State Champ Radio Genre Now
Recently, d4vd found himself feeling happy – as it turns out, maybe a little too happy.
“Not that being happy is wrong,” clarifies the genre-blurring artist behind Hot 100 hits “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me” and who last year scored an opening gig on tour with SZA. But, he says, “I started going into these sessions making songs. I wasn’t making music. I’d go in and be like, ‘Let’s make the best song ever.’ But then I wasn’t being as introspective as I used to be, and I was making such surface-level music. It felt like it wasn’t even d4vd anymore.”
This story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
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And that’s the irony of an artist like d4vd – when things feel too defined, he himself feels lost.
The artist born David Burke is a bit of an anomaly. Born in Queens, New York and raised in Houston, Texas, d4vd grew up on a range of influences from Mozart to Chet Baker to eventually Lil Pump. After a classmate introduced him to Soundcloud, he quickly became a fan of then-underground and sonically diverse rappers like Lil Uzi Vert, XXXTentacion and Smokepurpp. (Even today, he says the platform’s algorithm fits his taste “to a T.”) All the while, his gaming obsession (with Fortnite in particular) led him to discover more indie-leaning rock, which he says predominantly shaped his own approach to making music – a venture that started at first as a means to avoid more copyright strikes on the gameplay montages he would post to YouTube.
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Having made his first two EPs (Petals to Thorns and The Lost Petals, both released on Darkroom/Interscope Records) in his sister’s closet using his iPhone and BandLab, d4vd’s music has a refreshingly stripped-back, DIY aesthetic – or, in his own words, an “ethereal nostalgia.” He believes identifying his music by a mood is more important than being defined by any one genre – a belief his managers and label supported from the jump.
“There was a drive to keep things organic and not change the formula,” he says of his early communications with Darkroom. “To let the creativity flow from where it usually came from…and not subjecting myself to any of the boxes of genre.”
Below, d4vd talks with Billboard about his own unusual relationship with genre and whether he thinks the concept will have much of a place in popular music’s future.
You previously told Billboard it’s an honor to be a gateway for music fans, especially young Black music fans, into alternative music. Why is that role so important to you?
I feel like the most important thing right now in the past five years of music has all been image. The driving force of marketing and promotion and everything has been [about] an artistic image.
[At first] I didn’t show my face at all, because I knew the music that I was making wasn’t what Black kids usually would make when they go into music. I had so many friends I tried to get into music and they instantly went for the hip-hop sound or the alt-rap sound or whatever was going on at the time, underground. But then I started making the indie alternative stuff, and I was like, “What if people didn’t know what I look like?” And that was the most important thing for me, because I wanted the art to speak for itself.
SZA spoke in her Billboard cover story about the “luxury” of trying something new and how it’s harder as a Black woman. When you were on tour with her, what did you learn from watching her blend so many influences into one seamless live show?
We didn’t talk about music that much during our time together, but I can see the career trajectory she’s built. And now SZA has become this sound that everybody’s so used to, but it’s all new people finding out about SOS first, and then not contextualizing her past projects. So that’s the thing about music too, there’s so many new ears hearing you every day. And your work isn’t always fully appreciated because of where you started. And people always see where you are [now]. So it’s interesting to see an artist that prolific have such a passion for making everything.
But then there’s a certain demographic that will only listen to one thing, so it’s kind of hard to kind of expand. I think Lil Yachty is doing that the best right now with his [Let’s Start Here] project, and always bringing in new fans to these sounds that have been around for a long time but aren’t fully appreciated because of the culture.
Who do you think your fanbase is?
I wouldn’t say for sure that I have a target audience yet. Although I’ve been making music for like, a year and a half, done a couple tours, we’ve seen the people that come to the shows… but I don’t have a certain group of people that I’m marketing to. So that allows me to kind of be free with the way I create. Right now, the people that listen to my music are people that are fans of certain sounds, not certain artists. So I don’t have to be compared to anybody else, because the fans like the sounds and not the person behind it.
Do you think that’s a specific trait of Gen-Z and how they consume and even discover music today?
I mean, completely. There’s no more artist development now. It’s like, people are marketing songs before artists, and it works sometimes. But the rest of the time it’s like, I’m hearing a song 50 times a day and I still don’t know who made it. And it’s in my playlist too. And I couldn’t care less about the artist. We’re in a weird spot right now, but I think more people are figuring out how to break through. And it’s just interesting to see internet kids take over the music industry.
Do you think in the next few years that we will still be defining music by genre?
Oh, absolutely. I feel like there’ll be even new genres. We’ve created so many subgenres that subgenres are becoming main genres. So I can’t imagine like, years down the line, how music is even categorized.
Have you ever with your team or friends made up a subgenre that could apply to d4vd?
You know what? No, I haven’t done that yet. I should, to be honest. It’d be like, hyper-alternative indiecore. I don’t know. [Laughs.] We can hashtag that.
How do you describe your music to people who may be unfamiliar?
I like to make old sounds new, I did it best with “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me.” It’s kind of like the old Morrissey from The Smiths, kind of Thom Yorke Radiohead rawness and passion that was lost due to over-technologized music. Now everything is layered with like, 50 vocal stacks and 50 harmonies and this, that and the third.
And kids’ brains are getting oversaturated with so much stuff. When they hear raw [music], it’s refreshing now – when it shouldn’t be refreshing, it should be how music is. I feel like I’m just taking advantage of the fact that kids are not hearing this kind of stuff around anymore. I feel like Steve Lacey is doing it the best right now, too. Dominic Fike, he’s doing crazy right now too.
And that’s the thing too, with genre. It’s like, we got to bring back the weird people making music. I don’t think I’d ever see Thom Yorke come on Tik Tok like, “Did I just make the song of the summer?”
Do you think some of that weirdness is lost because of social media? Are people too concerned now with how they come across?
Yeah, cause people are too worried about what works. Back in the day nothing worked. Nothing was working. So many things are working right now. Even the way people approach different genres in the same way. I don’t like seeing techno and EDM being promoted the same way an acoustic song is on TikTok…it’s like, I’m dancing to this and I’m crying to that, but they’re being marketed the same way and I’m confused.
Is there an artist or band that you would want to work with that you think would shock people who have listened to you before?
Deftones. I want to work with Chino [Moreno, Deftones frontman] so bad. So bad.
This story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Are there any producers that you’ve come across that you would want to work with?
Coming up, it was all YouTube beats, ‘cause I had no connections to anybody in the industry. So I’d go on YouTube and search up this type of beat and that type of beat. And that’s another thing, I wouldn’t go and search up: “indie type beat.” It was like a certain sound or feeling instead of a genre.
Like, if I get [the top spot] on New Music Friday and a bunch of new people are hearing this for the first time, I’d rather them ask, “Why is this on top of New Music Friday?” than have them be like, “Oh yeah, I understand why it is.” I like my music to make people think about why it’s in the position it is. And “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me” did that, and I loved it so much because people didn’t know why [they were taking off]. I want you to not be able to figure it out.
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For artists who are just starting out, is identifying with one genre helpful or hurtful?
It can be both. I feel like whatever makes you confident in your music and your sound, go for it. But I feel like there’s more freedom in not associating yourself with anything. And I feel like most people that start doing music forget that there’s freedom and are going off based on what they see around them. I see the benefits of being like, “Yeah, I just made this song so now I’m gonna make a hundred more like that and see if people like it.”
Whatever makes you confident in your music and your sound and helps you stick to it and not lose the passion for the music…You can lock yourself in a box and also break out of that box later if you want to. So just do whatever you want.
A sea of tweens and teens (with a few parents in tow) covered every inch of Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom on Nov. 17. Those closest to the stage had stood outside for hours, braving the rapidly dropping temperatures of a typical Midwest fall day as they waited in an entry line that circled around the block. They were there for a therapy session with Ivan Cornejo, the 19-year-old Mexican American artist who has become the unofficial therapist for a generation, providing a healing space at his shows with songs about love and heartbreak. Cornejo, who is soft-spoken and considerably shy, looked the part of a therapist clad in gray slacks, a dark dressy shirt and a piece of fabric wrapped around like a headband that has become part of his signature onstage look.
That night was his second sold-out show at the Aragon as part of his U.S. Terapia Tour, and it was indeed therapy for the fans in attendance, who shed a few tears throughout the night while also singing every song at the top of their lungs. Cornejo performed his Gen Z-approved anthems, like “Donde Estás (Where Are You)” and “Perro Abandonado (Abandoned Dog),” powered by moody sierreño guitars, but he also covered the 2006 folk-pop classic “Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White T’s and Jesse & Joy’s 2011 Latin pop ballad “¡Corre!,” showcasing the remarkable versatility that has made him one of regional Mexican music’s most eclectic acts today.
Born in Riverside, Calif., to Mexican parents, Cornejo epitomizes the modern música mexicana artist. He has embraced the traditional instruments, including the requinto and other acoustic guitars, that have long powered the regional Mexican sound, but has also given the enduring genre an alternative edge, incorporating electric guitars and darker, emo-like lyrics for a sad sierreño approach that has connected with his young and zealous fan base.
