If you’re under 25, I imagine you might only know of Jessie J from social media. Maybe you’ve seen the “nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-no” clip, or the live footage of her singing an outlandish acoustic version of “Price Tag” on the BBC. The impression you might glean from her status as a meme is a brightly coloured, chaotic, high-camp queen.
But if you’re older than that, you will remember a time when Jessie J and her brash mid-tempo pop songs were utterly ubiquitous. The dulcet tones of “Do It Like a Dude” ringing out in student union bars, the materialist melancholy of “Price Tag” blasting in the gym. A year after those songs made her – with her striking black bob and thick eyeliner – a star in 2011, she joined the BBC’s new prime time talent show The Voice as a judge, and became a mainstay of British showbiz.
In recent years, those ironic memes have picked up on Instagram and TikTok – and there is also a whole slew of online fans advocating that she never got her dues. Unlike her Brit School contemporary Adele or her US counterparts – her second biggest hit, 2014’s “Bang Bang”, was a collaboration with Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj (see viral video of their live performance at that year’s AMAs) – Jessie J, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, never quite ascended to that untouchable level of pop stardom, never quite built the devoted fanbase that guarantees longevity. Instead, her in-your-face extroversion, her exaggerated look, and her British eccentricity made her an aberration in the pop world, and eventually, a few years later, the perfect caricature for a viral video clip.
