JoJo Siwa Backtracks Her Statement About Wanting To Invent 'Gay Pop'

By Emily Richardson | Celebrity | April 11, 2024 |

By Emily Richardson | Celebrity | April 11, 2024 |

Last week, JoJo Siwa showed up to the iHeart Radio Music Awards dressed like a goth KISS fan. Let’s just say there was a lot of tongue and double devil horns. Rock on, JoJo!:

The 20-year-old’s new look is part of an image rebrand to promote her adult music career. Days later, JoJo released her new EDM single, “Karma”, complete with a trying-too-hard-to-be-sexy music video where none of the girls actually kiss each other (but they sure do get close). Wikipedia says the song and video were “met with universally negative reviews from critics and social media users.” I’ll let you be the judge:

The whole thing is very “good girl gone bad” Miley Cyrus-lite. And that’s exactly what JoJo wanted. She went on Call Her Daddy and said she’s always craved her own Miley Bangerz moment. But it’s what JoJo said in a Billboard interview last week that’s really making headlines. Interviewer Tetris Kelly asked her what genre “Karma” would fit into, and this was her answer:

“The genre is, I said it back in the day, when I first signed with Columbia, I said, ‘I wanna start a new genre of music.’ And they said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s called gay pop.’ And they were like, ‘What’s that?’ And I was like, ‘It’s like K-pop, right? But it’s gay-pop.’”

Then, JoJo described a style of dance called jazz-funk, which she says lives in the same world as her new single. She compared the genre to Lady Gaga’s “Applause” and Miley’s “Can’t Be Tamed.”

Unsurprisingly, JoJo’s statement about wanting to invent gay pop received a fair amount of backlash. See: this silent, judgy TikTok from Tegan & Sara:

@teganandsara #stitch with @billboard ♬ original sound - Tegan and Sara

In the comments, people brought up other LGBTQIA+ artists like Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Janelle Monáe, Kim Petras, David Bowie, George Michael, and Lil Nas X. And everyone agreed that JoJo Siwa, who came out as queer in 2021, is not inventing a new genre of music with “Karma”

Yesterday, JoJo walked back her statement to TMZ (after a lot of prodding). Paps caught up with her in L.A., and asked if she wanted to “retract” what she said because of all the icons that came before her. JoJo agreed about the icon thing:

“So many, so many. Gosh, I saw even Betty Who made a post being like, ‘Hey’, and I’m literally friends with Betty. like… Madonna, Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson… there’s so many people who have made gay pop.”

When asked to clarify what she originally meant, JoJo replied:

“I think I just want to make it more clear that gay pop is a genre. You have pop, you have rock, you have country, and you have gay pop. If I said to someone, ‘Name a gay pop artist,” they’d go, ‘What’s gay pop?’ But if I said to someone, ‘Name a rock artist,’ you would say, ‘KISS, ACDC, you know what I mean?’”

TMZ’s pap disagreed with this. She said, “I think they’d say, ‘Lady Gaga, I think they’d say Chappell Roan, they’d say Freddie Mercury, Elton John…” JoJo replied, “Ok, that’s valid, cuz I would too.” Once again, the pap asked JoJo if she’d like to retract her statement, and she responded:

“I definitely am not the inventor of gay pop, but I do wanna be a piece in making it bigger than it already is. I want to bring more attention to it, OK? I’m not the creator, I’m not the president, but I might be like the CEO or the, like, CMO… OK, I could be the CMO, the Chief Marketing Officer.”

Whew! We did it. Statement officially retracted. Here’s the TMZ video: