JoJo Siwa Grows Up
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JoJo Siwa drives a car covered in her own face.
Actually, the child star turned children’s entertainer drives a couple. On a Thursday afternoon in late March, it’s a Tesla Model X wrapped in a patchwork of her blond, ponytail-topped head complete with a signature hair bow. The tire rims are a kaleidoscope of cotton candy colors.
Another car, a Lamborghini, was in the shop getting re-wrapped with a fresh design inspired by “Karma,” the synth-heavy dance track she released on Friday.
Ms. Siwa is currently doing a bit of re-wrapping herself.
“The following content is not made for children and may be disturbing or offensive to some viewers,” Ms. Siwa, who is about a month shy of her 21st birthday, posted on Instagram earlier this year when she began teasing her new single. “It may contain sexual themes, violence, strong language, traumatic scenarios and flashing lights.”
In reality, what “Karma” does contain is Ms. Siwa saying precisely one swear word.
This month, Ms. Siwa stopped by Beaches Club in Los Angeles to promote her new single.Credit...Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times
She eschews another for a more PG-13 modification, “effed.” Her sparkly costumes are tight, vaguely amphibian and skin-baring, though perhaps no more so than those she donned as a child on the reality show “Dance Moms.” In the music video, she dances aggressively on a desert island to a routine choreographed by Richy Jackson, a longtime Lady Gaga collaborator. Black makeup, painted into geometric designs on her face, makes her look like a forgotten member of Kiss. (Gene Simmons, the band’s frontman, approves.) She humps a woman on the sand.
“I was a bad girl, I did some bad things,” Ms. Siwa sings in the opening line of the song.
Not everyone is so sure. “‘I was a bad girl’ YOU WERE SELLING GLITTER BOWS AT WALMART,” reads one comment on Ms. Siwa’s YouTube channel.
Ms. Siwa burst onto the scene as a mouthy 11-year-old in “Dance Moms” in 2015. When she left the show the next year, she signed a deal with Nickelodeon. From there, she started a wildly successful career as children’s entertainer, performing family-friendly songs around the world and building a fan base of tween girls to whom she has sold over 80 million bows.
Some of Ms. Siwa’s fans wore rhinestones and black eye makeup in a homage to JoJos past and present.Credit...Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times
Ms. Siwa onstage at a “Karma” release party.Credit...Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times
“I am the first, per se, first child star that is going from not a character to still not a character,” Ms. Siwa said, drawing a contrast between herself and Miley Cyrus, the former Disney Channel actor who shed her sugary sweet alter ego Hannah Montana and promptly cannonballed into adulthood with a series of scandals that fed tabloids for years. Ms. Siwa, who at first modeled her career on Hannah Montana, is now after her own Miley moment.
When Ms. Cyrus’s album “Can’t Be Tamed” came out in 2010, it was far from a critical success. The years that followed were tumultuous and didn’t always foretell the Grammy-winning artist she would later go on to become. It’s a notoriously tricky transition that has ensnared plenty of young people — Britney Spears, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, to name a few.
Now a familiar trope in the pop-culture canon, this shift can feel stilted when it’s happening in real time. That may be unavoidable.
“You don’t need to pretend that there’s this organic or authentic self that is somehow out there,” said Carolyn Chernoff, a sociologist who once taught a class at Skidmore College entirely on the subject of Ms. Cyrus. “It’s all this performance to manufacture a Miley moment. Of course, it’s manufactured, calculated.”
At Studio Siwa, Ms. Siwa’s personal rehearsal space in Burbank, Calif., the young singer, wearing loose black sweatpants and a pile of chain necklaces, offered a brief tour. A glittery red, white and blue piano sits in one corner of the space, but it’s fake, a leftover stage prop. In a makeshift archive in a backroom, there are other largely untouched things. Shelves reaching to the ceiling are filled with Siwa-branded dolls, pillows and headphones. Racks of old costumes line the perimeter.
“We would zip-tie it,” Ms. Siwa said, pulling out a hefty, bedazzled bow headpiece from one of her tour costumes and flipping it over to reveal dirt and sweat stains. It hurt her scalp “so bad, but in the best way possible,” she added. “Wouldn’t change it for anything.”
She speaks with the same unflinching positivity about her time on “Dance Moms,” though viewers of the show might have a grimmer recollection of Ms. Siwa’s time onscreen. In Ms. Siwa’s first appearance, her dance teacher, Abby Lee Miller, called her “obnoxious.”
“If you are good at what you do, you don’t have a healthy relationship with it,” Ms. Siwa said, likening her time on the show to an athlete being pushed by a coach to train even harder after losing a game.
Ms. Siwa ensconced in the crowd.Credit...Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times
In 2021, Ms. Siwa and her mother tried their luck at hosting their own reality show. Eleven girls competed on the Peacock show “Siwas Dance Pop Revolution” in the hopes of joining a new children’s musical group, XOMG POP!