“A lot of my influences came from regional Mexican, but it is hard to just identify as just that,” says Cornejo, who broke out in 2021 with his first single, “Está Dañada (She Is Damaged),” which landed him a No. 1 entry on Billboard’s Latin Songwriters chart dated Oct. 30, 2021, while also becoming the second regional Mexican song to appear on the all-genre Hot 100. “All the genres that I listen to, like country and rock, have inspired me. My sound is regional Mexican with a twist.”
His experimentation has paid off. The singer-songwriter has placed 13 songs on the Hot Latin Songs chart, and his second album, Dañado, was No. 1 on Regional Mexican Albums for 37 nonconsecutive weeks, the fourth-most since the chart launched in 1985. The 2022 Billboard Latin Music Awards crowned him new artist of the year, he has generated 1.6 billion on-demand official streams in the United States, according to Luminate. Cornejo landed at No. 10 on Billboard’s 2023 year-end Top Latin Artists chart.
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
In August, following his Lollapalooza debut and on the heels of his Terapia trek, Cornejo signed with Interscope Records (he was previously signed to independent label Manzana Records), a significant and timely partnership for the mainstream label that, two months before, had added Karol G to its roster. Signing Cornejo felt like an acknowledgement of Mexican music’s global expansion in the past year, which has been led by a new generation of artists like Cornejo who are evolving the genre’s look and sound. In the first half of 2023, overall consumption of regional Mexican music jumped 42.1%, topping all other genres but K-pop.
“I’ve worked in Mexican music for many years and if you tried to step out of the regional Mexican circle 20 years ago, you would get punished,” explains Interscope executive vp Nir Seroussi. “I’m open-minded, but it was hard to think how the next generation would connect with this style of music. Now, here’s this kid who is borrowing from the roots and making it his own and there’s nothing forced about it. It feels powerful and authentic. Ivan could’ve chosen any other path, folk or indie rock, but for whatever reason, he chose regional Mexican as his starting point. But it doesn’t define him — he is defined by his songs and his guitar. I see Ivan expanding the range of Mexican music and that’s what makes it so much fun nowadays.”
After wrapping up his tour on Nov. 22 with a record-breaking concert at Toyota Arena in Ontario, Calif., becoming what the venue says is the highest-selling single Latin music show in its history, Cornejo is now focused on recording his third album — which he promises will be even “bigger” than Dañado thanks to “improvements musically and lyrically.” While the core of his sound will continue to be Mexican music, he isn’t letting genre labels box him in, and is eager to experiment with reggaetón and house music: “I have a lot of respect for artists that can do more than one genre. It’s not easy.”
Michael Buckner
While your music often falls under the música mexicana label, your sound is eclectic. What do you think helped define it?
I grew up listening to a bunch of different genres. My mom loved listening to pop, rock en español. My dad would listen to more regional stuff like Los Bukis, Vicente Fernández. My brother would listen to rock [and] alternative, like Metallica, and my sister was more into psychedelic EDM, almost. A mix of everything. I loved music while I was growing up and it was natural the way it came about.
You learned to play the guitar on YouTube. How complicated is that for someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?
I was 7 years old when I learned how to play. At first, I’d watch tutorials for the basics but when it came to learning entire songs, it was more of just watching the artist or musician play the guitar and copy what they did. Also, a lot of older songs didn’t have tutorials. I remember my dad would ask me to learn to play songs by Joan Sebastian or Los Bukis and he’d pay me $5 for a song. I mean, for a 7-year-old that was a lot of money. It was kind of my way of making $20 for the weekend. I was collecting some royalties back then. (Laughs.) But I also really loved music, so it never felt like a chore.
After you wrote your first song, who did you first show it to?
I showed my friends, and they motivated me to just keep making my own music. They were the first ones to say, “You’re kind of good.” I didn’t believe them at first but a part of me did, so that motivated me. I kept showing them the songs I was writing and asking what they thought. I was a little nervous to show them, but it wasn’t anything like an audition or anything too serious — if they didn’t like it, cool. It just meant I had to keep trying.
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Besides your father, your friends also exposed you to regional Mexican music. Tell me about your connection with the genre.
When they started showing me, it was around when T3R Elemento was dropping music. Their [2017] song “Rafa Caro” stood out to me. I thought, “I actually like this.” At the time, I wasn’t really listening to regional music; it was more like my dad’s mariachi or traditional music. A couple of years later, when Natanael Cano dropped [his 2019 album] Corridos Tumbados, it changed everything for me. He really took a big step and just changed the whole style of corridos. A lot of people adapted to that quickly.
Once you established your sound, how did you go on to make this a full-time career? Who helped you get everything up and running?
I started posting my videos [singing covers] on TikTok and Instagram. After I started getting recognition and seeing a lot of comments supporting me, it motivated me to write my own music. I dropped my first song three years ago, and that song was a big change for me. I was just doing TikToks and then labels started reaching out. It was like a mini dream come true. It was what I always wanted. I remember being 9 years old, playing the guitar, not knowing the music industry or how to get into it. I would always think, “Once I’m older, I’ll know how.”
Given your age and your fans’ age, do you think they are more open to hearing a lot of different sounds from you versus expecting only one thing?
I feel like Gen Z is fearless when it comes to listening to genres. I would hope they’re not expecting just one specific style from me. But I also have to find a way to experiment without catching them off guard. I need to do it gradually; that way I don’t scare them off.
Do you still try to listen to a variety of music?
I feel like my taste in music is always expanding. Every day I find a song that is different than what I’m normally listening to. The more variety you have, the better the chance of creating new unique music [yourself]. I listen to Miley Cyrus, she’s cool. Lana Del Rey. I remember watching The Great Gatsby and falling in love with her song “Young and Beautiful.” She has those songs that take you somewhere both emotionally and mentally.
Michael Buckner
Are there other producers or artists you’d like to work with?
There’s a couple, like Tainy and James Blake. Also, it’d be an honor to have RYX produce one of my songs. I would also love to collaborate with Post Malone or Miley Cyrus.
You wrapped your Terapia Tour in November. What was the inspiration behind that name?
I would see a lot of comments on social media from my fans, writing comments like, “Your music saved me.” They’re talking about my music like it’s some sort of therapy. So, I made each concert into a session. At the meet-and-greet they’d tell me their stories, which is heartwarming. Some are really sad stories. It made me realize how much power you have in helping these young kids with things they might be going through. I’m at home but my music will always be with them. It’s something I think about a lot. I really don’t want to let them down.
Música mexicana is massive. How do you want to move it forward?
The charts are full of Mexican artists. I’m excited for next year to drop the album and be part of that massive moment. As of right now, my sound is sad sierreño but next year it could change and might not feel or sound like sad sierreño — it could be more alternative, rock and a bit more like all my influences.
What does it mean when you hear that you can move an entire culture forward with your lyrics and your style of Mexican music?
It’s a great role but also a big one. A lot of pressure. But I think I will do my best doing things that feel natural to me.
Taylor Swift is currently the biggest pop star in the world. It goes beyond her record-breaking albums, the scale of her world economy-boosting Eras Tour, gossip about her love life or even her household name status — in 2023, familiarity with the 34-year-old singer-songwriter’s lyrics, whereabouts and condiment choices is almost required for carrying a knowledgeable conversation about pop culture.
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That’s why, as the years go by, it gets harder to believe that Swift didn’t start her career in pop music. And while the Pennsylvania-born musician has always demonstrated mainstream sensibilities and mass appeal, country was an identity she eagerly embodied for several albums as she rose to stardom — from the cowboy boots she paired with every outfit to the now-faded southern accent she picked up after moving with her family to the genre’s Mecca, Nashville Tennessee, when she was barely a teenager.
She started flirting with pop sonics in the early 2010s, when she was still in a committed relationship with country but had already been pulling pop star numbers with mainstream-level crossover hits. In the same year she won Entertainer of the Year at the 2012 Academy of Country Music Awards, she dropped the EDM-influenced “I Knew You Were Trouble” and sang about dressing up like “hipsters” on the sparkly earworm “22,” simultaneously accumulating radio and chart recognition in both country and pop.
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But come 1989, her crush on pop had become a full-blown love affair, for which she chose to publicly and amicably break up with country music indefinitely. “For the record, this is my very first documented, official pop album,” she said while announcing the project atop the Empire State Building in a livestream hosted by Yahoo. Later, she explained to Billboard, “I followed my gut instinct and tried not to think about how hard it would be to break it to country radio… I didn’t want to break anyone’s heart.”
From top to bottom, 1989 was unflinchingly pop, inspired heavily by the shimmering grandeur of ‘80s top 40 hits. Collaborators included some of the mainstream’s hugest producers — Max Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder — and gone was any trace of fiddle, twangy guitar or mention of the word “y’all.”
Also gone were any of the commercial benchmarks Swift had previously set for herself – 1989 blew them out of the water. Following its release on Oct. 27, 2014, the album spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, became Swift’s first LP to produce multiple Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hits – “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space” and “Bad Blood” with Kendrick Lamar – and debuted with 1.287 million copies sold in its first week, the highest of her career thus far (the album was not initially made available on streaming). Her departure from country would go down as one of the single greatest business moves in the modern music industry, one that only continues to pay off for the supernova; nearly a decade later, the origins of Swift’s current status as cultural overlord can still be traced back to the overwhelming success of 1989.
