The Age of Social Media Celebrity: Ayesha Erotica

Editorial

THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA CELEBRITY

Fall 2020 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

media demonized these female celebrities by flippantly living up to their trashiest scandals. Whether she was yearning for a well-endowed goth boy or flipping the power dynamics of being a minor in a relationship with an adult, Ayesha Erotica’s music was artfully curated to mimic tabloid culture by garnering controversy and leaving listeners clutching their pearls.

As Ayesha’s relevance and social media presence hit new highs, her influence rapidly seeped into the core of the underground pop community. She soon began producing for rising acts, such as Slayyyter and That Kid, who found inspiration in the “coked-out” genre of pop music she engineered from her Y2K iconography. This specific breed of high-intensity pop centered around ultraautotuned vocals and lyrics so absurd that they almost feel ironic was emulated by a wave of artists in the underground pop scene. Discussions were even sparked as to how this genre, which was largely influenced by Ayesha’s Myspace-adjacent aesthetic, could be categorized—some opting to the Spotify algorithm-driven label of “hyperpop,” which is somehow both all-inclusive and deceptively vague.

Though a majority of her career and rise to relevance revolved around her presence on social media, Ayesha’s near-constant proximity to her fanbase exposed the darker underbelly of navigating virtual relationships as a public figure. In 2018, Ayesha was gearing up to release her sophomore studio album, Horny.4u, when her personal social media accounts were posted onto a discord server by her fans. Scrapped demos of her allegedly using racial slurs leaked online while her deadname was posted onto Doxbin. Ultimately, this resulted in the cancellation of Horny.4u, as well as the removal of her discography from most major streaming sites and her official retirement from the music industry under the stage name “Ayesha Erotica.” In her final public words, she rebuked being touted as a public figure and reflected on how reaching her level of social media celebrity resulted in her boundaries being overstepped and disrespected. Regardless of her wishes, the sensationalism of Ayesha’s music allowed for its insurgence into Gen Z culture through its footholds in social media. In 2020, a TikTok audio from Ayesha’s 2016 single, “Sixteen,” was used by Charli D’Amelio, who currently has over 95 million followers on the platform, to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. Some of Ayesha’s other releases, such as “Vacation Bible School” and “Literal Legend,” also found popularity in various meme formats, including fancams of Ariana Grande on stan Twitter.

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.

With Ayesha’s mass appeal to a broader base beyond her original cult following, there was a simultaneous rise of the Y2K Bratz Doll aesthetic on TikTok, which Ayesha and other trans women had donned throughout their careers. Even to this day, Ayesha’s legal team is constantly at war against fans illegally pirating her music to streaming sites under her name, garnering millions of streams in the matter of weeks. Given that most of Erotica’s official releases peaked out around a few hundreds of thousands of impressions, teenage influencers adopting her signature style into the mainstream palpably heightened her visibility to the public.

Social media may have provided a platform for Ayesha Erotica to curate a sonic and aesthetic direction of her own, but it ultimately overshadowed the creator that it brought so much adoration and attention to. Ayesha Erotica became a brand, and as her pull became more magnetic over time, it could only burn brighter and hotter until it bore straight through the woman behind the persona. While her creator still carries on through her now-anonymous work as a producer, Ayesha Erotica will remain a permanent fixture in time, cemented well-beyond the control of the woman who first invented her. Social media, in essence, has preserved the legacy of Miss Erotica, leaving her forever entombed in the digital catacombs. Inevitably, our current Y2K resurgence will pass, and Ayesha’s influence will fade from the public eye. However, an eternal presence on social media is a provision for life after death of some sorts, and even after the world has moved on, buried deep within a Windows XP hard drive, Ayesha Erotica will be waiting—against all odds—to be unearthed back into the public’s consciousness.

• Neeloy Bose (Bioengineering) Designer: Maura Intemann (English and Graphic and Information Design)