78 Time Sept. 2–9, 2019
said, ‘You know, you don’t have to come to
these meetings all JoJo. You can just come
normal.’ And I said, ‘Pam, we have to have
a talk, because I need you to know that
this is my normal. This is my life. There
is no other secret. There is no other per-
son. I literally am JoJo. I wear the bright
clothes every day. I wear the sparkly hair
bows. I wear the high-top shoes. I sing the
fun music. I talk really loud. I talk fast,
and I talk a lot. This is who I am.’”
The consumer-products line is an ex-
tension of this truth. “My hand is in every-
thing, along with a lot of other people’s
hands,” Siwa said. “It’s not like I design a
hoodie and we release it online, but I have
what is called a style guide.” Siwa has the
last say on “every image, every picture,
every graphic, every color, every font and
every word.” For branded- content deals,
she’s been known to rework scripts,
tweaking the tone to better suit her de-
mographic. Later that day, I’d watch her
manage the sound check, delegating
tasks, issuing praise and remembering the
names of even minor staffers. She views
this work as a hands-on education.
“There has never really been some-
one who has done what I’ve done,” she
said. “I’m live-action. I’m the first real-life
license —the first human, who is not play-
ing a character, to be licensed as a brand.”
One only needs to look as far as Kim
Kardashian to see this isn’t exactly true.
But in the entertainment world, as in psy-
chology, it’s hard to say for sure where
being yourself gives way to projecting
a public persona. In any case, the senti-
ment remains: Siwa takes pride in her
image empire and loves to partake in the
work that it entails. She can sound like a
workaday Joe married to her job: “I have
a [learner’s] permit in California. I could
drive by myself if I had a free hour to go
get my license.”
California child-entertainment law
limits her work to six hours per day and
caps the number of consecutive workdays
at five during the school year. These laws
don’t yet apply to social media, but even
if they did, it would be hard to litigate
which parts of being JoJo Siwa count as
labor. Being a worldwide lifestyle brand is
an anomalous take on the human experi-
ence. Siwa knows this, though she doesn’t
really know what the conventional alter-
native might look like. To her, it feels nor-
mal to work with her mom and to have her
best friends be her 30-something danc-
ers. It feels normal to have her own prod-
ucts at big-box stores and to have a tête-
à-tête with Elton John.
“This is all I’ve known since I was 9,”
she admitted. “For about half my life now,
it’s just been what it is.”
All childhoods have their own circu-
lar logic. It takes growing up to earn your
own reality, and this can be hard for even
ordinary people who don’t have a wholeindustry on their shoulders. Siwa main-
tains she could walk away tomorrow,
though she knows the real question is
what happens if she doesn’t. When she
turned 16, the 5-year-olds turned 6. The
6-year-olds turned 7, and the 8-year-olds
turned 9.
“There will be a time when I age up,”
she said. “Everyone does grow up.”
But that day, she couldn’t yet predict
what that might look like.
“I think I’ll cross that bridge when I get
to it,” she said. “But I mean, what do peo-
ple want me to do? Wear black every day?”The world ouTSide was falling apart,
but inside the Beacon Theatre, no one
knew it. Roughly 2,000 little girls reached
new octaves as JoJo Siwa took the stage.
She zoomed from the dark on pink cus-
tom Heelys and stopped on her mark with
a broad, sporty stance. I tried to think of
another teen star who moved about with
such neutral wholesomeness. This was a
girl outside space and time.
A vast sea of bows stretched across the
room, tossing and turning with the tempo
of the music. “Who loves candy?” Siwa
asked. Where we were going, there was no
need for irony. The little girls shrieked as
she launched into a song—a cover of the
Strangeloves’ “I Want Candy” or a cover
of Aaron Carter’s cover of “I Want Candy.”
They shrieked as a unicorn pranced across
the stage. They shrieked when the screen
showed a thousand JoJo faces, emerging
from the mouth of a larger JoJo god.
With each next song, Siwa’s energy in-
creased. She sang about drama, and danc-
ing, and parties. She sang “Boomerang”
and “Every Girl’s a Super Girl,” and I got
chills against my better judgment. A mom
sitting next to me received a text: “Wow,
I feel so sorry for you.” At 8:30 p.m., the
crowd started to flag. Younger kids started
rubbing their eyes. A few parents dragged
screaming children down the aisles.
“Tonight’s show is really special to
me because as you all know I love Fred-
die Mercury,” Siwa said. Her voice, as
she spoke, got faster and faster. Her
baseline hype was hard to transcend, but
soon she achieved the highest plane of
emphasis. “So I just want to say thank
you for coming tonight, because it’s a
really special night for me, so it’s a really
special night for you, and I’m just really
happy to be here.” Culture
^
JoJo performs in Anaheim, Calif., on
Aug. 13, one of 89 stops on JoJo Siwa
D.R.E.A.M. the Tour