But how exactly did Swift achieve a crossover that didn’t just meet expectations, but exceed them beyond belief? In speaking on that topic with pop and country radio experts and veteran Swifties, one word comes up a lot: authenticity.
This story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
“People sort of expected that this [would be] a natural transition for her,” remembers Audacy’s Erik Bradley, a Chicago pop radio brand manager and music director. “Her realness just helped make it that much easier. Her personality and her demeanor, it just all feels that it came together perfectly for a smooth transition. You have to be authentic [to cross over successfully]. And she is that.”
“[Swift’s] approach felt like, ‘How can we do this? What do I need to improve? Do you like this?’” agrees SiriusXM + Pandora’s vp of music programming Alex Tear, noting the singer-songwriter’s humility as a newcomer to the format. “When you have that kind of dialogue and you’re open-minded and your ego allows it, you can start to shape exactly what you need to elevate to the levels she’s elevated to. She listened.”
Essentially, Swift’s genre leap made fans out of naysayers who may have speculated that the star simply wanted to gain more money or fame by crossing over. She approached 1989 with a genuine love, appreciation and studiousness for the genre that you can hear in the album’s 13 songs – which were embraced by critics, industry heads and fans alike.
“The music was just so superior,” says Bradley. “That resonated. People were playing multiple songs because all of them were so undeniable. ‘Style,’ ‘Blank Space’ and ‘Shake it Off’ were on the radio at the same time, which is not easy, for top 40 to be playing that many songs [from one album] at one time.”
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Swift was also smart enough to know that, though her lyricism already made her special in any contemporary music space, she needed to bring something fresh to the pop landscape if she wanted to stand out. It wouldn’t have been enough to merely sing “Out of the Woods” over a beat borrowed from the EDM or R&B-infused tracks that were dominating the charts at the time. She also had to fill a space not yet occupied by fellow mid-2010s hitmakers like Ariana Grande, Meghan Trainor, Drake or Pharrell.
That’s where those star producers, as well as an on-the-rise Jack Antonoff, came in, assisting Swift in finding a specific blend of breezy, forward-moving sounds accented by synths and programmed drums that was entirely her own. Working with some of the biggest names in mainstream music on 1989 was another solid calculation on Swift’s part, as it gave her foray into pop “a lot of credibility,” says 25-year-old Swift expert and pop culture podcaster Brooke Uhlenhop.
“She’s already established as such a great artist that people could trust that she knew what she was doing,” continued Uhlenhop, who’s been a fan since Swift’s debut era around 2006. “When she finally made that jump, people were like, ‘Oh, okay. This is really good.’ I think 1989 was more of a representation of her true self than she was letting people know before.”
It likely helped that Swift was upfront about the change from the beginning of 1989’s album cycle. She didn’t necessarily have to vocalize that she was going pop, and could’ve just let the music speak for itself, but making a direct statement clarifying 1989’s influences made her switch-up a cultural moment in and of itself. It had admirers and casual observers paying attention before the record even came out, keen to see if Swift could pull it off.
“I really liked that, the honesty of ‘Here’s what it’s going to be,’” recalls 25-year-old Pulitzer-winner and Swiftie Kristine White, who recalls sneaking into her elementary school’s computer lab to watch videos of the star. “There were so many people when I was in high school who first became Swifties because of 1989, because they weren’t country fans. If she’d kept easing into that transition, I don’t think she would’ve gained that huge following that she did.”
Swift also went out of her way to distinguish her public image as being different from the Taylors of the past, from chopping off her famous blonde locks to moving out of Tennessee into a glamorous apartment in lower Manhattan. For the first time, she also incorporated specific items into the iconography of her album – seagulls, paper airplane necklaces, Polaroid photos – to further solidify and commodify her new identity in pop.
“She completely reinvented herself,” adds White. “She went to New York. She cut off her hair. She was always with her big [#Squad] girlfriend group. She had a completely different style. Everything about herself was completely new, saying, ‘No, I’m really moving forward. You’re not going to see those country ringlet curls anymore.’”
Bradley agrees – 1989 was the full package, as an album and era. “She and her team made all the right moves,” says the radio executive. “Everything was very well executed. Aesthetics, videos, press, television appearances. It just felt like everything connected, everything felt right.”
That’s not to say she completely deserted her old self, though. She still went to great lengths to remind her OG Swifties that she was “still just a girl like I am,” says White, touching on Swift’s interactions with fans on Tumblr, her inaugural Secret Session listening parties and maintaining beloved traditions like the coded messages in her lyric booklets. “Keeping that authenticity really helped keep the older fans.”
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Swift also wisely courted the people that counted in pop without “giving the finger to country music,” as put by country radio consultant and former Max Media operations manager John Shomby, who met Swift when she was 16. “She stayed true to herself and knew who her friends were in the business and stayed close to them, but also respected everybody else and did not push back when there was pushback on her.”
“Here’s what’s really refreshing: Taylor Swift was available,” remembers Tear from the pop side. “She traveled, she did the miles, she met everyone, she had such in-depth relationships that people became cheerleaders. One of the key formulas was visiting the programmers that push the buttons. Then, they feel part of the movement.”
This story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
A decade later, Swift has only exponentially expanded what she started with 1989, which remains just as popular today. Just as she ended 2014 with 1989 at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, she recently sailed into 2024 with her re-recorded 1989 (Taylor’s Version) again at the top of the chart, logging even higher first-week sales numbers than she did the first time around (1.359 million in traditional sales, to be exact). And in between both iterations, she continued to do what worked for her in the first coming of 1989 — trying out different genres on projects like the folk-tinged Folklore and Evermore and staying curious, hungry, humble, savvy and yes, authentic.
For instance, Shomby still maintains a relationship with Swift and her team, even though it’s been a decade since his industry coincided with hers.
“Last time I saw her was three years ago when she was here at Nissan Stadium [in 2019], and I went back to see her. My wife and daughter were not there and the first thing she said was, ‘Where are my girls?’” he recalls with a smile you can hear over the phone. “I’m one of those people, anybody who criticizes Taylor, I’ll pull them aside and say, ‘Let me tell you about her.’
“You feel like you’re the only person in the room when she talks to you,” he adds. “That’s a rarity — especially in our business, especially on the pop side.”
“Is Laufey jazz?”
This was a recent topic among the armchair musicologists of Reddit’s r/Jazz thread, who spend much of their time debating the genre. It’s also the title of a 33-minute deep dive by YouTuber and musician Adam Neely where he dissects the 24-year-old cellist, singer and songwriter’s harmonic and chordal choices on a granular, theoretical level in an attempt to answer the question too.
Trying to neatly categorize whether Laufey (pronounced LAY’-vay) makes music that is jazz or something else misses the point of what she is doing. Laufey is building a modern and surprisingly lucrative musical world out of old-school building blocks — ii-V-I jazz chords, classical music motifs, bebop ad-libs — plus more than a pinch of Taylor Swift-ian storytelling.
But it’s Laufey’s wider aesthetic world — “Laufey Land,” as she calls it — that a remarkable number of Gen Z fans are flocking to. While traditional jazz can feel esoteric, Laufey makes it accessible by inviting followers into Laufey Land on social media — a place where her best days involve sipping lattes, reading Joan Didion and wearing the latest styles from Sandy Liang, and where listening to Chet Baker and playing the cello are the absolute coolest, hippest things to do. “It’s all kind of illustrative of my life and my music,” she says, and she shares both online generously.
Laufey Land (which has also become the name of her official fan HQ Instagram account) has also captured the imagination of the music business: sources say she sparked a multimillion-dollar bidding war last year among record labels that have rarely seen so much commercial potential in a jazz-adjacent act, though she remains independent for now. Perhaps that’s because her music renders a wistful, romantic portrait of young adulthood that can feel fantastical yet still within reach. And even if you’re not quite familiar with her own lofty influences — Chopin, Liszt, Baker, Fitzgerald, Holiday — Laufey invites you to sit with her, listen along and get lost in a magical place where, sure, the music is jazz-y, but is also so much more than that.
Raised between Iceland and the Washington, D.C., area, Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir grew up surrounded by classical musicians. Her Chinese mother is a violinist, and her grandparents were violin and piano professors; it was her Icelandic father who introduced her to jazz. “There was just so much music in the house growing up,” she recalls today. “It was a sonic blend of those two.”
Laufey and her identical twin sister, Junia — who now acts as Laufey’s creative director and is a frequent guest star in her TikToks — started playing young. Eventually Junia landed on violin and Laufey on cello (though she also plays piano and guitar). Until college, she saw herself more as a performer and practitioner of music than as a writer of it. But at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she found many of her new friends were penning their own songs.
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Though Laufey says she always listened to pop music as well — she especially loved the storybook tales of early Swift songs — she felt that “oftentimes the lyrics and the storytelling resonated, but the sound [of pop music] wasn’t completely there. I didn’t feel like it was something I could make, and I wanted to make something that sounded more like me.” A self-described “sheltered orchestra kid,” she also didn’t yet have much life experience to expound upon lyrically.
Like so many artists before her, Laufey says she was finally propelled into songwriting when she had her heart broken. Borrowing chords closely related to the Great American Songbook that she had spent so much time studying already, she created “Street by Street,” which eventually became her first single. She was 20 years old. “The way I wanted to write was to find this middle ground between the very old and the very new,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you can do this. You can write something new in the style of George Gershwin or Irving Berlin — something older.’ ”
When COVID-19 hit and forced everyone into lockdown, school ended, and to stay in vocal shape, Laufey began posting her takes on jazz standards online, her smooth alto accompanied by either cello arrangements or acoustic guitar. “The day I got back from school and started isolating, I told myself, ‘OK, I’m just going to write and post as many videos online of me singing jazz standards as I can,’ ” she recalls. “I’ll just see where it takes me.” An early video of her singing “It Could Happen to You” “hit some sort of algorithm,” as she puts it, and quickly, her following grew, attracting interest from a number of record labels, though she opted to sign to AWAL instead.
Today — one EP, two studio albums and one live album with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra later — Laufey is quite possibly the most popular artist making jazz or jazz-adjacent music, according to metrics like Spotify monthly listeners (24 million) and Instagram and TikTok followers (2.2 million and 3.6 million, respectively). Her breakout single, the bossa nova-inspired “From the Start,” is a massive hit, with 313.1 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate. And she’s now a Grammy nominee: Her second album, Bewitched, released in September 2023, is up for best traditional pop vocal album, an eclectic category this year where she’s the one new talent alongside veterans Bruce Springsteen and Liz Callaway and the late Stephen Sondheim. “It feels very, very validating, especially in the category I’m in,” Laufey says.
Tony Luong
The debate about what genre signifiers define Laufey may still matter at the Grammys (and on the Billboard charts, which categorize her as “jazz”), but there is far less need to label music than there once was, benefiting artists like Laufey who bridge disparate sonic worlds. “I think people’s desire to categorize things into genres was so rooted in radio, where they were trying to fit into a certain format to succeed,” says Max Gredinger, Laufey’s manager and a partner at Foundations Artist Management. “I think that is kind of ingrained in us, but now that terrestrial radio has certainly diminished in impact, I think people are still wrapping their heads around this new world.”
Around the time Laufey started to build her audience, TikTok’s reign over music discovery had just taken hold. It’s a place where personality and catchiness count but genre is of no consequence — the perfect platform for an artist like Laufey where she could define her jazz-inflected pop as not just a sound but as an aesthetic, a feeling, a lifestyle both timeless and very much of the moment.
Gredinger calls Laufey and her sister “the 2024 version of what you think of as a marketing executive. I would bet on them to do that job best a trillion times over.” Beyond music and slice-of-life videos, Laufey invites her fans into her process in other ways. She has posted sheet music versions of her songs before releasing them, asking her musician fans (of which there are many) to try to learn the song without hearing any reference and post the results, which she’ll then repost in the lead-up to release day.
She also hosts a book club, with selections — from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History to Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted — that feel akin to her music and her personal style, somewhere between darkly academic and coquettishly feminine. On the release day for Bewitched, she hosted A Very Laufey Day, a sort-of scavenger hunt around Los Angeles, involving everything she likes to do in a day. It included special Laufey Lattes, a display of her book club selections at a local shop and a merchandise pop-up at the Melrose Trading Post; at the end, she treated participants to a secret performance in West Hollywood’s Pan Pacific Park.
“It was like a normal Saturday for me,” Laufey says with a laugh. “I would’ve done all those things either way. I drove around West Hollywood and saw girls in white shirts, jeans and ballet flats carrying lattes and I would roll down the window and say hey and surprise them.” Her fans range from ultra-online teens to nerdy music majors to nostalgic grandparents, but her core base is Gen Z, many of whom do not listen to jazz or classical otherwise.
When she was younger, Laufey says, she never anticipated the mainstream popularity she has now. “If anything, I thought I would go the conservatory route, practice cello and try to get into the best orchestra I could, like my mother did,” she says. “I was so focused on being realistic that I almost didn’t allow myself to dream so big.”
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She remembers one of her first shows after pandemic lockdowns eased up, at New York’s Rockwood Music Hall, where she heard there was a line of fans outside waiting to be let in. “I was really confused,” she says. “I grew up going to symphony concerts primarily, and nobody lines up like that, you just walk in. I was like, ‘Oh, no. Let them in! What is happening?’” It was the first time she realized that her fans weren’t just a number on her screen: They would show up for her in real life, learn all the words to her songs and were shockingly young.
Norah Jones, a hero of Laufey’s and one of the few modern artists to, like her, bridge the jazz-pop divide, says she sees “a lot of similarities” between herself and Laufey. “We both come from a background steeped in jazz and have formed our own paths from there,” Jones says. “[But] because social media and streaming have changed the music industry so much, her journey is also so different from mine.” (The two recently collaborated on a set of holiday songs, Christmas With You.)
Unlike Jones, who has a long-standing relationship with Blue Note Records/Capitol Records, Laufey has opted to stay independent — a clear sign of the times. Industry sources say she recently sparked a multimillion-dollar bidding war among major labels, but she finally decided to keep her business among herself, Gredinger and AWAL (which handles label services and distribution) instead.
“With the kind of music I make,” she says, “I make very individualistic choices. I’m very confident in my music. I know what I want, and my current team at AWAL has let me make those creative decisions. I’ve had a great time being independent, so I haven’t felt like I’ve been lacking anything. Making independent decisions is my main focus.”
In the future, Laufey Land’s borders are likely to only expand further. She envisions her sweeping love songs soundtracking musicals and films someday, like Harry Connick Jr., Jon Batiste and Sara Bareilles have done. The ultimate dream? A James Bond theme. “I’ll just keep on repeating that I want that, so it manifests itself maybe,” she says, smiling.
Batiste, who also knows what it’s like to move between jazz and pop music spaces, thinks she’s on the right track. “Laufey approaches all of these many facets [of a music career] with a great deal of prowess, deftness of craft and insight into how to connect with her community,” he says. “That will only continue to attract more curious listeners.”
“I think there are a lot of barriers to entry to listening to jazz… [It] can be very daunting,” Laufey says. “I’m lucky I was born into that world, but I’m aware of how scary it can seem. It seems like something that’s reserved for maybe older or more educated audiences. I think that’s so sad, because both jazz and classical music were genres that were the popular music of one time. It was for everyone. That’s one of the reasons I want to fuse jazz and classical into my own music: I want to make a more accessible space.”
Tony Luong
She points to artists like DOMi & JD BECK and Samara Joy, young jazz talents she admires who are actively evolving the genre today. “Jazz hasn’t gone anywhere — it’s actually, I think, gone into music more,” Laufey says, pointing to its influence on hip-hop, R&B and pop. “The amount of times I hear a pop song really hitting the charts and everyone’s like, ‘It’s so good’ — in my head, I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s because of this jazz harmony that really draws you in.’”
Her own sound borrows primarily from that of the jazz greats of the 1940s and ’50s — one reason, perhaps, why her songs connect so well. As tracks featuring sizable samples or interpolations of older hits continue to rise on the Billboard charts, experts posit that the pandemic led to an increasing interest in songs that feel nostalgic.
Though Laufey’s work sounds quite different from, say, “First Class” by Jack Harlow, the same primal desire for familiarity and comfort is at the root of its appeal. “I think a lot of the sounds that she pulls from, every person has some connection to,” Gredinger says. “You would be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t have some memory or relationship with jazz or classical. It’s a foundational experience most everyone has had, combined with modern, honest songwriting.”
And it’s the combination of those elements that create the foundation of Laufey’s own brave new world. One where true love is possible, every day is romanticized, major sevenths are essential — and all kinds of listeners are welcome.
September’s Hip-Hop Forever show at Madison Square Garden in New York — part of the yearlong celebration of the genre’s 50th anniversary — brought the stars out. Alongside legends who helped build hip-hop’s storied past was a slightly more unexpected booking: Jamaican dancehall king Sean Paul. He tore the house down with hits like “Give It Up to Me” and “Like Glue,” reminders of a time, in the early 2000s, when dancehall records topped the Billboard charts — when Paul, who has now traded his trademark cornrows for a crisp, neat Caeser, effortlessly mixed dancehall’s infectious riddims with hip-hop sensibilities and aesthetics. Blending reggae and dancehall with other popular genres wasn’t a new idea when Paul did it, but no one else besides Bob Marley and Shaggy had done so to greater effect.
At least until now. That night, Paul wasn’t the only dancehall MC to bless the stage. One of the “special guests” teased on the show’s flier was a comparatively little-known 29-year-old guy from Montego Bay, Jamaica, that most audience members couldn’t pick out of a lineup if they were promised the numbers to the next Powerball. But though silence at first overtook the crowd when he stepped onstage, Teejay looked every inch the star when he arrived.
Invited as a guest of Funkmaster Flex, the longtime Hot 97 DJ who oversaw the night’s proceedings, Teejay emerged dripped out in a Gucci jacket and matching sneakers. And when the opening chords of his current hit, “Drift,” blared out of the speakers, concertgoers slowly caught on: This was the guy who made the song that had taken over TikTok for a few months last year. As Teejay warmed up to the crowd, so did they, breaking into the signature dance that would help propel “Drift” to a No. 47 debut on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart three weeks after the Garden performance.
