JoJo Siwa has backtracked on her wildly bold claim of having “invented” gay pop, but still maintains she’s up there somewhere in the chain of command.
The former-Dance Moms star made the controversial comment in an interview with Billboard last week, when she claimed the steamy new music video for her song “Karma” was the beginning of “a new genre of music” called “gay pop”.
Predictably, that comment went down poorly. Netizens pointed out that Elton John or Freddie Mercury were making music for The Gays™ before Siwa was born. Others felt she was using her queer identity to claim ownership of gay music.
However, it looks like the 21-year-old has realised her comment was in poor taste — or at least, miscommunicated.
“Madonna, Lady Gaga, fucking Michael Jackson, there’s so many people who have made gay pop,” she conceded in an interview with TMZ.
She said what she meant with her initial comments was that she wanted to legitimise gap pop as an established and recognised genre of music, like rock or country.
“If I said to somebody ‘Name a gay pop artist’, they’d be like ‘What’s gay pop?’. But if I said to somebody ‘Name a rock artist’, you would say KISS, ACDC,” she said.
I mean, it’s probably debatable to say people don’t know what gay pop is, but she at least agreed that she didn’t invent it.
“I definitely am not the inventor of gay pop, for sure not,” she said.
“But I do want to be a piece in making it bigger than it already is. I want to bring more attention to it.”
Siwa said she’s not the “creator” or “president” of gay pop, but she “might be like the CEO, or like, CMO. I could be the Chief Marketing Officer.”
Look, I’ll take that. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to shed more light on a type of music that you feel is perhaps under-appreciated — even if maybe people are more across it than you think.
But still, she also says in the interview that she has no idea why people were so incensed by her earlier comments. Sooo, maybe there’s some learning to go.
If all this has got you curious about “Karma”, you can check out the music video here.
