How Shania Twain Won Over Gen Z

Granted, Twain’s audience is immense: Her 1997 LP, “Come On Over,” remains the best-selling country album of all time and the best-selling studio album by any female artist, ever. Still, you might not expect her to be thrilling young pop audiences at this stage in her career, and at 60 years old. Styles isn’t sharing Wembley with any of the other women who dominated late-1990s radio; teenagers do not seem this excited about, say, Faith Hill or Celine Dion. If you had imagined, 20 years ago, what Twain’s audience would look like today, you might have pictured something more middle-aged — not, say, the 20-something lesbian couple I saw at Wembley, one in a leopard minidress and cowboy hat, one in a leopard ascot and backward baseball cap, going hoarse screaming along to “Any Man of Mine.” Or the scene later described to me by the writer Liana Satenstein: a Manhattan party where the Gen-Z crowd went wild upon hearing a Twain single, not long after a spin of the theme song from “Hannah Montana.”

Part of this is thanks to the younger musicians who have spent years telling fans that Twain is a crucial touchstone. Styles is not alone: Rappers and indie-rockers and pop stars call her an influence, a dream collaborator, even a blush-inducing crush. Post Malone says he primarily listens to Twain before going onstage. Rihanna ranks her alongside Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey in her pantheon of divas. Diplo described meeting her as “face-melting.” The singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers has praised the instincts Twain brought to conceiving her videos, including the indelible image of Twain in a barren desert, in head-to-toe leopard print with matching suitcase, in “That Don’t Impress Me Much” — a song now regularly covered by the pop trio Haim. Sabrina Carpenter, who has also covered Twain, invited her to appear as Mrs. Claus in a 2024 Christmas special. And on July 4, Twain left her final performance with Styles and crossed London to appear with Mumford & Sons at Hyde Park, where Marcus Mumford described her from the stage as “my [expletive] hero”: “You don’t understand. You don’t get it. This is a very big deal for me.”

There’s nostalgia involved: Millennials were children when Twain conquered radio, introducing some of them to pop the same way SpongeBob introduced them to television. There’s also a question of style. Twain and her husband at the time, the hard-rock producer Mutt Lange, made pop-country engineered to cross over to the mainstream — an achievement that has since moved from rare to practically the definition of pop music. (Taylor Swift says it often: Shania Twain paved her way.)

But the most striking reason is cultural: Twain’s young acolytes often see her as a glamorous, self-actualized champion whose songs are blockly feminist statements. That was the image captured in a 2017 Rolling Stone article about how Twain “empowered an unlikely group of female artists.” It has younger musicians calling her a “feminist icon” (Kalie Shorr) and saying childhood memories of dancing to her music are “among the earliest I have of testing out my own variety of ‘girl power’” (Caitlin Rose). The singer-songwriter Kelsea Ballerini — who has said her own drive to write female authority into every song traces back to Twain — told me the singer was “on the Mount Rushmore of showing women you can be bold, s***y, smart, ***y, strong and soft, all at the same time,” and that her music offered “the most empowered gift in the world.”