The Refutation of Jojo Siwa
This has to be the only article on the internet with Jojo Siwa and Bashar al-Assad mentioned in the same paragraph.
Jojo Siwa is one of those people that you’ve probably heard of once or twice, and if you know anything about her, it was probably something you learned against your will. Like most celebrities and influencers blasted into our eyeballs from the screens with which we scry upon the digital world, we really aren’t granted the liberty of ignorance when it comes to these characters, nor the privilege to even choose it.
I reckon if you have children, particularly one (or more) that are both young and have two X chromosomes, you’re probably more aware of her than those of us who don’t. My first exposure to Joelle Joanie Siwa came through osmosis at a friend’s house, where, at the time, his seven year old daughter was very into Jojo Siwa. Since then, she’s become something of a running gag among my friends; we we’ll ask him, Is your daughter still into Jimbles Samba/JamJam Sang-woo/Jiji Kraft-Singles, or some other humorous malapropism of her name.
As it turns out, my friend’s daughter no longer has much of a taste for Jojo Siwa. It could be the natural course of her maturation and development, and that she’s simply outgrown the comically gauche, puerile, rhinestone-and-sequin-studded gurly-gurrrl image that Siwa built her Empire on. It’s more likely that she didn’t outgrow Jojo Siwa, and rather that Jojo Siwa outgrew the demographic she’d risen to fame on the backs of.
You see, earlier this year, Jojo Siwa pulled what I like to call a Miley. This term1, if it wasn’t obliquely clear, is cribbed from the name of former Disney Channel star, Miley Cyrus, who infamously worked with a previously unseen diligence to shed her identity as a dancing monkey for the House of Mouse by adopting the identity of a trashy, coked-out slut.
And for a while, she was a trashy, coked-out slut. I still believe that there is a strong case to be made that she was demonically possessed, and that whatever infernal power was prompting her to cover herself in grotty scratcher tats like the interior of a truck-stop bathroom stall jumped to Katy Perry, but whatever the source of her madness was seems to have abated over the years. She’s leveled out since and maintains a subtle presence at the fringe of the entertainment industry, but mostly as a curio from another era of pop culture. Though this period of debasement and shameless degeneracy was proved to be the most lucrative years of Cyrus’s career, scoring her hits like the insufferable track Wrecking Ball and equally annoying We Can’t Stop, I think that, like Perry’s similar crash-out in the later 2010’s, it left an irrevocable stain on her career that will never thoroughly wash out. She could convert to Catholicism tomorrow, join a convent, and start feeding the needy in Bangladesh, and all anyone would really remember is her grinding her money-maker on Robin Thicke in his Beetlejuice cosplay at the 2013’s MTV Video Music Awards.
This is all to say that pulling a Miley has proven to not be a recipe for long-term success. You don’t want to go Full Miley.
Apparently, this is advice no one gave to Jojo Siwa.
It’s not hard to understand why she’s going Full Miley, though; by dressing up like a reject from from a KISS tribute band, or Scandanavia’s worst death metal outfit, she’s attempting to utilize shock value to disabuse the world of her previous persona, which is inextricably linked to prepubescent girls. I don’t fault anyone for not wanting to be pigeon-holed into being a children’s entertainer for the remainder of their life. But this? This, as the kids would say, ain’t it, chief.
Born in 2001 to an unassuming, upper-middle class family in Omaha, Nebraska, Siwa first broke big by participating on Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition. The eponymous Abby refers to Abby Lee Miller, who built a television empire on the Lifetime network by with the program Dance Moms - which Siwa would later join.
The show and its spin-offs were immensely popular, which is a rather damning indictment of the state of our culture as, from what I understand, it wasn’t much more than a showcase of what could arguably be defined as child abuse. Many participants who took part in the shows have come forward in the intervening years, and nothing they say about Miller is either nice or terribly surprising.
At the time of her first appearance on Dance Moms adjacent media, Siwa was only nine years old. She became a fan favorite and, like sharks smelling a bleeding tuna thrashing about the waves, television producers and music executives were tripping over one another to court her. They were quick to wring every ounce of clout they could out of the young girl. At age fifteen, she started a music career with the song Boomerang, which quickly accumulated over a billion views on YouTube. Later that year, she’d ink an exclusive deal with a staple of every dying shopping mall, Claire’s, to hawk cheap jewelry with her name slapped on it. Among the accessories in this line were large, colorful hair bows, reminiscent of those that Siwa herself would wear. These would later go on to be a symbol of her brand.
