The past few months, Jojo Siwa has been doing an ample amount of promotion for her newest single “Karma”, which came out last Friday. At 20 years old, her new “bad girl” era has gotten a lot of attention from the public and has gotten the attention of the whole world. This surplus amount of coverage led to the music video becoming the #1 trending music video on YouTube and her song hitting multiple streaming records on Spotify, Apple Music and TikTok Sounds. She also annoyingly teased the song for a month and when it came out, I thought the song and video were ok at best. 

Amidst all of this, a clip of her on Billboard News has been sparking controversy as of late. In the interview, she talked about how when she was signed to Columbia Records, she wanted to start a new genre of music called “gay pop,” a genre that is specifically centered on the type of rebellious and uncontrollable eras that Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus went through in their careers. She even stated in multiple interviews that she took some inspiration for her new look and attitude from pop stars such as David Bowie, Prince, Elton John and Lady Gaga. As someone who has listened to queer pop stars, old and new, my whole life, I was taken aback.

Outright stating that you want to invent “gay pop” is not the ideal way of celebrating the icons that paved the road for you. This could lead to the ignorance and erasure of queer musicians everywhere and given the massive public exposure, it probably already has. Calling it “gay pop” is minimizing queer music to only be focused on rebelliousness and uncontrollable nature, an unfair stigma that already surrounds the community already 

I associate “gay pop” with pride and inherently used and made by the gay community for the celebration, and what JoJo Siwa is referring to is only a part of the LGBT+ experiences, if people even have those experiences. Sure, unhappy experiences such as cheating as heard in “Karma” can be turned into pop songs.

However, all the greatest historic pop songs that the queer community has taken and made their own, such as Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” Queen’s “I Want to Break Free,” and Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” does not fit into that genre. Would WHAM be excluded from the “gay pop” genre? What about newer artists like Chappel Roan or King Princess? What about Tegan and Sara, Hayley Kiyoko, or Pale Waves? There are so many queer pop musicians that are not getting the credit and attention that deserve as much as JoJo Siwa is getting. 

I am hoping that it was just her choice of words since she does have a fair amount of knowledge of gay pop stars in the past. All of the positive publicity and attention is fantastic for the LGBT+ community, and if that song was good, it would have had the possibility of creating a larger impact.