Jojo Siwa has always been a person in the spotlight since her childhood. Starting her career at 10 years old on Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition then switching to Dance Moms in season 2. After her joining Dance Moms, she has been a childhood star ever since going between Youtube, Nickelodeon, and Dance Moms.
Siwa has been in many controversies in her life between her pop dance group and her connections with other internet personalities. The dance group is a problem due to some of the members speaking out about Siwa’s treatment of the dancers. This kind of makes what she’s been doing try to feel like a distraction from what has happened.
Most recently, and the reason this story is happening, Siwa changed her style trying to break away from her child-geared persona and reach a more mature audience even if it’s been met with scrutiny and criticism. To emphasize that she’s no longer a kid anymore, she made a debut single called “Karma” which came with a music video on April 5. The song feels like a 2010s pop song that covers themes of cheating with explicit lyrics.
Siwa has also been quoted saying that she invented “gay pop” or that no one has had this drastic of a change in her generation, which has been met with some mild backlash online. It is interesting that Siwa says that because the producers and writers for the song are ones that have worked with Miley Cyrus and it’s been theorized that “Karma” is an old Cyrus demo, which is added to the fact that Siwa is not credited as a writer or a producer.
“It feels like it was very forced,” said sophomore Rathi Thiagarajan when asked about Siwa’s song. And, that seems to be a common sentiment between students that this doesn’t feel genuine and that “she’s kinda doing anything to stay relevant,” said Kai Doyle.
If you want an example of how to properly transition out of a young audience to attract an older one, you can look at Olivia Rodrigo. She went from being a child star on Disney and having that younger audience to now having an older teen / young adult demographic. She achieved this not by breaking through but by making albums covering her life that made her seem more mature instead of just instantly being mature like Siwa is doing.
So far, we already know that she plans to release new music and that she isn’t giving up on her persona any time soon, so it’s just a matter of time to see if this is how she plans on staying or if this is another phase.