It’s worth noting that the song Boomerang is, ostensibly, an anti-bullying screed. I say ostensibly because I didn’t listen to it and I don’t want to. This is noteworthy as many primary schools in the United Kingdom began to ban Siwa-branded bows from their halls because they were causing bullying. In the same way that Logan Paul and KSI’s unpalatably sweet and unethically caffeinated energy drink PRIME2 became a status symbol on playgrounds across America, so too did Siwa-branded bows become symbols of class for little girls across the English isles.
If you didn’t have a tacky, neon-pink bow pulling your hairline back further than a Norwood VI, apparently that made you a broke bitch and a target for harassment and ridicule. What is fashionable about brute-forcing your hairline to resemble a late-30’s bugman with more Funko Pops than tangible assets, I don’t understand, but people have always followed silly trends to fit in with their tribe since the first cro-magnon got the bright idea to shove a squirrel’s tibia through their nose.
She also launched a cosmetics brand, some kits of which were recalled for toxic levels of asbestos. That’s the danger of outsourcing cosmetics made for girls who are too young to even know what make-up is to underpaid Chinese sweat-shops, I suppose3.
She struck another lucrative deal with J.C. Penny’s to do more of the same, only with more throw pillows and duvets. Even though it seems as if her line of over-priced home decor exclusively made for the rooms of five year old girls were not tainted with carcenogenic heavy metals, Siwa’s line didn’t stop J.C. Penny’s from filing for bankruptcy a few years later. I’m not saying the two are related. But I’m not not saying it, either.
Though networks, talent agencies, and various entertainment institutions were falling over one another to throw fat, juicy contracts at Siwa, it would be our old friends at Nickelodeon who would leave the limb-strewn, blood-stained arena of gladiatorial combat with Dame Jojo in tow. With years of acting in staged reality television programs since the tender age of nine, the then sixteen year old Siwa made her official acting debut in the 2017 made-for-television Nickelodeon movie, Blurt.
Looks great, doesn’t it? It’s got a respectable 5.9 on IMDB, so, if you’re looking for some quality programming to keep your kids quiet for an hour - thank me later. I also have to say that I find the plot synopsis of the movie morbidly hilarious.
So it’s about virtual reality inducing schizophrenia, huh? I’m sure that won’t be pertinent in the coming years.
As the 2010’s came to a close and the currently unfolding nightmare of the 2020’s began, while most of us were living the new normal, Siwa was on top of the world. She was included on Time’s annual 100 Most Influential People list of that year. Whether that speaks to Siwa’s ever-expanding presence in the American cultural landscape and her stranglehold over the demographic of girls aged five to ten, or the precipitous decline of Time’s reputability is anyone’s guess. She continued to pump out music that did well enough with her target audience to keep her career afloat. She was unavoidable on reality television, popping up on programs like Keeping Up With The Kardashians, The Masked Singer, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. She was even a judge on America’s Got Talent and a contestant on the thirtieth season of Dancing with the Stars. None of these means much to anyone who doesn’t have a cable box, but given that there is, apparently, a phantom block of middle America that continues to indulge in that type of televised sludge, her stock only continued to rise. She even got her own cereal at some point.
Mm-mm! Tastes like pre-diabetes.
Not bad for a girl who started off back-sassing a convicted criminal on a trashy reality show about child exploitation, no?
It wouldn’t take all that long for Jojo Siwa’s fortunes begin to shift, though. Some people will cite the beginning of her crash-out to 2021, when Siwa announced via TikTok that she was a member of the Rainbow Bloc. Which piece of the alphabet soup anagram was she a member of? Even she didn’t know. Though she revealed that she was dating another woman at the time, she said the following on the topic of her sexuality.
I was under the impression that gay was exclusive to homosexual men, but, whatever. My Pride bonafides aren’t exactly up to date. I still don’t really understand what queer means because everyone seems to have a different answer and at this point, I’m afraid to ask.
She also went public with her relationship with yet another woman and, later that year, would come out as an official, self-proclaimed lesbian.
There was a time where someone primarily associated with children’s entertainment coming out as a homosexual would have been a death knell for their career, but, given that it was the current year, it didn’t do much to diminish Jojo Siwa’s star. I’m sure there were a few disgruntled parents who promptly rounded up every scrap of their daughter’s Siwa Swag and tossed it in a dumpster, but if I remember, the general reaction to this grand proclamation can be summed up like so:
The public’s problem with Siwa wasn’t the fact she had an attraction to the fairer sex. I mean, hey - I do to. Can’t blame her.
The issue was that she didn’t seem to be satisfied with her big announcement being met with a resounding, Okay, and an apathetic shrug from the public. It wasn’t enough to have every trashy tabloid rag glaze her for being so brave for her decision to come out, when at this point, 30% of her age cohort identifies as some manner of LGBTQIA+LMNOP. No - the public’s problem with Jojo Siwa was that she was being really, really annoying about it.
This might not be a universal experience for most Millennials, but I recall back in my high school days, we had a number of girls that suddenly discovered that they were lesbians. And they wanted everyone to know. Whether anyone cared or not. These were typically the same kids who littered their speech with broken Japanese and generally had an issue with reading the room to begin with. Being gay basically became their entire personalities and all they wanted to talk about. It got very difficult to be around them, not because I have some raging, proprietary disdain reserved uniquely for lesbians, but because everything they said always somehow came back to how their sexuality.
Like, yes - we get it. You like women. Can we talk about literally anything else, now? And I also remember thinking that, for people who yapped so much about liking women, they never really said anything else about the topic beyond that. Not what they liked about women, or anyone in school they might be harboring a crush on, it was all just, Hey! I like women! Did you know that? Because you should know I like women. Did I mention I like women yet?4
Suffice to say, by the time most of our college years came to an end, they were dating men. Only one that I’m aware of actually committed to the bit.
That’s how Jojo Siwa’s absolute media blitzkreig relating to her newly announced lesbianism comes off. Every TikTok she was uploading had something to do about being out of the deep, dank closet and proud to be free of it. She just wouldn’t let the topic die, and it slowly began to chew away at both the good-will people had for her, and their patience.
It would all come to a head in April 5th, 2024 when Siwa, now officially off Nickelodeon’s leash, debuted her new look.
I already clowned on this disaster of a fit already, but suffice to say, no one was taking it seriously. If you’ve seen the absolute buffoonery that some stars choose to wear at events like the Met Gala - you know, that event where celebrities seem to be perpetually engaged in an unspoken competition to see who can wear the most stupid shit at big events? - but Siwa did not have the chops or the street cred to back up her new look. She was the laughing stock of the internet for a good month following this event, and even though she claimed that she didn’t mind a bit of fun at her expense, she made a whole lot of TikToks insisting, no, really guys - I don’t care.
Methinks the Siwa doth protest too much.
Sure enough, in the press junket she was running afterwards, she even name-dropped Miley Cyrus as an inspiration for her new direction. Again, I can’t stress enough that someone should have told her that wasn’t the route she wanted to go, but if anyone did, she didn’t listen. She barrelled ahead and dropped her first single as an adult artist, titled Karma, dropping the video which featured her furiously humping women like a stud hound in a pen full of bitches in heat.
Though critics were making fools of themselves to slobber over how brave and mature it was, the internet was, ah…
Let’s just say they were less than receptive to this new, edgier side of Siwa.
But that wasn’t where Siwa’s troubles with Karma would end.
Within hours of the song’s release, a TikTok user now lost to time dug-up an old video from the obscure video hosting platform, Vimeo, uploaded all the way back in the stone age of 2013. The song featured a young woman named Brit Smith, and the song she sang in the video was titled, Karma’s A Bitch. It didn’t just sound like Siwa’s “new” track - it was Siwa’s song.
Brit Smith is an interesting character. She formed a pop duo with her identical twin sister, Alex, called - can you guess? - Brit and Alex, which only ever met with middling success before the latter half of the duo decided that the whole thing wasn’t shaking out and try her luck at college, instead. In 2009, Brit alone would continue to struggle her way through the music industry under the name Matisse. Again, she failed to break big, and after releasing a collaboration with Black Eyed Peas front man, Will I. Am, titled, Provocative, she finally decided to throw in the towel circa 2013. The only thing of any real note about Provocative was that Brit and Mr. I Am managed to coax Golden Girls alum Betty White into busting some fresh moves for the video.
Given how fucking weird my generation is about Betty White, I’m surprised it didn’t get more traction.
Anyways, shortly before Brit Smith’s retirement from music, she recorded a song and a video in 2012 for a track titled, Karma’s a Bitch with superstar producer, Timbaland. It was intended to be her debut single under her actual name rather than the nom de guerre Matisse, but it would ultimately be shelved by the record label before after Smith called it quits on her career… though not before Vimeo user Super77 managed to get a hold of it through unknown means. Super77’s upload went ignored and unknown for almost two decades.
Until Siwa dropped Karma.
Overnight, Brit Smith was the talk of TikTok. The newfound success of her long-lost track brought her out of obscurity and, buoyed by the support, Smith would return to career as a singer and drop a new track in less than a full calendar month of being rediscovered. This bizarre story almost completely overshadowed what was supposed to be Siwa’s grand statement and new debut. Worse still, it tainted the already poorly-received track with allegations of plagiarism.
To add insult to injury, it was universally agreed that Smith’s Karma is a Bitch was vastly superior to Siwa’s Karma. Within days of being rediscovered, Brit Smith put her original Karma’s a Bitch track on Spotify. By the end of the week, it had tens of thousands of more hits than Siwa’s. In fact, all the attention would spur Brit Smith’s Karma’s a Bitch to the number one spot on Billboard’s Electronic Digital Chart. Siwa’s cover failed to even break the Top Hot 100.
Ouch.
Siwa would address the allegations on social media, stating thusly:
Smith would take to TikTok herself to defend Siwa and her cover.
Technically, Brit Smith is not wrong. The rights to Karma is a Bitch were up in the air. The song had already been pitched to a number of other artists, including, perhaps ironically, Miley Cyrus. Jojo Siwa’s record label acquired them. They tweaked the song a bit (read: mangled), Siwa covered it, and released it with every legal right to do so. But it was still a cover. And that fact was one they did not disclose, nor did they own up to it in any way until they were caught. For her part, I doubt Jojo Siwa even knew she was recording a cover; like most artists, I’m sure the label just gave her the song and said, Record this, and she did.
But, she also did say this about Karma’s development:
Given that Siwa was most likely still soiling Pampers when Brit Smith recorded the original track, this means that she’s either the foremost infant musical prodigy of our time, or a liar.
Oh, the mendacity…
Jojo Siwa limped out of the Karma debut and her botched reinvention firmly stamped with the label of Cringe stamped to her forehead, which was just about the worst thing that could have happened to her image. Yet, her troubles were only just beginning to foment.
Part of the reason that Siwa was eager to reinvent herself, I suspect, was due to then-recent allegations of abuse and mistreatment of ten year old girls in a dance troupe she led. The group went by the very exciting and not-at-all forced name of XOMG POP, and was run by both Siwa and her mother, Josselyn, who is herself a professional dance instructor. According to the mothers of some of the outfit’s members, both Jojo and Josselyn would verbally abuse the girls, calling them terrible, awful, and lazy. They’d criticize their weight. Apparently, the girls were being made to practice for up to ten hours a day, multiple times a week, and being pushed to the point of physical exhaustion and chundering all over themselves. One girl, if the allegations are to be believed, was forced back to practice three weeks after surgery on her spine. Otherwise, she’d have lost her spot on the team. Oh, and, of course, none of the families were ever paid what they were promised in their contracts. Allegedly.
I see why Jojo Siwa is just about the only Dance Moms alumni to not just speak positively about Abby Lee Miller, but defend her.
Miller isn’t the only questionable friend Siwa’s gone to bat for. Siwa was close with one Colleen Ballinger, who was once one of the most prominent YouTubers on the platform. You might not have heard of her name, but you may have heard of her infamous (and deeply unfunny) character, Miranda Sings.
Despite being as comedic as a tetanus infection, Ballinger parlayed her success into a Netflix series featuring the Miranda Sings character, multiple nation-wide tours, and millions of subscribers. But, these days, Ballinger is most known for uploading what has gone down in internet history as the single worst apology video ever to grace the series of tubes when she thought that this was an appropriate response to allegations of sexual misconduct.
I feel like I have to stress that the aforementioned allegations were that she flirted with, sent nude photos to, and even went so far as to mail a pair of her used underwear to a thirteen year old boy.
