A curious symmetry took over the British album charts this weekend. In at the top was Amy Winehouse, followed by Adele, then Beyoncé, then Adele's other album, and then, at No 5, Amy's other album too.
Of course, Winehouse's chart reappearance was due to a surge of interest after her death. Yet still, that's a rather amazing bunch of records made by three female solo artists; two of them British and all three under the age of 30. As my friend, a music industry executive of some 20 years' standing, said when he saw the figures on Sunday: "Men haven't got a clue how to do pop any more."
Women have been taking over British pop for some time. Lily Allen's already had enough years in the game to have gone into semi-retirement, settling in the Cotswolds and entering cake-baking competitions. Amy Winehouse died horribly young, but her debut album, Frank, was released a full eight years ago. Their descendants, such as Jessie J, Florence, La Roux, Laura Marling, the CocknBullKid – and of course Adele – are already with us. Not to say that these women are any less idiosyncratic than Amy and Lily, and certainly not to bundle them into some imaginary musical genre called "female". It's just undeniable that the music industry has become more receptive to them, with artists such as Jessie J and Florence getting a heftier promotional push now than they would have done a decade ago.
Of course, the industry is trying to sell us British boys too. Plan B had the biggest-selling album by a male solo artist in 2010; Example has become such a huge star that Nando's has given him a special card with free food for life. (It is a truth universally acknowledged that all male London pop stars are obsessed with eating at Nando's. All of them.) Tinie Tempah grew up in south London's Aylesbury estate, considered the most notorious in Britain, and is now Prince Harry's favourite pop star, mingling with the royals at polo matches. Tinchy Stryder wrote a song called Number One that took him to No 1 (though what has made him rich is his Star In the Hood range of T-shirts). Calvin Harris has spent a good few years topping the charts; Paolo Nutini has gone from a cute pop boy to a critically acclaimed artist. But would you really recognise any of these blokes if they stood next to you in Tesco? And will any of them ever get as big as Robbie Williams did, when everybody knew his face and could sing along to his songs on the radio? Where is the household name, the Will Young, or Craig David, or Jarvis Cocker?
Bands are still going strong – indeed, it's perhaps ironic to ask for another Robbie Williams when the current fastest-selling tickets are for Take That. Mumford and Sons have cracked America; Coldplay and U2 remain death-proof. A new band, Brother, now renamed Viva Brother after a copyright issue, have made a safe enough album that might well sell a few copies. Some very promising chaps called Spector have just been signed to Polydor. As for solo personalities who dare to really stand out? Forget about it.
It has to be said, there's a lot of male capitulation about, and not just in the charts. The New York Times has just described Obama's economic compromise as surrender. Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems appear to surrender constantly to Cameron's Tories, but then Cameron makes endless U-turns himself, while Ed Miliband seems still to be working out if he will stand for something or fall for anything. Now all of them admit that they have been surrendering to Rupert Murdoch the whole time, while he in turn faces a surrender all of his own. Boris Johnson has announced that one solution to this whole crisis is to appoint a female chief of police.
Meanwhile Dominique Strauss-Kahn, having been accused of the abuse of women, has lost his job to one, and bookshops are selling out of Caitlin Moran's new guidebook for the 21st-century feminist, How to Be a Woman. She claims that the time for outspoken females is now – and nowhere is this more apparent than in pop music.
Because the thing about these top five albums is that they were all made by women with a bloody-minded determination, and bigger balls than their male counterparts. Beyoncé is the only big pop star I can think of who is heterosexual, married, mainstream – and yet brings most of her songs back to gender bending. She sings about what she would do if she were a boy, about how a diva is a female version of a hustler. About all the single ladies, all the independent women. Watch the video from her recent hit Girls (Run the World) and you'll see a new world order where a female army defeat armed military men solely with African dance, with their powerful thighs, their steel, their menace.
Adele got signed in her teens and promptly began to argue with her record label about the pricing structure of her singles, because she had been reading the business magazine Music Week since studying at the Brit school and knew all about sales margins. In a climate where every artist has to play music festivals, she refused point blank, knowing full well how much this was expected of her. She cancelled a big US tour at a time when experts warned this was the kiss of death to any chance of American success – yet she became huge there regardless. It may seem odd to talk about Amy Winehouse's independence in the wake of a death that has been linked to dependence, but she wrote and performed songs like nobody else, all sex and poetry and pain and fire and dirt. She, too, refused to do as she was told. While this aspect of her personality may have been the undoing of her in the end, it was that same fire that made people want to buy her records. And then there's Lady Gaga, another huge seller in this country, who investigates her own ugliness and brokenness as much as beauty, putting wheelchairs in videos and meat, literally, on her bones.
What all these female stars have in common, aside from their talent and their big personalities, is a deep awareness of the business side of the industry. They know all the rules inside out. It's just that they choose when to break them.
So is this shift towards the female just cyclical, or something more permanent? The fact is that these top women have raised the bar so high that the usual pop fare from both males and females now struggles to cut it. Sophie Ellis-Bextor could have been interesting but she rose up just too soon, when you could still get away with writing nonsensy lyrics and not showing much of your soul. She did seem idiosyncratic and radical, but it was only in comparison to Kylie, who released fabulously catchy hits, written by other people, that told us nothing. Sweet and lovely Leona Lewis has entered the Sunday Times Rich List off the back of her hits, but right now, it's the altogether less respectable X-Factor graduate Cher Lloyd getting the attention.
In fact, a male star would be welcomed, if he had big songs, a big presence, and a big heart that was open enough and genuine enough and contradictory enough for us to roll around in. Chaps, it's over to you.