This year, Lana Del Rey headlined Coachella, Charli and Lorde worked it out on the remix. If one thing is clear, 2014 Tumblr-core is having its renaissance. Yet with Tumblr culture’s comeback, there’s one “Tumblr-famous” pop star that’s still waiting to collect her flower crowns.
You may know Jae Stephens more by the username “Beyoncebeytwice,” the infamous account that earned a devoted 200,000 followers. Ten years following Tumblr’s peak, the dashboard diva is still here, despite its downfall, in a capricious internet era that’s been desperately searching for a “new Black pop star.” With the release of her latest EP, SELLOUT, Stephens has returned with the backing of Issa Rae’s Raedio and Def Jam Recordings, and a collection of polished ear-wormy hits.
“You can take the girl out of Tumblr, but you can never take the Tumblr out of the girl,” Stephens tells PAPER, reflecting on how much the platform has influenced not only social media but her career itself.
Her beloved Tumblr fanbase admired her covers, life updates and takes on pop culture. It was hard for a day to go by without at least one Beyoncebeytwice post coming across your dashboard. “You’ll recognize Tumblr speak anywhere,” she says. “I think it was such an integral part of me growing up. It played a part in how I write and how I interact with my fans today, and it’s why we’re so close, because we already have that kind of natural rapport.“
While “Tumblr famous” always carries a sense of ironic sincerity, Stephens chuckles at the badge of (dis)honor. “It’s very funny because, at my young age, I definitely did feel like I was a bit famous. I was known as ‘The Tumblr Girl’ in my school, which was embarrassing, but it was a sort of notoriety that was a little bit exciting to me. It’s funny to look back on, what was considered ‘famous’ back then is definitely not the same now. I had a few 200,000 followers. That’s not anything these days.” Despite this, her following allowed her to experiment musically and explore a music career. But then, when Tumblr fell out of fashion, Stephens was essentially deplatformed. However, she saw it as an opportunity to take her music more seriously and evolve as both a person and an artist.
Since Tumblr’s obsolescence, she released, f**k it, i’ll do it myself, a fully self-written and self-produced EP, performed on stage with Khalid on Saturday Night Live, collaborated with AJ Tracey, THEY, VanJess, Khamari and Xavier Omar and earned writing credits for singers like Jennifer Lopez, Normani and Sinéad Harnett.
While working on these impressive projects for other artists, Stephens was losing her own musical identity. “I was doing a lot of writing for other people on other projects and just finding ways to stay busy in a bit of a non-committal way,” she says. “I felt like ‘You’re wasting your time. You have all this talent, you know you want to do it, you’re in these rooms with other people.’ I was thinking, ‘I wouldn’t do that. I do that differently.’ It just came at such a time where I felt like I was at a crossroads, and I felt like I just really wanted to say that I put my best foot forward, because that’s not something that I would have been able to say up until now.“
During this hiatus from her own projects, Stephens found support from a fellow creator whose fame began on the internet, Issa Rae. In 2022, Rae launched The Raedio Creator Program, supported by Google, selecting two female artist and composer submissions as winners who would receive funding, mentorship and creative and business resources. Thanks to her manager secretly submitting her, Stephens would go on to win the competition, using that moment as a sign to go back to prioritizing her own career.
It’s hard not to see the parallels between Rae’s and Stephens’ careers. “Insecure is one of my comfort rewatch shows. It is the show that I put on when I’m cleaning or doing anything around the house,” Stephens says. “I’ve always resonated with her being that Awkward Black Girl. I just felt like it was a good fit, she knows the internet to real-world pipeline grind, and that is a code that I am currently trying to crack.” With this new partnership of Raedio and Def Jam, the emerging artist refused to become a pixelated relic, unlike the platform she got her start on.
That energy and intention is captured in SELLOUT, the project Stephens released in September of this year. The six-track EP is vivacious with R&B grooves and high-tempo pop hooks and lyricism. Stephens’ internet roots aren’t abandoned either, whether it be the click-baity and cheeky track, “Girls Don’t Cheat” or main pop girl energy and ’00s nostalgia in “PDA” and “Body Favors.”
“I’ve put a lot into making it look slick and making it sound hit heavy,” she says. “I wanted these big songs that were bold and catchy and hooky, earworms, crazy, sexy, cool.” The high quality and confidence is something fans hadn’t heard before and it looks as if Stephens was ushering in her main pop girlie era.
Luckily for her, the internet had been looking for their “new Black pop star,” and after Jae shared the video for “Body Favors” in response to the request, she went viral. “It just made me so happy,” she says. “‘Body Favors’ was the first song where I was like, ‘This is the music you’re supposed to be making. This makes you happy. You want to perform this. You wouldn’t mind whoring yourself out on the internet day in and day out for this song.”
Ten years later, she was beginning to relive the virality she initially saw, but the internet still hasn’t established her or really anyone as a Black pop star. Instead, “pop star” is often a term delegated to their white counterparts and places them into R&B, Hip-Hop or Gospel without much thought.
Stephens doesn’t understand the need for these distinctions, explaining, “For me, pop is popular music. It’s expressive, it’s upbeat, it’s fun. My own personal genre of pop it’s a bit sexy, it’s a bit cool, it’s intentional, it’s slick and it’s a bit tongue in cheek. My version of pop is always going to have a sprinkle of R&B in it, because that’s what I grew up on. I think my voice lends itself to that very well. The beauty of being a Black girl is that we can pull off both. There is a world where you can have both. I feel like we are encouraged to pursue one more than the other. This is me kind of stepping over that line.”
In the online conversations of finding the Black pop star, Tate McRae is often criticized by music lovers who feel she’s getting undeserved flowers and praise for the work that Black women have been doing for decades.
Talking on this controversy, Stephens explains, “I love what she’s doing, visually and performance-wise. If you’re gonna complain about Tate McRae being in the spotlight — which I think she deserves because she’s super talented — if you’re gonna say that somebody else needs it more, go find that person! The advertising you gave Tate McRae in that tweet is the same advertising that you can give somebody else showing them love in a tweet.”
She elaborates, “There’s room for others and I especially don’t like that conversation, because you know that the first Black girl to really pop off, they’re not going to let anybody else in after that. We need dozens and dozens of pop girls because we’ve got to collab, we’ve got to work with each other and uplift each other. I think that’s what made female rap so good. It was a voice and rap that we hadn’t heard before. When they would link up, it was two queens maximizing their joint slay.”
On maximizing joint slays, Stephens has found many people to find room for. She quickly names Black pop artists at the top of her head, Alemeda, Rachel Chinouriri, Serena Desir, Bronze Avery and what attributes they bring to the genre and what she uniquely loves about them. She touches on PinkPantheress’ role in bringing Black representation to pop. Now, Stephens is on track to become a part of these same conversations beyond the confines of Tumblr.
As we wrap the interview, Stephens shares her reservations for the interview and its focus on her Tumblr past, revealing that she even tried to change her name before releasing SELLOUT.
“It’s really nice to come into this project and speak to people who were a part and reflect on the come up. As I’m seeing now, there is beauty in that. Even sitting here talking to you, I realized, Tumblr is literally what got me comfortable sharing my music. It was a necessary part of that growth and getting comfortable being online, talking to people, interacting with people, and sharing my music. It all plays into where I am now. I am reaching a part where I want to look behind fondly and I appreciate the role that it’s played and where it’s taking me.”
She concludes, “I joke on Twitter all the time, like the Jae Baes [a fandom name given by her Tumblr followers] have been down for a real long time, but we’re finally up this year. I’m just really grateful for people who have been rolling with me since then.”
Photography: Randijah Simmons
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