Jojo Siwa Still Has a Lot of Growing to Do
The struggle of being a very forward facing queer young adult
Last week, my Twitter (yes, I’m still there and I’ll never leave) feed was full of tweets about Jojo Siwa. Since she came out as queer a couple years ago, she’s become quite a zeitgeist in the queer woman community. Mainly because she’s loud and proud and messy, and if that isn’t lesbian culture, I don’t know what is. She’s most recently become the topic of conversation and discourse thanks to the new song she released last week, “Karma.” Both the song and the video have become conversation starters thanks to Siwa’s particularly aggressive assertion of not only her sexuality, but her position as a “bad girl.”
Everything I know about Jojo Siwa has been against my will. I became vaguely aware of her a few years ago when I started doing content writing for a couple parenting sites. Her branded hair bows, which were a part of her signature style until she turned 18 and came out, caused controversy amongst elementary school girls when they became a financial status symbol. Prior to that, I knew she had been on Dance Moms, which means I felt a little bad for her because she had been abused and exploited on national television. But then, I had to do a 30 slide listicle on her and holy shit. She lived in a chaotic mashup of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and Barbie’s Dream House — her face was plastered all over EVERYTHING, including a car she wasn’t even old enough to drive. Her obsession with Freddie Mercury (she went so far as to replicate his Wembley Stadium outfit during her own tour) definitely made a lot more sense once she came out.
I will admit, I was very glad we didn’t have Nickelodeon, the channel that made her famous, and that I had a son who knew fuck all about her. Jojo Siwa was everything I can’t stand as an adult: loud, mumbly, and chaotic. She seemed to yell a lot, but then she talked really fast and mumbled which made it incredibly hard to understand what she was saying. I had to scroll through her Instagram feed for at least an hour, and I had a massive headache when I was done.
Ahead of the release of “Karma,” Siwa posted TikTok videos of her krumping and dancing to the song. Her movements were jerky and erratic, and while I can understand that krumping is an established (Black) style of dance, it felt off. Immediately queer women began to denounce their association with her, asking if perhaps they could trade her in for someone more palatable and a little less…Jojo Siwa. I will admit that I laughed at the tweets I saw, exchanging them with my best friend and largely agreeing with others’ sentiments. My friend Frankie wrote a great defense of Siwa and why the shunning of her is harmful, and I encourage you to read it, even if I don’t fully agree.
I will say it here: I think Jojo Siwa can do whatever she wants. I understand what the thought process is behind “Karma.” She’s about to turn 21 — she’s trying to shed the skin of her teenage persona and make “art” out of her numerous baby gay missteps, including several high profile breakups. What she’s doing isn’t new, we’ve seen it millions of times. Debbie Gibson and Tiffany both shed their 80s mallrat personas by posing for Playboy. Britney released “I’m A Slave 4 U,” Christina Aguilera became X-tina. Miley released Bangerz, (more about that in a minute.) Even the messy queer woman trope is something I know and love. I mean, I’m a Fletcher fan (“Becky’s So Hot” is the messiest bop.) My problem is that she’s arguably one of the most public facing queer women, and I am not okay with her being the representative for us. She can be crazy and messy and whatever else, but I do not feel comfortable with her somehow becoming a poster child for the community.
In the video for “Karma”, which has over 17 million views on YouTube, Siwa explores more of this “bad girl” energy, a young woman caught somewhere between heaven and hell quite literally. While she doesn’t go full Lil Nas X hell, in one shot she’s angelic in white with crystals and diamonds on her face and then she looks like some sort of grungy angel complete with Batman-esque eye makeup. The song is clearly about infidelity, but the messaging is so heavy-handed. She dances suggestively between two different women, and there are some off putting moves that are somewhere between dancing and dry humping. While there are a lot of open mouthed closeups, she never actually kisses either woman, though one kind of licks her neck? It’s hard to tell what she’s getting at.
Jojo Siwa doesn’t yet know who her target demographic is, and I think that’s a problem. There’s likely some freshmen in high school who would probably list her as a guilty pleasure or write her off as an artist they liked when they were a “little kid,” but they’re moving on to different icons. Gen Alpha kids are still young enough to care, and for so long, they’ve been the biggest consumers of her content. (Last year, she was one of the featured celebrities at the West Hollywood Pride parade, and my son was stoked to tell his third grade classmates that he stood mere feet away from her and waved.) While she claims to want to evolve past that, she’s not really doing it yet. “Karma” still sounds juvenile, and for a community that is so varied by age, does she really expect to be taken seriously by queer adults if we’re the market she’s eyeing?
Honestly, I’m glad little queer kids have an icon like Siwa to look up to. I certainly didn’t have anyone like that as a kid. It’s also okay if that’s who she wants to continue marketing to — it would actually be rad if young queer kids had a musician who understood the market and knew how to cater to that demographic. Of course, based on the “Karma” press tour, she’s trying real hard to prove that she’s left the kids behind. “Just wait until I drop that F bomb,” she threatened. (She says “effed” in the song) I’m sorry, but this threat feels so hollow. Dropping the word “fuck” into a song doesn’t make you an adult, and the way she’s framing it sounds like a little kid threatening to say it to shock Gramma at Christmas dinner.
Siwa claims that she wants “Karma” to be her version of Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz era and whoo buddy, is that the wrong take. Yes, that era produced some of Cyrus’ greatest hits, (“We Can’t Stop” is still a fucking bop) but that is not a time to replicate. Cyrus’ way of eschewing her Disney persona once and for all was to appropriate Black culture and then pretend it never happened. I wrote about it a little bit in my VMA retrospective last year. It doesn’t seem that Siwa is going that far (even though those dancing videos give me pause), and is instead potentially going 70s glam rock? She appeared at the iHeartRadio Awards last week in some sort of Gene Simmons cosplay, and I don’t think she fully understood what she was doing. It feels like she was trying to come off as dark and menacing, but like, anyone who’s seen KISS knows that that’s not the vibe? I can’t tell if she understands glam rock camp.
This leads me to my other biggest gripe of Siwa’s current press tour. In an interview, she claims she told her record label that she wanted to create a genre called “gay pop.” The quote has understandably been making the rounds, with people expressing their understandable horror at what she said. Yes, Siwa is 20, but how in the world can she fix her mouth in 2024 to say that she wants to create a genre called gay pop?! As if there aren’t dozens of artists who have been in the gay pop game longer than she’s had her period? Gay pop icons Tegan & Sara hilariously mocked Siwa in a TikTok.
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It’s a perfect example of how younger generations do not engage with the history of their culture. You mean to tell me that this young adult can say something so ignorant when she can get on Al Gore’s internet and Google gay pop artists? Did those tight ponytails scramble girlie’s brain? She really played in our faces and acted like she was creating something new when lesbian jesus Hayley Kiyoko is RIGHT HERE still making bangers? When Janelle Monae literally dressed as a vulva for the “Pynk” music video? I don’t care if it makes me sound like an angry senior citizen, but she needs to learn her history. I simply cannot sit here and allow this ignorance to continue.
Jojo Siwa clearly has so many things to figure out about who she wants to be as a public figure and a musical artist. As a person who grew up in the spotlight, it’s only natural for her to go through this messy transformation right in front of our eyes too. But a part of growing and maturing is also knowing when it’s time to do some of that growing in private, especially when you’re representing a large community.