A Close Read of Jojo Siwa’s “Guilty Pleasure” Music Video

Bears, face gems, and power tools, oh my!

As challenging as it is, we continue to try to process the creative output of musician, YouTuber, and former Dance Moms competitor Jojo Siwa. This week, we face down another daunting mystery: Her new song, “Guilty Pleasure,” and its accompanying music video, a horny montage of fog machines, pleather, dancing bears, and power tools. Let’s wade through this together, shall we?

“Guilty Pleasure,” which comes on the heels of the news that Siwa is working on a docuseries about her life with the creator of Dance Moms, takes place in what the music video tells us is “Jojo’s Guilty Pleasure House,” where everyone is trying to get in to see our titular star lounging on a couch with bedazzled teddy bears strapped to her chest and head. (Siwa appears to be fully committed to a bear theme during this chapter of her career — she recently got a winged teddy bear tattooed on her arm.)

Anyway, back to the video. After grinding with a fellow dancer in epaulets, Siwa suddenly changes into a rhinestone-encrusted safety vest and work boots and experiments promiscuously with a jackhammer. Her last outfit change involves glam-emo face gems arranged in a cross and comes just in time for her to dance in a church apse among some sexy nuns. The choreography, at least, is very good.

Sorry but this Jojo Siwa video is shot and lit exactly like one of the ChaseDreams songs in The Other Two pic.twitter.com/oqJyV5HGNt

— Sam Herbst (@smhrbst) July 12, 2024

In keeping with the construction theme, Siwa is naturally releasing a collection of phallic wrench merch. This has already proved controversial, and not for the reasons you think. It turns out Siwa is not the first musician to make a wrench look kind of like a penis and slap it on a T-shirt — metalheads have accused her of ripping off the rock band Tool’s signature wrench, which has itself been the subject of a lot of legal drama. They do look pretty similar, but that is for Jojo Siwa and Tool to hash out.

For all the construction equipment — plagiarized or not — in this album rollout, Siwa has not provided us with the psychological toolbox to understand what is going on in her music video. Still, I can appreciate that she has given us what is essentially a relic from the year 2012. It’s better than 2016!

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