It was a big night for Teejay — one that affirmed that the hard work he’d been putting in over the past three years was finally paying off. So what if few can yet recognize him by face? They recognize his music. Well, sort of.
“Most people still don’t know what I’m saying,” says Teejay with a laugh, thinking back to the Garden show. We’re in Los Angeles, meeting for the second time at his Billboard photoshoot, and his fit looks as if it costs more than most people’s monthly income. “But they love the vibe. They love the music. They love the sound. So, I just work with it.”
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Born Timoy Janeyo Jones in Montego Bay, Teejay learned early on to just work with it. To most people from outside Jamaica, Montego Bay is an idyllic resort city, but it has a shadier side that doesn’t make travel brochures or TV commercials. One in which families of nine like Teejay’s — he grew up with his mother, uncle, five brothers and one sister — live in small board houses, in sometimes dangerous neighborhoods (like Glendevon, where Teejay’s family lived). His brothers were all musicians who as kids picked up digital production and recording software like FruityLoops and Pro Tools to produce music. Naturally, Teejay took to them as well.
“I started recording myself at the age of 9,” he says. “Every day, I would come home and see them recording with Pro Tools and I’d just sit there for hours, and when they’d gone, I’d just record myself.”
Michael Buckner
The autodidactic method worked. By the time Teejay was in seventh grade, he decided to leave school behind and focus on music full time. “My teacher asked me, ‘What do you want to be in life?’ And everybody in the class said they want to be a policeman, a lawyer, a judge, a doctor. I tell the teacher I want to be an artist. She said, ‘That’s not professional. Give me something else.’ I said, ‘Entertainer!’ ” When he was supposed to be taking notes, Teejay was instead tapping out riddims on his desk. His teacher told him that he needed to take that noise to the music class — so he did.
The way he saw it, he could help his family much more financially if he dedicated his time to growing into an artist like 2Pac or the Jamaican great Jah Cure — two of the MCs idolized in his neighborhood. “Growing up in my community, we listened to 2Pac every single day. Once you’re a Montegonian, you’re going to know about 2Pac and Jah Cure music.”
His focus paid off when Tommy Lee — fellow Montegonian and controversial mentee of incarcerated dancehall star Vybz Kartel — let Teejay rock with him and his crew, even helping the fledgling artist score his first live performance in 2010. The experience left Teejay feeling like he could actually become a star. But it would take a good while longer before the dreams in his mind materialized outside of his head.
Steve Jobs famously said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Teejay watched the artists who were remaking dancehall in the early 2000s — artists like Movado, Aidonia, Busy Signal and Tommy Lee, who were all more different than similar — and studied what made them connect not only with Jamaican fans, but the throngs of dancehall fans around the world. He took bits and pieces from each one’s style, creating a dancehall sound that was fluid, melodic and, at times, lyrically crazy.
Over the next eight years, he produced a torrent of music, culminating in his 2018 regional hit, “Uptop Boss.” Though it didn’t make much noise in the United States, the slinky gangster dance track was a massive hit on the island; its official video has racked up over 16 million views on YouTube.
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Then, tragedy struck: Two of Teejay’s close friends, who often appeared in his videos and lyrics — Romario “Grimmy Boss” Wallen and Philip “Afro-Man” Lewis — were gunned down in St. Andrew, Jamaica, on June 4, 2020. (The two were reportedly just hanging out on the block when a shooter pulled up and opened fire.) Condolences poured out from fans and fellow dancehall artists, with many posting photos and comments on Instagram. But Teejay went quiet: He deleted everything on his Instagram page except for two posts of his departed friends.
Wallen’s and Lewis’ deaths derailed Teejay’s momentum just as he was finding his footing as an artist — but they were also a wake-up call. He took time away from music, leaving the country for a bit and settling at a friend’s house in Miami to refocus his energy and clear his head. His friends’ deaths affected both his physical and mental health: He changed his diet and started to eat healthier, in turn losing a lot of weight. But the biggest change wasn’t what he was putting into his body — it was what he put into the world.
He no longer wanted to make music that was overtly gangster. “Hardcore music has a barrier,” he says. “It can’t be played in a Christian home or in certain homes. I decided that we’re not going to go violent; I want to do something happy.” To achieve that, he decided to make some changes — starting with who handled his business. “Jamaican artists don’t even know what a proper management is,” Teejay says. “As a Jamaican artist, we have to still go out there and look for a chauffeur ourselves and an interview, everything. Some people don’t even know that some people in Jamaica who say that they’re a manager are basically a booking agent.”
Sharon Burke, the leader of Teejay’s new management team since 2021, is much more than a booking agent. Co-founder and president of the Kingston, Jamaica-based Solid Agency, Burke has worked for years to bring reggae and dancehall music to a global audience. She has had a hand in the success of many of Jamaica’s biggest superstars, including Freddie McGregor, Barrington Levy, Bounty Killer and Aidonia. And her company produces the annual Island Music Conference, bringing the wider music world to Jamaica. When it came time to set up the Verzuz battle between Bounty Killer and Beanie Man — ultimately watched by over 3 million — it was Burke who Verzuz creators Swizz Beatz and Timbaland turned to.
Burke believes in Teejay — that he has what it takes to really leave a mark on the game much as some of her previous clients have — but she has impressed upon him that good music alone won’t take him to the top “I said, ‘Listen, if you’re just going to sit by and think it’s talent alone, I can’t work with you. It’s hard work. It’s about presentation. It’s about excellence. It’s about choreography in the way you move. So, if you’re ready for that journey, I will go it with you.’ ”
Michael Buckner
One of the first things Burke did was to connect Teejay with Panda, one of their in-house producers. While Teejay was in Miami getting his mind right, he began to think beyond the boundaries of the genre he’d worked within for so long. He loves dancehall — it’s the music he was raised on and the music that changed his life — but he understands that, right now, dancehall and reggae aren’t as popular as they once were.
Back in 2003 — when Sean Paul was hopping on remixes with Busta Rhymes, when LL Cool J jumped on Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go” remix, when Elephant Man had everyone ponning de river — new dancehall artists were making serious waves in rap and R&B music. Fast forward to 2021, when the bestselling reggae and dancehall artists in the United States were Paul, Bob Marley and Shaggy. No new artists broke onto the Billboard Hot 100 that year.
Now, another type of Black diasporic music, Afrobeats, has assumed the position reggae and dancehall once occupied. Over the past three years, an increasing number of new African artists have broken onto the charts with big singles, like Wizkid and Tems’ 2020 hit, “Essence,” the first Nigerian song in history to appear on the Hot 100, reaching No. 9 on the chart. Now, mainstream American rappers like Drake and Future and singers like Chris Brown are tapping the genre’s ascendant stars to help them move units. Future’s first Hot 100 No. 1 as a lead artist, for instance, came courtesy of a song that heavily samples Tems’ song “Higher” from her 2020 EP, Broken Ears.
“They’re saying now that Afrobeats is bigger than dancehall,” Teejay says. “I was at a show where there was an Afrobeats artist on the stage — I won’t say any names — and he was saying ‘our music is your music’ because they took pieces of all the legendary [dancehall] artists’ music.”
He took to the makeshift studio in the garage of his friend’s Miami house, puzzling over a riddim he’d had in his head for close to three years but couldn’t quite figure out how to translate into a workable beat. He wanted to make something that was new but also paid homage to the warm dancehall feeling that radiated from songs made by legends like Supacat and Shabba Ranks. Then, one day in 2022, he received a batch of beats from Panda. “I called the beat-maker and said, ‘Bro. You got it. This is good.’ ”
What he got turned into “Drift,” the slick dancehall ditty that could easily be mistaken for an Afrobeats song if not for its decidedly dancehall drum programming and, of course, Teejay’s perfectly syncopated bars that swell into what has become an inescapable chorus.
“Me and the team, we created something called ‘Afro dancehall,’ ” he says with a laugh. “It’s more of an Afrobeats song with a dancehall artist on it. At the time, dancehall music was kind of slow and really toxic, based on everything that was going on in Jamaica. I was like, ‘We need to embrace happiness [in] the world. Something everyone can dance to.’ We created that old dancehall feeling where people just want to dance. It’s simple math. We used less words and more melody so people can remember it.”
That last, key idea came to Teejay from his mentor, Shaggy, the platinum-selling superstar who’s also one of Burke’s partners at Solid Agency. Combining reggae and dancehall with music from around the world and making it as simple as possible to sing along to has been a Shaggy trademark since he dropped the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Boombastic” back in 1995. “He has been telling me, ‘Listen: choice of words,’ ” Teejay says. “ ‘Try to say less, but make sure it’s effective and that people can understand it.’ ”
“[Teejay’s] incredibly talented. He’s a guy that is making music outside of the box and he also works extremely f–king hard,” Shaggy says. “And I think that is the formula that is needed to have a very long and successful career.”
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A little luck also helps, and it was on Teejay’s side when it came to promoting “Drift.” He gave the song to a DJ who then leaked it on TikTok, and it took on a life of its own, becoming a top-used sound on the platform. Soon, celebrities like Jamaican Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt and Cardi B were making TikToks doing the dance from the music video. “Drift” became Teejay’s first Billboard chart entry, landing at No. 47 on R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay.
