse of The Kids Are All Rebels on the buzzy social media app and within a few days it had clocked up over 1.5 million views. Without intending to she had created her first internet-fuelled smash – all from her bedroom on College Road.
“A lot of people started using TikTok during the pandemic. I was reluctant to at first,” says Murphy (24) over Zoom. “Unless you’re actually on it, it’s hard to grasp the appeal. But then I started putting up little verses of songs just for fun. I wrote this song [The Kids Are All Rebels] about the frustrations I was feeling as a young person – and it went viral.”
“A generation of rebels with too many causes/ There's smoke in the air and we're all getting nauseous” she sings on that opening verse. “If melanin colour's worth killing a goddess/We'll take to the streets and you'll see who the boss is."
The lines came to Murphy as she sat at home, watching the US presidential debate. The rancorous exchange, in which Donald Trump repeatedly interrupted Joe Biden and Biden replied, “Will you shut up, man”, filled her with despair.
“I was very frustrated,” she says. “There was no vaccine yet. The whole world felt like it was falling apart. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. I wrote this song about my frustrations as a young person. It was amazing – it’s the first time I’ve had a global audience. I was in my bedroom in Cork and people from across the world were sending me these little videos they had made of the song.”
Murphy has dual American citizenship and has spent much of her career in the United States. But she came home at the start of the pandemic and lived through the lockdown with her parents on College Road. Still, there is no rest for the aspiring pop star and, a few days after speaking to the Irish Examiner, she is flying back to LA.
“When I was 15 and I had no insight into the music scene in Ireland, I had this idea that all the stars were coming from America,” she says.
Ireland has been criticised for the lack of gender balance in its music industry. Under-representation of Irish female artists on radio playlists has, in particular, emerged as a flashpoint for a long-overdue conversation. Murphy’s experiences, though, suggest the grass isn’t alway greener.
When she was 15 she spent a summer in New York studying at Dubspot, a production and DJ school in the Meatpacking District (Dubspot was more recently caught up in a scandal and accused of defrauding students). To her shock, she was the only female on the course.
“I always wanted to be a singer – probably because of Hannah Montana or something,” she says. “In the world I grew up in girls were singers. I didn’t even know about music production. When I got to New York, I was the only girl. Since then I’ve done recording sessions and, of the thousands of sessions, probably two have been with female producers. There’s a real lack of representation that wasn’t even talked about when I was young. It’s only come more to the fore in the last year or two.”
Music has yet to truly have its #MeToo moment, though clearly abusive behaviour is rampant. Murphy touches on gender imbalance and misogyny on Slip, which she describes as her “most aggressive” song.
“You start a milе ahead and then assume you run fastеr,” she sings. “You give me a present, I just open a disaster.”
“Girls go through it all the time – it’s no shock to any of us. But a lot of my wonderful male friends and collaborators wouldn’t be aware that there are so many sessions where you are belittled,” she says.
“It’s so common that someone would make a pass at you. There have been lots of occasions where I’d be asked on a date or asked out to dinner by someone I was working with. And if I declined they wouldn’t want to work with me any more. It happens so often. People don’t really understand how much nerve you need to be a girl in the music industry. You put up with a lot of crap.”
Women are often reluctant to speak out. “Until a year or two ago, a lot of girls wouldn’t want to call out or draw attention to these kind of experiences,” she says. “It is a male-dominated industry and a lot of the top positions are held by men. There is a need to succeed and a need to appease people and to climb the ladder and not step on toes. And when so much power is held by people who are making you feel uncomfortable, there’s a weird dynamic.”
Murphy’s father is a doctor turned academic who used to work at UCC and is now employed by the European University Association. Her mother is a former nurse. Lenii went to St Catherine’s National School on the Model Farm Road and then to nearby Mount Mercy secondary school.
“I didn’t dislike going to school there. But I think a lot of my views are influenced by my time at Mount Mercy,” she says. “I have always rejected authority. I was a very good student. But I also had a quiet power of resistance – to the whole idea of a school structure. Afterwards I went to Hewitt College [a private school on St Patrick’s Hill]. That was a better fit – we called teachers by their first name.”
With The Kids Are All Rebels, Murphy has been anointed a spokesperson for Gen Z. She goes back and forth about this. “I didn’t do it intentionally,” she says. “All of a sudden these people started commenting on a ‘Gen Z anthem’. I’m just on the cusp of Gen Z. So thank God I fit!”
- Lenii’s latest single is Straitjacket. She plays Cyprus Avenue in Cork on October 31
- Biig Piig: Championed by Billie Eilish among others, Cork-born Jess Smyth, aka Biig Piig, has been praised in the UK media for her “silky vocals and soul-tinged melodies over hip-hop beats”
- Lyra: The Rochestown singer has been compared to Florence Welch and Dolores O’Riordan and has played 3Arena supporting Gavin James.
- Cian Ducrot: Signed to the same label as Billie Eilish, the Passage West-raised singer has clocked up more than half a million Spotify plays and has 660,000 TikTok followers
- Meghan Murray: R’n’b singer Murray was born in Belgium to a South African mother and Irish father and moved to Cork in 2014 to study music at UCC. Debut EP, Out Of Mind, was released in 2017.
