i was a bad girl, i did some bad things

notes on industry plants, the fabrication of pop eras, and white girl mediocrity

Hello my sweet grrrls! Welcome back to our Internet Bedroom. Usually the format of this newsletter goes something like this:

• I ramble about something unhinged

• Then I choose two or three girl culture related things of the past or present to show you

• Then I apologize

But this week is different!!! Because my husband said something so wild to me and I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I had to revive my previous life as a teenage music critic who almost interned for Pitchfork to untangle everything.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written something semi-critical analysis-y and longform. Earlier this year I wrote about the Love Has Won cult (aka the Mommy God cult) and Poor Things, which you can read here if you’re interested.

Thank you for going along with this lil experiment and if you don’t like the long-form-I-went-to-grad-school-and-now-I-can’t-stop-with-the-critical-analysis vibes this week, next time we’ll be back to our regular programming. Ok love u <3

i. karma’s a bitch

The other night, my husband asked if Jojo Siwa and Billie Eilish were the same person. And, I mean, obviously they are not, but I couldn’t help but list all the ways they overlapped in my head:

• gay

• pop stars

• dancers

• weird stage-mom type parents

• well documented as prodigies (billie for songwriting and dancing; Jojo just for dancing)

• both wear baggy pants now (billie has always worn baggy pants)

Certainly the tenor of their presence in the world as pop artists is vastly different. Billie has always leaned towards the authenticity and vulnerability afforded to pop singer songwriters, while Jojo has never been shy about being an overly produced pop act. However, I can’t deny that the two share more than whoever is in charge of their respective branding would probably care to admit.

see? they are the same.

Of course, the biggest commonality between the two is that they are young white women whose careers began to take shape when they were teenagers after childhoods spent being groomed for the sport of American celebrity. And, because of this, the question — did she deserve it? the connections, the opportunities, the fame? — will always linger around their careers.

When it comes to Jojo, this question takes the form of meme-ified cultural rage. If any of Jojo’s TikToks have crawled their away across your For You Page, a quick swipe through the comments will reveal endless “Jojo, have you learned nothing???”s and “everything I’ve learned against Jojo Siwa has been against my will”s.

Billie, meanwhile, only really suffers the occasional accusation that she is an “industry plant” or, before she came out, that she was queer-baiting. While there seems to be real vitriol behind making Jojo Siwa into a meme, Billie is often embraced and praised for her authenticity — even as she cribs aesthetics from Black performers.

And all this had me up at night wondering: Why do we accept one baggy-shorts wearing queer pop star but not the other?

ii. the lifespan of a pop star’s eras

Part of Jojo’s problem is that her rebrand is not going over well.

Trading a side-pony and skirts for a sparkly construction-worker vest (her off duty look) and KISS-inspired eye makeup is a harder than it looks. Add to that a song people don’t like very much and choreography that Jojo over-performs whether she’s given the opportunity or not — and there is no limit to the online hate Jojo is getting for her “bad girl” era.

But Billie, too, has had difficulty making a new direction in her branding work. While her latest record Hit Me Hard and Soft revives a more mature take on the baggy pants + oversized t-shirt combos she was originally known for (now she’s wearing baggy shorts, oversized blazers, and tiny glasses), her rebrand as someone in control of her image as a sex symbol during the Happier Than Ever promo was incredibly short-lived.

And I personally die a little inside when I think about how a lot of this sexy promo was oriented around Eilish turning 18 and the pressure she may have felt to “reclaim” her image from those who sexualized her.

The lack of success that both Billie and Jojo have had in getting fans on board with a new era speaks to just how much hate women in general get for being visible as women.

It isn’t shocking to me that the Internet would tear Jojo down for going to Disney World on her 21st birthday and being somewhat annoying about it. We detest the idea that someone who was once a little girl is now a bumbling, messy grown-up. And I suspect that feeling isn’t too far off from the one underlying our implicit rejection of Billie’s switch from oversized t-shirt to bustier.

iii. white girl mediocrity & pop music

I became a teenager just as Avril was being pitted against Britney. (And I became an adult when Britney shaved her head. Honestly, a lot of my major developmental moments could be tracked along Brit Brit’s career).

After releasing her debut, Let Go, Avril was marketed as the anti-Britney: a girl who wasn’t afraid to be “one of the boys,” who knew what instruments were, who wasn’t going to wear skimpy outfits because someone on her marketing team told her to. We would probably deride Avril as a “pick me” if she tried to pull that shit today. But nostalgia has largely softened our view of Avril as a self-described “rock chick.”

Billie, too, benefits from aligning herself with craft (songwriting) and her proximity to male performers (in this case, her brother). I spend a not insignificant amount of time thinking about this episode of “Diary of a Song” from the New York Times, in which Billie and Finneas appear very self-congratulatory for writing a pop song that includes the sound of a dental drill and a slightly different approach to the basic structure conventional to pop music:

As charming and enjoyable as I find a lot of Billie’s catalog to be, it’s not like she’s a songwriter on the level of a Fiona Apple or Bjork. And that’s ok. But it’s also important to recognize the ways we both curtail creative expression — demanding that it appear under a particular type of branding in order to be received as authentic — while simultaneously over-inflating the relevance or even just space white girls making pop music are allowed to take up.

White girls in pop music are afforded a level of mediocrity because they’re white. We may have grown past pitting Avril against Britney or Jojo against Billie, but we are still deeply uncomfortable with admitting that all their antics are more than a little silly, at times inauthentic, and that no one is really better than anyone else.

If you liked this longish-form essay thing and wanna tip me that would be incredible because 100% of my job is writing for myself and for other people!!! thank you so much for reading!!!!!!!