In an interview this year with Rolling Stone, a member of the group and her mother accused them of mistreatment, including insults and punishing rehearsal schedules. The Siwas denied all allegations through a lawyer to Rolling Stone. When asked about them in her studio, Ms. Siwa echoed those denials, claiming that the mother and daughter, Anjie and Leigha Sanderson, were “dropped” by their lawyer “because they had an invalid case.”
In an interview with The New York Times, Anjie Sanderson denied this, saying that she and her lawyer had ultimately decided that pursuing further legal action was not in her family’s best interest.
Ms. Siwa said that the reason she had previously not spoken publicly about the incident is “because there was a kid on the line.” That child, Leigha Sanderson, now 16, said she thought Ms. Siwa’s latest musical efforts were “just trying to distract people from what actually is happening.”
The potential costs of being a child star were recently put in stark terms with the release of the documentary series “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV” which surfaced allegations of harassment and abuse at Nickelodeon in the 1990s and 2000s. Ms. Siwa described herself as “one of the lucky ones,” crediting her mother, Jessalynn Siwa, with helping her navigate the industry unscathed.
These days, Ms. Siwa finds herself having to contend with the warped way much of her audience views her.
“I’ve always physically looked younger,” Ms. Siwa said. “I was 18, wearing a bow in my hair, looking like a 12-year-old, but I’ve always mentally worked as an adult.”
“I’ve always joked that I’m 10 years ahead,” she continued. “When I was 9, I was 19, and when I was 19, I was 29, you know what I mean? Now 20, and I feel like I’m 30.”
Partaking in a rite of adulthood, she said she recently got two tattoos. “It was very impulsive, went into a janky shop in Florida and was like, ‘Let’s go,’” Ms. Siwa said. On her left hand is the name and release date of her debut children’s single, “Boomerang.” On the other, the same details about “Karma.” (The release date is technically wrong, Ms. Siwa said, because she didn’t account for time zones.)
Ms. Siwa has already met plenty of flak for her new album and the new image she has debuted alongside it. But she doesn’t seem too bothered. It’s designed for people to say, ‘What?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Huh?’”Credit...Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times
When she was 17, Ms. Siwa, who identifies as a lesbian, came out over the course of several TikTok lip-sync videos and by tweeting a photo of herself wearing a T-shirt that said “Best Gay Cousin.” That fall, she placed second on “Dancing With the Stars” as part of the show’s first ever same-sex couple. But she didn’t exactly ascend to gay icon status. In a recent interview, she told Billboard News that she “wanted to start a new genre of music” called “gay pop,” prompting a sidelong glance from the longtime gay pop artists Tegan and Sara.
Over the past few years, she has been more open about her sexuality and dating life. “I present as a top,” Ms. Siwa said, using the popular parlance to describe her sexual preferences. “Outside, for sure I’m a top. Inside, bottom nation.”
But when it comes to the particulars of her relationships, she says she’s become a bit more circumspect, and she has some strict rules she abides by. No romantic DM slides. She won’t ever make the first move.
“I’m scared of rejection, of course, but more so, like, I just don’t want anyone to be uncomfortable,” Ms. Siwa said. She tells dates they need to grant her “access” before she’ll get even a little physical, Ms. Siwa said, describing her own personal consent system.
One of Ms. Siwa’s fans.Credit...Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times
Ms. Siwa onstage at Rocco’s in West Hollywood.Credit...Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times
“The world is scary. You got to be careful, and I have horrible trust issues,” Ms. Siwa said. “I don’t want someone to be able to say she touched me and I didn’t want it. I would never do that, but anyone can say anything they want,” she added. She lives with “a lot of paranoia.”
“No one’s going to be like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing,” Ms. Siwa said. “It’s not designed for people to say that. It’s designed for people to say, ‘What?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Huh?’” Besides, she added, “My views have never been higher.”
The song did have some immediate fans, though: kids, the very same audience Ms. Siwa was intending to abandon. At a charity dance class hosted last month at Studio Siwa, a gaggle of 12-year-old girls burst into the opening line of the song when asked if they knew the words. The full track hadn’t even been released yet. Children have begun to send her videos singing the single with a slight lyrical change — “karma’s a beach” — Ms. Siwa said. That’s fine with her, she said. Her new music is for “whoever wants to enjoy it.”
So who is JoJo Siwa now?
It seems an unfair question to pose to someone still too young to legally buy a beer. That fact was striking when, on Thursday evening in West Hollywood, Ms. Siwa popped by several clubs to celebrate the release of her new music. An Instagram ad for the events initially warned that guests needed to be 21 or older to attend. Technically, as several commenters pointed out, that rule would bar Ms. Siwa from her own event.
She drove herself to the party, her hair piled in a lofty pompadour atop her head. Ms. Siwa’s Lamborghini was back from the shop, covered in new photos of her face.
