ADVERTISEMENTI am so tired of pop stars being perfect. It’s not even really their fault. To be able to last in the music industry, women are subject to impossible standards.
They must be sexy, glamourous, charming, and always combining breathtaking vocals with perfect choreographies. It’s all about finding the right pose, the right pout, the right outfit. And please, please, please, always be newer, fresher, younger.
Consider Dua Lipa, who roasted in 2018 because she was not a “pro dancer”. The celebrated singer later said she found the “go girl, give us nothing” meme “hurtful” and “painful.”
“I was like, ‘I’m finally getting to do something that I love to do, and I’m being shut down, that I just can’t seem to do anything right’,” she told Rolling Stone in 2024.
Then there’s Taylor Swift, the pop mastermind who has been outspoken about the expectation that she continuously needs to reinvent herself.
She’s taken the demand extra-seriously throughout her 20-year career, culminating in her record-breaking Eras Tour, to the delight of her fans – myself included.
Are female pop stars allowed to be something other than perfect? Can they be weird? Can they be too much? Are they allowed to be controversial?
A few months ago, I discovered Theodora. This 21-year-old French-Congolese singer, whose full name is Lili Théodora Mbangayo Mujinga, burst onto the scene in late 2024 with her song ‘Kongolese sous BBL’ (referring to both the plastic surgery procedure Brazilian Butt Lift and to BAD BOY LOVESTORY, the name of her first mixtape).
Here was a young Black girl, cheekily singing about her body and sexuality on a West Indian bouyon rhythm and using Lingala slang.
“Baby boo, you know, I’m worth a lot / Even if sometimes I don’t make ends meet / It’s because of my butt, it pulls my knees too far apart / And my big boobs often hurt my neck”, she sings on the hit track.
I had never heard anything like this.
Theodora quickly imposed her singular aesthetics, an elusive mix of goth, rap and R&B influences.
She released her first mixtape ‘BAD BOY LOVESTORY’ in November 2024, followed by a deluxe version, ‘MEGA BBL’, in May. Earlier this month, she sold out three nights at the Zénith Paris arena. That means 7,000 ticketholders per night, a total of 21,000 in attendance. Not half bad for an artist in the early stages of her career.
Theodora, whose self-chosen nickname is Boss Lady, is nothing like you expect her to be, and everything I would have liked to see (and hear) when I was a teenager.
Growing up in small French towns in the 2010s, as a biracial kid from Congolese descent, I spent years hearing that my coily hair was overwhelming and that I was intimidating, even scary. I tried to conform myself to the hypercontrolled, whitewashed version of femininity that I was fed.
Today, even nascent icons like Theodora show that it should not matter if you laugh too loudly, and that you can wear a bird-shaped wig if you want to (which she did).
In a sense, she walks in the footsteps of Lady Gaga and Rihanna circa ‘Good Girl Gone Bad.’ Theodora even said she fell in love with the Barbadian singer when she discovered her 2007 single ‘Umbrella.’
She also emerges in a Francophone music scene that has made room for Black female artists such as Aya Nakamura, Shay, Lous and the Yakuza or Yoa.
In May, Theodora attended Les Flammes, an awards ceremony dedicated to French rap and R&B. She performed a mashup of her tracks ‘FASHION DESIGNA’ and ‘DO U WANNA’, bringing the audience further into her world.
Appearing on stage from above, dressed in a black leather aviator-like bodysuit, she went on to dance like she owned the place. And make no mistake, she did.
Later that night, she (justly) received the award for Best Female Revelation.
“This project is really for the children of the [African] diaspora. This project is for our music, for black music”, she said in her acceptance speech.
“Thank you to all of you, thank you to us, thank you to me. I’m doing this for all the black girls who are a bit weird. Don’t worry, this one’s for us.”
It felt good being seen, for once.