While the song took Jamaican and U.S. audiences by surprise, its success isn’t that shocking to Shaggy. “In the early days, when I played stadiums in Africa, the majority of the music they were playing was dancehall,” he recalls. “The traditional music that you might hear from Fela Kuti and some of these original artists over there wasn’t the type of music you would hear in the nightclubs. Dancehall is what you heard in the nightclub. Whether it be Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, those are the songs that were played — dancehall. It has had a very strong influence on the African culture. So, to me, it’s all one.”
What does the future of dancehall look like if one of its most popular artists is co-opting the sound of another genre to make waves internationally? “If you listen to dancehall from the 2000s, it’s a totally different dancehall than what we have today. The sound of it is different,” Shaggy says. “The dancehall they make today is more a trap kind of dancehall. That’s just evolution at the end of the day. With an artist like Teejay, it gives him the opportunity to experiment and try a different vibe.”
On Dec. 15, 2023, Teejay released an official remix of “Drift” featuring none other than leading Afrobeats artist Davido (the song also has a couple of rap remixes at this point). He sounds perfectly at home on the track; if you didn’t know any better, you might assume that Teejay was the guest feature. Its success, and Teejay’s own, are proof that there’s an audience for this new sound, one that keeps dancehall’s driving groove intact while mixing in the breezy and blithe feel of Afrobeats. And if anything, it proves dancehall is at its best when pushed to new limits.
“I hope [new artists] keep experimenting and keep finding new ways,” Shaggy says. In other words, they just got to work with it.
“Do you have my black purse?” Sexyy Red asks one of her team members as she makes her way in front of the camera. As her brazen track “Sexyy Red for President” blasts in the background, the breakout St. Louis rapper pulls out two massive wads of cash, carefully placing one atop her trademark bright red wig as if it were a crown.
For all the boisterous energy of her high-octane hit singles, Sexyy Red is pretty quiet in person. The clock’s approaching midnight on the day of her Billboard photo shoot — and she’s quickly approaching the birth of her second child — so her relative calm is understandable. Nonetheless, as each new song from the deluxe version of her Hood Hottest Princess mixtape booms through the room’s speakers, Sexyy quickly shifts into boss mode, helping direct her shoot. She’s undoubtedly a star — and she was one long before “Pound Town,” her January collaboration with Tay Keith, changed her life.
As hip-hop celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023, Sexyy Red became a dominant force in the cultural conversation around the genre and where it’s headed next. Go to a college party blasting her “Hellcats SRTs,” or watch a club explode when “Yonce Freestyle” drops, and the 25-year-old rapper’s influence is obvious. From the tongue-in-cheek “Looking for the Hoes” to the Chief Keef-evoking “Shake Yo Dreads,” her music resonates with anyone willing to engage with and embrace their ratchet side.
Unlike many of her female peers, Sexyy’s raps aren’t drenched in metaphors and punchlines; her lyrics sound as if she’s saying the very first thing that pops into her head — which is exactly the case. When she spits, “B-tch, if it’s some beef, let me know, sh-t, what’s up?/All that talkin’ on the net, that’s gon’ get your head bust,” in “I’m the Sh-t,” Sexyy isn’t weaving subliminal shots throughout intricate wordplay — she’s plainly addressing her opps with equal parts humor, apathy and stone-cold seriousness.
According to Luminate, Hood Hottest Princess has collected 447.6 million official on-demand U.S. streams, helping it reach No. 13 on the Top Rap Albums chart, as well as making appearances on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums (No. 21) and the Billboard 200 (No. 62). Sexyy has charted a pair of top 10s on the Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay ranking: “SkeeYee” (No. 6) and “Rich Baby Daddy” (No. 2), with the former also becoming the inaugural No. 1 hit on the newly launched TikTok Billboard Top 50.
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Sexyy dominated 2023 amid a notable lull for her genre overall in the marketplace. Last year, no hip-hop artist topped the Billboard 200 until mid-July, when Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape became the first No. 1 hip-hop album since Metro Boomin’s Heroes & Villains the previous December, marking the longest gap between No. 1 hip-hop albums since a 34-week drought in 1992-93. In September, Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red” became hip-hop’s first Billboard Hot 100-topping single since Nicki Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl” in August 2022.
Both “Paint the Town Red” and Pink Tape were buoyed by the danceable, top 40-friendly sounds of pop-rap and Jersey club, respectively, signaling a shift from the 2010s, when dominant trap artists regularly launched new singles and albums to the tops of Billboard’s marquee all-genre charts. While Sexyy didn’t make quite the commercial impact of “Paint the Town Red” or Uzi’s “Just Wanna Rock,” her remarkable string of 2023 hits suggests hip-hop may evolve in a new direction: one in which less crossover-aimed rap can still captivate the culture, and in which a woman with Sexyy’s raw, raucous style can achieve mainstream dominance without a top 40-friendly hit.
Born Janae Wherry, Sexyy grew up in St. Louis listening to the likes of Webbie, Boosie BadAzz and Trina — artists that embody the unapologetically hood energy that now courses through every Sexyy Red song. As Sexyy points out, they were all revered for their fearlessness. But achieving that kind of bravery herself took some time.
“When I was little, I always knew [I was a star] because I was just different,” Sexyy says. “I was worried. I was quiet. But everybody used to want to be my friend. I was pretty, my hair was real long, my mama knew how to dress me. Everybody used to just be flocking to me, but I was shy. I didn’t want to talk to nobody. I’ve always been that person for real.”
Michael Tyrone Delaney
That kind of authenticity is now helping her fans access their own — one two-and-a-half-minute track at a time. From the start, Sexyy’s career has felt organic and, at first, low stakes. Growing up, she always had a creative spirit: “I used to think I was going to be a painter. I used to design my Barbie dolls’ clothes. I used to be doing hair. I just was multitalented, so I knew I could do it, but I just didn’t know how,” she says.
When a former boyfriend broke her heart in 2018, Sexyy reacted in the most hip-hop way possible: She recorded a dis track. The response among friends was so overwhelmingly positive that even the song’s subject encouraged her to seriously pursue music. (“He’d have me rap the song to his friends,” Sexyy recalls.)
From that very first song, listeners clamored to hear Sexyy’s specific voice, her cadence, her energy, her off-the-cuff rambunctiousness tempered with sincerity. Performances at local clubs and parties soon followed — “A free party? And I get $50 just to go up there and just do something? Why not?” — as did a debut mixtape, 2021’s Ghetto Superstar, and support on social media from R&B star Summer Walker. But it took a mixture of old-school grind and new-school social media prowess — and a little help from the music industry — for Sexyy to harness the zeitgeist.
In 2021, Rebel Music, an independent Miami-based label and management company, signed Sexyy after coming across some of her early tracks. “Once she got off the plane and I heard her voice, I knew she was a star,” recalls Vladimir “Sunny” Laurent, Sexyy’s A&R executive. “Like, her voice, it just tells you who she is.” By mid-2023, Miami-based distributor Open Shift and gamma — Larry Jackson’s media company that creates, distributes and markets content with a specific focus on Black culture — “reached out to [Rebel] and expressed interest not only in Sexyy, but their broad platform [too],” according to Dave Gross, who became Sexyy’s manager around the same time. (Sexyy remains signed to Rebel Music, while gamma and Open Shift handle distribution of her music.)
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In January 2023, Sexyy Red dropped the track that would change the course of her career. “Pound Town” is emblematic of Sexyy’s ethos: Say what you feel, and do that before anything else. From “too many b-tches, where the n—as at?” to “My c–chie pink, my bootyh–e brown,” her impulsive bars quickly drew listeners in, inspiring a litany of memes across TikTok and X (formerly Twitter).
The track also brought “p—y rap” — which music journalist Robyn Mowatt describes as “a subgenre of rap where women embrace their sexual prowess” in the face of “the patriarchy and misogyny” common in the male-dominated rap world — to the fore of hip-hop discourse. As female MCs have seized the mainstream, p—y rap has dominated, with Sexyy as one of its most prominent purveyors — even if she disputes the classification.
“I don’t agree with that [classification], because why is that the only thing you heard me talking about?” she says. “That’s the only thing that you got out of everything I just said? You just heard me say ‘c–chie’? I hate when they say that. I just rap about my daily life. Girls that live like me, I just rap about what we go through. I don’t sit and talk about c–chie all day.”
She’s right. What has made Sexyy such a contentious subject of hip-hop conversations is that she embodies an energy and perspective many are comfortable glamorizing without respecting. In lyrics like “When I don’t hear from my n—a, I write him/He a bad boy, I don’t care, that’s how I like ’em/Yeah, free my n—a ’til it’s backwards/F–k the police, f–k the pigs, they some bastards,” she’s not conjuring a scene to give the illusion of a hood aesthetic — she’s literally pulling from her real life.
“Authenticity is self-relative, and for Sexyy, it’s that she’s independent, fierce, strong, unafraid of the world’s opinions and unbowed by backlash,” Gross says. It’s not about whether she’s acting “hood” — it’s about expressing those qualities and aesthetics authentically in her music and performance. Sexyy is always being Sexyy, first and foremost.
“Pound Town” peaked at No. 66 on the Billboard Hot 100 following a remix with Nicki Minaj, marking Sexyy’s debut on the chart. “I specifically had the vision to make sure that we got that done and out by Memorial Day weekend so that we could just own the f–king summer,” says gamma CEO Larry Jackson, who was instrumental in orchestrating the remix. “That, to me, was like throwing a lit match in dry shrubbery.”
