In every era of entertainment, performers have been described as “triple threats,” signifying that they can excel beyond their chosen creative field. Everyone wants the license to sing, dance, act, and more. It’s a term that has, in previous decades, been easy to deride—the absurd claim of a performer who dared to dabble outside of her native universe. Now, though, it merely describes the table stakes for many young artists in a media-saturated landscape. Between albums, they might consider launching a diaristic podcast, as the ukulele-playing bedroom-pop queen mxmtoon did, earlier this year. Trapped at home during a global pandemic, you might start a cooking show, as Selena Gomez did, with her new series, “Selena + Chef,” on HBO Max. And then there is the laundry list of pop stars who have partnered with apparel companies and assumed titles such as “brand ambassador” or “creative director.” Versatility no longer indicates a lack of focus or conjures the notion of “selling out”; it is now a matter of creative and financial survival. Pinballing among mediums can yield delightful or unexpected new material, but too often there’s a hollow excess to it, producing the kind of content whose sole purpose is to maximize exposure.
One of the more exceptional cases of cultural lane-hopping is Grouptherapy, a new pop-music project born from the fatigue and disappointment that its members experienced as multi-hyphenate child entertainers. Jadagrace Michiko Gordy-Nash, Tyrel J. Williams, and Coy Stewart—whose stage names are Jadagrace, TJW, and KOI—are all in their early twenties, but they perform with a degree of earned disillusionment, as if they had already lived many lives. In some sense, they have. By the time Jadagrace, the group’s acrobatic vocal talent, was in middle school, she had already been through a rigorous dance academy, appeared in a “Terminator” film, and signed a major-label record deal. She was mentored by Motown Records’ Berry Gordy from a young age, and released a series of campy, heavily produced singles. These were an attempt to bottle talent and manufacture conventional pop at a moment when the music industry was beginning to capitulate to the forces of algorithms and online virality. KOI, the group’s hyperverbal and professorial rapper, was a child actor, who appeared on networks like Nickelodeon and TBS. In the music world, he might be better recognized as the star of the music video for the socially conscious rapper Logic’s hit song about suicide, “1-800-273-8255,” in which he plays Don Cheadle’s depressive son. TJW, the group’s sombre and resolute rapper, came up as an actor through Disney’s talent pipeline.
This type of path, via familiar institutions and formats, has become increasingly outmoded. Many charismatic Hollywood kids who might previously have started out auditioning for television shows or record labels have chosen to leapfrog conventional entertainment mediums altogether, producing snappy, often comical D.I.Y. videos on social media. It’s become such a common endeavor that a new establishment is forming: Los Angeles is experiencing a boom in content-creator collectives, giant groups of aspiring or already successful social-media stars. Many of these collectives, like the nineteen-member Hype House, live in rented mansions with plenty of mirrors, cultivating new ideas and social dynamics to broadcast on TikTok and YouTube.
Grouptherapy represents a departure from both the old Hollywood model and the new guard of social-media creatorship. In 2019, after crossing paths at parties and auditions, the group’s members began to make music individually and together. In the eyes of Grouptherapy, pop music provides a refuge from the financial stressors and the structural limitations of Hollywood. It also presents an opportunity to reclaim ownership of their own talents. On “there goes the neighborhood”—a new collection of songs that the members have described as a “mixtape,” even though it has much of the polish and meticulousness of a major studio album—Grouptherapy examines the condition of being in the Hollywood machine while feeling underpaid and unfulfilled. “I must reflect on my passions, deflect all the bad things,” Jadagrace sings on “watercolor,” a whispering and sensuous R. & B. song with a drip-drop beat. KOI leads the group in the album’s more militant and defiant moments, like “blackout”—a rumbling song with a refrain more reminiscent of an activist march than a radio banger. It’s a song about being creatively undersold, but it’s also a rejection of the materialist tropes that come with success. “I don’t want nothing when I’m rich,” he announces. “I don’t have a single rock on my neck or wrist.” Eventually, the beat cuts out and he begins to speak, as if at a lectern. “I’m sick of flexing, can I vent?” he asks. “I just sold a show and still ain’t made a fuckin’ cent. That don’t make no sense.”
In theory, Grouptherapy was formed as a reaction to the commercialization and professionalization of creative energy. (“Suit and ties on my line / Had to decline / Click!” KOI says on a track called “yessir.”) But though their music is thornier than, say, the outrageously saccharine music of Jadagrace’s earlier career, Grouptherapy has not shaken the ethos of its members’ formal training. Their stage-readiness, honed over many years, is what distinguishes them from all the other young musicians expressing such familiar forms of disillusionment. “there goes the neighborhood” has a frothy musical theatricality to it, with a structure and a buoyancy that suggest each song is ready for its accompanying choreography. While so many of their peers in today’s mainstream favor a kind of studied disaffectedness, Grouptherapy rejects—whether intentionally or not—any kind of glib cool.
This can make the project feel gimmicky in its wholesome eagerness, like a teen-age movie soundtrack or a church-choir act. There’s enough pitch-perfect harmonizing to make a college a-cappella group envious. But the album is also refreshing in its effortfulness. The anthemic sweetness of the centerpiece, “raise it up,” harkens to the late-nineties and early-two-thousands heyday of pop and R. & B. girl groups. (The music video features a trio of female dancers in cheerleading outfits, seemingly a nod to the film “Bring It On.”) It’s a triumphant pop do-over from Jadagrace, who handles both the buttery chorus and the nimble rap verses. On the surface, a chorus of “Raise it up” seems like an energetic party cry, but a close listen reveals a message about self-worth and restitution: “My shit comes with benefits you cannot afford / You done made me have to raise it up.”
Aesthetically, “there goes the neighborhood” is nostalgic for a pre-streaming era of pop. In those days, pop groups were often formed by labels through auditions and molded for stardom by a select group of powerful people. (The record executive Lou Pearlman, for example, developed a model that he applied successfully to a handful of groups, including ’NSync and the Backstreet Boys, before he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme.) But this is precisely the system that Grouptherapy wants to reject. They’re a little late: outside of indie rock and the K-pop industrial complex, groups are unfashionable entities. This is probably why, on the album, the members of Grouptherapy refer to themselves as an “art collective.” Grouptherapy, for now, is fully independent, a quality that is vanishingly rare. They’re self-funded and without a record deal. (Their principal connection to the mainstream is through their executive producer, a Chicago songwriter and producer named Dee Lilly, who’s worked with acts like Big Sean and Snoh Aalegra.) It’s a form of freedom that allows them to record such polished pop as a matter of choice, rather than out of obligation. ♦