Oh, but don’t worry. The used panties thing? It was a joke.
Don’t get it? Yeah, me neither.
She’s thirty-eight years old, married, and has three kids, by the way.
Almost every major figure associated with Ballinger cut ties with her afterwards. Except for one. Jojo Siwa, like Ballinger, simply hand-waved the allegations - and the evidence - away as lies told for clout.
You’re probably beginning to understand why the public’s patience with Siwa was rapidly dwindling, and she was in dire need of a reinvention to get people to talk about something other than the fact she’d been (allegedly) verbally abusing ten year olds and defending an alleged groomer.
Unfortunately for Siwa, she proved incapable of opening her mouth without sticking her foot firmly in it. In an interview with Billboard about Karma, as she tried to salvage the already butchered reputation of the track, she made the hilariously tone-deaf statement, I want to make a new genre of music. When asked by the interviewer what she meant, Siwa said, Well, it’s called Gay Pop.
So, uh…
Who’s gonna tell her?
Because if I have to, I’m gonna hurt her feelings.
She didn’t do herself any favors when she attempted to save herself from the flack in another interview and inadvertently tossed gasoline onto a dumpster fire with this statement.
The interviewer then astutely rattled off a few names. Lady Gaga. Elton John. Lil Nas X. Chappelle Roan. I’m sure you can think of more than a few gay pop stars and musicians that aren’t named Jojo Siwa if you give it more than two seconds of thought.
Like, c’mon, Jojo - put some respect on the Scissor Sister’s name.
It doesn’t gayer or poppy-er than the Scissor Sisters.
She’d continue to dig this pit even deeper by immediately adding the following:
I’m not sure if these were statements Siwa made out of general music illiteracy or blind conceit, but it doesn’t really matter because it went over like a lead balloon with the Rainbow Bloc. And understandably so. Ever since Siwa had come out, she’d yammered on and on and on about her love for the community and how important our history is and promoting queer voices… and then she comes out and says that she wants to be the President of Gay Pop? Without acknowledging all the rainbow titans in the industry that had come before her? And that she was taking up her position of standard-bearer whether people liked it or not?
To many in the Rainbow Bloc, I imagine these statements felt tantamount to the new, annoying transfer kid who decided they were going to sit at your lunch table that you begrudgingly allowed into your friend group out of the goodness of your heart suddenly making the claim that your little social circle wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t graciously allowed it to be so.
They also weren’t exactly fans of Karma. This quote taken from Aja Romano’s article on Jojo Siwa, published on Vox Day, sums it up better than I can since, y’know - not a memeber of that club, here.
As 2024 ground on, Jojo Siwa would continue to hop from one knee-deep pit of shit to another, using TikTok to rattle off more nonsense about her queerness or spouting off increasingly antagonistic TikTok’s towards the haters, violating the sacred rule of don’t feed the trolls. It’s gotten to the point where people take swipes at her just for the sake of getting her to make a spiteful, petty response that they can all laugh at. The woman has her own personal fortune, and yet, like so many other celebrities, she seems to have nothing better going on to keep her from spending an inordinate amount of time pitching bitch-fits and cat-fights on TikTok.
This is a bit of a spicy take, here, but I think Siwa might actually classify as a lolcow. Here’s one definition of what makes a lolcow taken from Urban Dictionary.
The only discrepancy I see there is that there’s nothing secret about the way people have been clowning on Siwa for the lion’s share of 2024. At this point, she’s considered so cringe that she might as well have the word tattooed on her forehead. She’s irrevocably soiled her former reputation as child-friendly and, with it, decimated the profitable empire she’d established around it. She seems intent on burning bridges with both the broader public and her erstwhile friends in the Rainbow Coalition through nothing but sheer force of narcissism.
Now, if you made it this far through the article, this is all probably coming off as a struggle session for Jojo Siwa. I really don’t mean it to be. Yes, Siwa has done some less than savory things, she runs defense for rather iffy characters, and the sass and spunk that (apparently) made her so endearing to audiences when she was nine are now seen as conceit and contentiousness. How much of this is true to her nature or just played up for the camera is debatable. But she’s also a celebrity that struck it big on “reality” television - these qualities are pretty much part and parcel with the vast majority of that class of people. She’s not unique in those respects.
