THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA CELEBRITY Editorial Fall 2020
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It’s a typical Thursday night. Your friend sends you a link to a song, “Emo Boy” by Ayesha Erotica, to be exact. Thinking nothing of it, you innocently click on the link and begin blasting the song in front of your parents. Now, if you know anything about her, you could imagine how playing an Ayesha Erotica song in the general vicinity of an authority figure would be a permanent mark on your character, akin to the scarlet letter. But if you’ve never heard of her before, maybe keep it that way—for her sake. In 2016, Ayesha Erotica released her debut album, Big Juicy, onto SoundCloud. She was immediately noted for her refusal to shy away from blunt and unapologetic expressions of her sexuality, and the hyper vulgarity with which she described every carnal detail of her sexual misadventures was almost something to be wonderstruck by. Though her lyrics could leave any casual fan flustered on their first listen, they only provided a small insight as to what exactly made her one of the most
prominent underground producers of her time with such a rabid cult following. Erotica’s music was largely surrounded by her social media presence. At the peak of her visibility to the public, she ran a Tumblr account where she would regularly post about her music and cultivate an aesthetic that revolved around the culture of the early 2000s. Her social media documented her fixations on anything from pink Motorola Razr flip phones to AIM away messages to scandalous paparazzi shots of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Heidi Montag. Even her album artwork continuously centered brands, such as Playboy and Juicy Couture, that reached a peak in cultural relevance at the start of the millenium. Ayesha clearly drew inspiration from a post-Mean Girls society and admired the young female celebrities that were both objectified and scrutinized within it. With a deep affection for the “it-girls” of the 2000s, Ayesha was actively working to reclaim and honor their velour tracksuit aesthetic throughout her career. Not only did she adopt the gritty and glitchy electropop of Blackout-era Britney Spears, but Miss Erotica simultaneously doubled down on the tabloid rumors that followed the women of this time through her explicit hypersexuality and lyrics rampant with drug usage. Ayesha herself almost seemed to be a character that was meant to satirize the way in which the