As scores of streaming-era artists know well, it is easy for a viral hit to overshadow the artist behind it. Sexyy Red and her team sought to avoid that, Jackson says, delivering a constant stream of singles and remixes to support Hood Hottest Princess. The project arrived alongside the official single release of “SkeeYee,” a raucous party anthem named after a cat-calling phrase frequently used in Sexyy’s hometown of St. Louis.
“SkeeYee” quickly became a staple on locker room playlists across the country, the go-to celebration song for athletes from college football’s Ole Miss Rebels to MLB’s Baltimore Orioles. Its success shifted Sexyy into a different tier from her peers like Kaliii and Flo Milli. Most mainstream female rappers are ignored by straight male audiences save for a verse or two, but Sexyy had that demographic captivated for an entire calendar year — from the countless videos of ecstatic male fans at her festival appearances to Travis Scott’s giddy embrace of “SkeeYee” during his 2023 Wireless Festival set.
“She’s the female Gucci [Mane]. She sounds like Trina. Everybody thinks she’s like a p—y rap artist, but she’s not really,” Laurent says. “She makes music for dudes who like fast cars. That’s why dudes connect with her so well. Everybody loves her, from the LGBT community to [straight] women — it’s all walks of life.”
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“Hellcats SRTs” (along with its Lil Durk remix) and “Shake Yo Dreads” added two more hits to Sexyy’s résumé, and smart features on NLE Choppa’s “Slut Me Out” and DaBaby’s “Shake Sumn” kept her momentum going. In 2023, ratchet party rap reemerged in popularity, and Sexyy led the charge with music and energy reminiscent of iconic voices like Waka Flocka Flame and Chief Keef. “I see Sexyy Red as a female me,” Waka says. “How people are like, ‘Man, Waka’s music just ratchet!’ It was records outselling me by millions of copies, but they can never get played inside the club.”
Neither “Pound Town” nor “SkeeYee” was a major Hot 100 hit, reaching Nos. 66 and 62, respectively, but they still captured and defined the year for large swaths of consumers; Sexyy landed six entries on the TikTok Billboard Top 50. And after her hit linkup with Minaj, she spent the rest of 2023 maximizing her commercial reach by collaborating with another Young Money icon.
According to Gross, Drake reached out to Sexyy via DM around the time the rest of the industry began to truly take notice of her. So, between supporting Moneybagg Yo on his Larger Than Life Tour and headlining her own Hood Hottest Princess tour, Sexyy opened for Drake and 21 Savage’s blockbuster It’s All a Blur Tour. That cross-country trek set the stage for Sexyy’s highest-peaking Hot 100 entry yet, “Rich Baby Daddy” (No. 11), a track from Drake’s For All the Dogs album that also features fellow St. Louis native SZA. “Rich Baby Daddy” also became her most beloved track yet (by critics and fans alike), on an album that also featured heavy hitters from Bad Bunny to J. Cole — an indicator of how quickly Sexyy had risen in the industry.
Her stint on Drake and 21 Savage’s tour also laid the groundwork for her own headlining tour, which her team estimates sold 75,000 tickets across 28 shows — a rare feat for a female rapper, especially one so new to the game, and a testament to the strength of the Sexyy Red brand in a year that had numerous cancellations of hip-hop tours and festivals.
“Touring was stressful at first, because nobody knew I was pregnant,” Sexyy explains. “I’d be in the bedroom trying to suck my stomach in or wear clothes to show I wasn’t. It hurt to just be onstage all day holding your stomach. It’s hard to hide it.” For an artist like Sexyy, deeply committed to presenting herself authentically, the decision to do that was deeply personal, and tactical: She shot more than 10 music videos, made several festival appearances, went on three tours and performed at awards shows — and did most of that while carrying her second child.
“Being pregnant is stressful; it wears your body down. I was tired, but I tried to hide it as much as you possibly could,” she says. “I like to have a personal life. I’m already famous or whatever, so everything be out there. I be trying to have something to myself that I could keep. Just go home and be with my son and my family. That’s the reason I was hiding.”
Michael Tyrone Delaney
Gross recalls one summer stint in which Sexyy “hopped off the stage with Drake, hopped on a jet to make it to a Moneybagg Yo show, did an afterparty after the Moneybagg show, then at six or seven in the morning took another jet to go the next city where the Drake tour was.” That kind of work ethic is what drew him to Sexyy in the first place.
It’s the same energy Sexyy started the year with after the father of her baby got locked up. “I don’t got no more distractions. I can work now,” she says. After every show, she went straight to her 2-year-old son, Chuckie — a testament to how she manages to balance work with her personal life. “This year was very unique and there was an extremely heightened sense of concern” around the impact of Sexyy’s promotional schedule on her mind and body, Gross says. “Our game plan is always going to be to take our cue from the artist.”
As quickly as she has become a pop cultural touchstone, Sexyy has stirred up plenty of controversy. In October on the podcast This Past Weekend With Theo Von, she said, “Trump, we miss you” — arguing that “they support him in the hood” because “he started getting Black people out of jail and giving people that free money.” One conspiracy theory accuses her of being a plant by the CIA to destroy the Black community, while some posts on X have called for Jackson’s condemnation to hell because of his involvement in promoting Sexyy.
For Sexyy, wanting to be in the rap game for the long haul has meant finding a way to exist amid all that noise. “It don’t really faze me, because I know what’s going on in real life,” she says. “I just do me. I be really nice.” And, in real life, Sexyy is connecting with audiences because she’s giving them the space to revel in their ratchetness. “In my opinion, she is the first one post-pandemic who brought us a hot summer,” Jackson says. “She dropped music that made us feel good for the first time in four years about being outside again.”
“I think she’s every woman’s spirit animal. That rambunctious girl that says anything she feels. She says things people are afraid to say,” adds Laurent. “She’s like a heroine in a way.”
In 2024, Sexyy Red has one goal: “I’m showing my ass. I’m going to just be getting richer, bigger, more trendier. I’m going to be everywhere,” she says. “I’m going to be in it for the long haul, [but] not even on purpose, though. Even if I try to stop rapping, they’re going to take some sh-t, turn it into something, put me on the blogs, make it something it doesn’t even have to be, so Imma be here for a minute.” Her manager is aiming for “three or four albums next year. That might be ambitious,” he acknowledges. “But I want 2024 to be the year of Sexyy Red like 2023 was.”
Michael Tyrone Delaney
In December, she dropped a deluxe edition of Hood Hottest Princess featuring collaborations with Chief Keef and Summer Walker, and she has also scored rising hits in “Bow Bow Bow (F My Baby Dad)” and “Free My N—a.” The negative response to the latter in particular — some critics contended that the song and music video contributed to the glorification of the incarceration of Black men — exemplified the vitriol that has moved some veteran female rappers to defend Sexyy.
“We don’t know what [Sexyy is] going to be talking about on the third or fourth album, but right now we’re talking about where we came from,” Trina tells Billboard. “We’re talking about the bottom. The gutter, the trenches, the dirt, the slime, the scum. All of that. Some people have just grown above it and they’re not in the hood no more, but everybody has not got to that place yet. You can’t expect them to be talking about the most lavish things in life and they haven’t addressed where they from and what they’ve seen and how they seen it. Give them a chance to grow. Give them a chance to elevate. Give them a chance to evolve. They’re still young women. They’re still under 30 years old. They still have time to do whatever they want to do, but this is just the beginning.”
Sexyy’s vision and hope for hip-hop’s future is centered in the same principle she has upheld since “Pound Town” blew up: authenticity. For her, that’s the only way to know “who really f–king with you when you’re just being yourself and not trying to pretend.”
And for her heroes — like Boosie BadAzz, the only artist she requested to hear during her Billboard photo shoot other than herself — it’s the reason her voice is so needed in rap right now. Sexyy is “a girl from the hood who finally got her chance to speak and it’s accepted,” Boosie says. “When I listen to her music, it’s like the girls from my project talking. You got to respect it or watch other people respect it. We got a voice, too. The hood has a voice, too. A lot of people don’t respect it because they don’t understand it.”
Perhaps that’s what the future of hip-hop looks like under a Sexyy Red dynasty: a scene where a young woman can captivate a nation with her own perspective and narrative while also giving a voice to the place some of the culture’s most overlooked movers and shakers come from — and where none of that is just a performance. As usual, Sexyy puts it best herself: “I’m just doing me in this rap sh-t.”
A packed crowd writhes along to the buzzing beats thundering from the speakers. It’s a warm Wednesday night in November, and onstage at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right, 23-year-old Houston-based producer Odetari is performing one of his first shows. The 300 or so people assembled range from the middle-aged to young adults to actual children — several of whom are perched on their parents’ shoulders and shouting the lyrics to songs like “I LOVE U HOE,” “GOOD LOYAL THOTS” and Odetari’s latest, “GMFU,” an acronym for “got me f–ked up.”