But I also think it’s important to take note of the fact that Siwa is most likely struggling with intense demons off-camera. I never watched Dance Moms or any of the adjacent media, so I can’t speak to the character of her mother, Jessalyn, but it seems that fans of the series view her rather poorly. It’s very likely that Jessalyn Siwa was a Striver Parent - a phenomenon that I discussed previously in my article on former child star, Drake Bell - and that Jojo Siwa is, more than anything, someone who never really had much agency in her life. Her mother was a professional dancer and operated her own dance studio, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she made sure that Siwa would follow in her footsteps whether she liked it or not. Siwa had been in the public spotlight since nine years old. Again, I doubt she had much say in the matter once Nickelodeon started flashing their checkbooks at her parents.
She’s been pushed and pulled in various directions by powerful adults, both her parents and the vultures of Big Entertainment, for pretty much her entire life. I have a difficult time imagining just how damaging that can be to a fragile developing psyche. This is to say nothing of the fact that, if Abby Lee Miller and even her own mother were as cruel and authoritarian as both fans of the show and former Dance Mom participants say they are, then Jojo Siwa’s own mistreatment of juvenile dancers under her purview is likely a result of the cycle of abuse turning once more. If it tells you how much pressure she was under for so many years, she revealed this year that her much-ridiculed hairline, which I’ve seen described as receding further back than recorded history by one internet commenter, is a result of stress-induced hair loss that began when she was twelve. Regardless of what you think of her, it’s simply intolerable that a child be subjected to that level of stress, and even more so when it’s for purely pecuniary purposes.
With all this in mind, I think Siwa should be afforded a bit of grace. Personally, I believe her overly-performative obsession with her sexuality, her bizarre change of personal aesthetics, and defensive, pugnacious attitude when it comes to criticism is most likely Siwa’s attempt to exert some degree of agency that she’s largely been denied throughout her life. I’m not exonerating her, or saying that she shouldn’t be held accountable for any wrongdoings she might have done, but I am saying that her behavior didn’t just spontaneously materialize without cause.
Now, everything that preceded this was something of a preamble. Backstory, if you will. It’s necessary to understand the dense lore of Jojo Siwa and her many controversies not just to know why she’s become so reviled by so many, and in many ways transitioned from a child star to a laughing stock, but to fully understand why Jojo Siwa was the first victim of a new TikTok trend that I find deeply fascinating and perhaps indicative of the much-discussed post-election vibe shift we’re watching gradually manifest in almost every facet of American culture.
As you can probably guess, Siwa’s antics have led many to stage attempts at cancelling her. As you can also see, her continued success indicates that these cancellations were largely ineffective. After all, even if people only discussed Karma to clown on it, they were still talking about it.
But, like Bashar al-Assad of Syria recently found out, one can only skate through so many coup attempts before someone eventually figures out a way to bring you down5.
Every controversy Siwa suffered only brought her more attention. That much was obvious. So, one curious mind wondered… what might happen if there was a dedicated attempt to not give her any?
I’ll tell you what happened. Next time.
I’ve trademarked it, so if you use it, contact my lawyers for royalty negotiations.
I’m not making some baseless accusation, either; the kits were manufactured in China.
Strangely, this seemed to only effect self-professed lesbians, because all the gay guys I knew were well-aware of their leanings well before high school and didn’t go out of their way to advertise it.
Yes, when I started writing this, Bashar al-Assad and the fall of Syria was still topical. I don’t get everything I write out in a timely manner, okay?
It should be known that the controversies of Dance Moms, Abby Lee Miller, and now this Jojo and her own mother is just a microcosm of the dance world writ large. That Jojo initially thrived in this environment and is now turning into a confused and sad, gay little attention whore is not surprising in the least.
I say this as former studio enrolled dance fanatic (sadly started too late - and was too poor - to ever make anything of it). The joy of artistic movement is one of the great loves and passions of my life; I watched a Christmas performance of the Nutcracker this year and got choked up numerous times witnessing the jumps and pirouettes. Forget world peace, I just want to live in a world where we can develop dance talent without unleashing the demons of frustrated never-made-its or developing monstrous egos in talented but impressionable kids who don't know any better.
Something dark I've realized is that I mistook "Wrecking Ball" and such songs for Taylor Swift. This is both a sign of Pop Stardom's interchangeability and ironically faceless amorphousness and also that I'm frankly bad at following it.