This lattermost track is a collaboration with 6arely Human, a 22-year-old electronic artist from Fort Worth, Texas, whose own shows are similarly hectic and whose audience is similarly age-agnostic. Since its July release, “GMFU” — a dark, thumping anthem about “going dumb” from partying — has accumulated 91.9 million on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate. (Their second collaboration, “Level Up,” arrived Jan. 8.) Odetari’s catalog has racked up 475.4 million on-demand official U.S. streams — a number that swells to 612.6 million when including data from user-generated content on platforms like TikTok — and he has clocked 11 entries on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart in 2023. 6arely Human’s catalog has 67 million official on-demand streams, ballooning to 96.5 million with UGC.
On a recent Friday afternoon in Los Angeles, Odetari and 6arely Human make an eye-catching pair: the former in bulky streetwear, his new grills twinkling when he flashes a wide, easy smile; the latter sporting a pink corset, black platform boots, an enviable black velvet duster and perfectly applied black lipstick adding up to a look that evokes both the rave world and of his two biggest inspirations, Kesha and Lady Gaga.
Until this past August, 6arely Human was managing a Panera Bread, slinging bagels by day and spending his nights making music, clothing and TikToks. And until earlier this year, Odetari was a substitute teacher, a gig he says he did purely “for the paycheck.” Now, both electronic producers are TikTok stars, but they’re making significant IRL inroads as well. In 2023, both signed with Artist Partner Group, and they’ll take their high-powered — if not yet totally polished — shows on the road in 2024.
“Our role is to challenge, inspire, support and remove friction points on the path to success,” says APG founder and CEO Mike Caren, who notes that consistency is key to turning internet stardom into more tangible success. “They have the talent, uniqueness, work ethic and originality to achieve huge goals.”
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Despite the lyrical content of their music (“Don’t cheat me/Believe me/I am a f–king c–t,” 6arely Human announces on “GMFU”), there’s a sense of purity about both acts. They represent a nascent style of extremely online dance music, defined by woozy productions that speed up, slow down and generally capture the sound of the global online dance community from which they hail, the DIY vibe of the early rave era and the ultra-modern world of TikTok stardom. APG senior director of A&R Andre Herd, who signed 6arely Human, says that the producer “stood out from the crowd of internet artists because he had been building an in-person fan base through underground raves and parties.”
The electronic scene has always been cobbled together from many niche genres and sounds. Together, Odetari and 6arely Human are continuing that tradition while pushing it further — making music forged online that’s now transcending the internet, translating to very real popularity.
6arelyhuman photographed on December 1, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Michael Buckner
Tell me about the first time one of your songs went viral.
Odetari: I always kind of knew that going viral on TikTok, especially with music, is usually a one-time thing if you don’t do it right. The first song [of mine that] went viral [2023’s “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”] hit 256,000 streams in a day, which was crazy to me, because I had never passed 10,000 on a song. I saw how fast it went up and got really excited, but I tried to tell myself, “Don’t get too excited, because you don’t know if this could drop.” Then the next day it dropped by half. So, I was like, “What do I do next? I have to keep this momentum going.” It was like a roller coaster.
What was your strategy when you saw the numbers go down by half?
Odetari: Just rapid-fire dropping [of new music]. Whatever worked for that first thing, you’ve got to keep doing that again and again [while expanding your catalog]. The song that went viral was mostly beats, so the next songs were filled with actual structure and lyrics, so there was steady replay value. That’s what I just kept doing.
6arely Human: I relate to him. My first viral song was also doing this up and down thing. But it started to really go [up] when I would see a bunch of videos from people that were creating things and making edits with their own ideas with the song. I remember specifically that one of the things that helped a lot was a [fan-made] South Park edit [that played the song “Hands up!” over images from the show]. [Virality] is a lot about what people do with the song once it comes out.
Odetari: Also, a lot of people making music similar to ours were not showing their faces. We definitely made sure to also attach [our] image to [the music], because a lot of songs that blow up on TikTok, people will scroll and hear the song, but they don’t really care about it or the person who made it. I feel like we really nailed it on that, [by each of us] attaching [our] images and connecting with the fans.
You’re both from Texas. How much of what you make is a product of where you’re from versus from being on the internet?
6arely Human: A lot of my inspiration is definitely from the internet, but I feel like there’s something about where you’re from that you put into your music, and it just adds the salt and pepper element. There is that little Texas spice.
What specifically makes it Texas?
6arely Human: The way I say things on a song, and the words I use. I don’t know if everyone’s going to be saying “y’all” on an electronic song, but it sounds cool.
Odetari: I definitely have influence from Houston, especially with the slow, chopped-and-screwed stuff. A lot of my music slows down toward the end. When I was growing up, I looked up to Travis Scott. Me and his sister went to the same school, and we were pretty close friends. She kind of took me along the journey when he was first starting, going backstage and stuff. Seeing where he was with [debut solo 2013 mixtape] Owl Pharaoh to where he is now just really shaped a lot of the things I want in life.
Odetari photographed on December 1, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Michael Buckner
Let’s talk about the sound of your music itself — because sure, it’s electronic, but it’s something else, too. What do you both call your sounds?
6arely Human: I call mine “sassy scene.” Sassy Scene was [the name of] my first album, and a lot of the songs that were on that project had a similar sound. The word “sassy” is just the feeling you get listening to it, and then “scene,” that could mean the style, because there’s different subcultures of the way that people dress that connect to the music. “Scene” is the community as well, because there’s a lot of people that make similar stuff. Everyone’s making up different words for it — the most common one is obviously “hyperpop.” And then “scene core,” “crush club.”
Odetari: Some people call it “sigilkore.” I call my stuff “Odecore,” but I would just categorize it under electronic dance music.
What are the characteristics of the people in your scene who are consuming your music and making similar music?
6arely Human: There are really colorful outfits; a lot of people love the fur [raver] legging things. I see those a lot, and then arm warmers and a lot of accessories — fur and pink. Scene fashion is almost emo, too, that kind of mixes with ravers.
Is this scene happening everywhere? Or is it centralized in Texas? Or is it mostly on the internet?
Odetari: It’s really well respected in the U.S., but overseas they really love it. Poland and Germany, where they have those underground raves that just go crazy, I feel like they’re the ones that really like it. They really get it.
What do your shows look and feel like?
6arely Human: Very lively. There’s a lot of energy. It’s mostly younger people, but there are also people that maybe get a nostalgic feeling, too [for the early rave days]. There is a wide range of people. Everyone’s really excited, and it’s really fun, honestly.
Odetari: Sometimes you have to scream in the mic. They’ll scream over you. They know the lyrics. They’re really dedicated. It’s an awesome fan base for shows. The age range is pretty wide.
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Within your scene, is there a particular worldview or set of values or a philosophy?
6arely Human: I’m not sure about that one.
Odetari: It’s so new, so we’re learning it, too. It kind of goes back to everyone who has made similar music to ours but never shows their face. They’ve never really taken it to a performance level. We’re some of the first to be performing music like this, so we’re figuring out what the best way to do that is. It’s experimental.
Have there been hits and misses in translating your music to a live setting?
6arely Human: For sure. Some of my songs are sped up a little bit, and it’s hard to key the music, too, if you’re using live Auto-Tune. Everyone’s doing the sped-up thing, or slowed down, or even both.
Odetari: My music speeds up, then slows down and then is normal. For performances, it’s not ideal unless you do a DJ set, I guess. But again, we’re figuring it out.
6arely Human: A lot of the people that are there at the live shows, I feel like sometimes they just want to see you on the stage singing. Even if you’re not giving the best vocals in the world, they just love the song so much that they just want to see you up there having fun as well.
Since you’re both so deeply online, maybe it’s just exciting for people to see that you both actually exist. Do you feel like underground acts?
Odetari: I don’t know. The numbers are not really underground.
6arely Human: I feel like we were, but since everything happened rather quickly it hasn’t really hit me yet.
Odetari: It hasn’t hit me, either.
Do you see yourselves performing in arenas, or is the preference sweaty underground warehouses?
6arely Human: I don’t know about arenas. You never know. Maybe. But I really do like smaller, intimate shows. They’re more fun. I love jumping in the crowd, starting mosh pits.
Odetari: A 2,000-[capacity venue], those are really the best shows.
Odetari & 6arelyhuman photographed on December 1, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Michael Buckner
What do your friends and family back in Texas make of your success?
6arely Human: A lot of people don’t know. A lot of people where I live might not be as tuned in with internet stuff. I don’t know how to explain, like, “Oh, yeah, we just made this in our room and then put it on an app called TikTok and now we’re here.” It’s weird to explain to people that don’t really get the internet.
Obviously, a lot of electronic music is made for parties. How much do you connect to that partying aspect of the electronic world?
6arely Human: The type of music we make is something people can just have fun to and not really think about everything else that’s happening. Our type of music, whenever you play it, people just want to jump around and have fun and go crazy.
Odetari: You don’t even need to know the lyrics. You can just vibe to it.
Do you feel connected to other realms of the dance music world?
Odetari: I personally don’t, because I really don’t listen to music. I only listen to video-game soundtracks now, so I really don’t know what’s going on in music that much. I think it helps me not get too influenced by anything.
6arely Human: I feel the same way. Anything that’s new, it’s probably just me listening to my friends or someone I actually know. Most of the music I listen to and take inspiration from is really old. From, like, 2010 or 1998.
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