![]() ![]() It’s not unheard of for such young talents to find their way into show business, with stars like Michael Jackson starting as early as eight. The question becomes how we came to put a six-year-old in the limelight. In the internet age, celebrity has become conflated with virality and made way for stan culture. The issue of celebrity has a longstanding hold on fans building mythos around and assigning meaning to people whose immediate lives are intangible. With her TikTok account garnering 29k followers following her first release and her Instagram fan account alive and well in her own account’s absence, the quickness with which we grant notoriety. Moving her online presence instead to Twitter, the last bastion of the banned, Montes has beef with the platforms over her banning. Since her rise to fame, the darlin’ diva has been banned on TikTok, and Instagram, likely to keep haters, and even fans, at bay from inflicting any harm on Montes at an impressionable age (or the violation of age requirements on social media). But, perhaps most interestingly, is the reference to Instagram (Ig Ig Ig). The opening of Emily Rose (Deluxe), “Intro/ Ig Ig Ig/ If Today Was The Last Day” draws on key themes in the Montes oeuvre: going outside, haters, and existentialism. “I’m going in circles, crazy, insane/I’m losing my mind/What are the words/That I’m trying to find” Struggling, in our personal and (suddenly increasingly more) virtual lives, to put language to ineffable feelings, fleeting thoughts, and ever-changing facts, our own neurological systems became much like that of a toddler just starting to process and interpret the world around them. At the same time as auto-tune, and hyper-pop glamorized adults with child-like voices, the hyper-salience of doom under a global pandemic dramatically altered our reality as we understood it. The virality of Tiktok, with a surplus of new users under the pandemic, gave Montes a fanbase rife with ironic appreciation. Montes’ rise to stardom is as elusive as the artist herself. While decreasing barriers to entry in the music industry is a worthwhile endeavor, it does not dismantle the cult of celebrity the industry is built on. Montes’ monumental emergence in the music scene offers a moment of reflection in how much media we make available to young people on the internet, and how quick we are to place them, in the limelight. The sixteen-second song (lyrics in full above) launched the then five-year-old into fame, and, subsequently, the unrelenting arms of stan culture.Īs fun as it may be to jump on the stan-wagon (coming from someone who wanted to coin the Emily Rose Montes fanbase, “Thornies”), granting a six-year-old starlet celebrity status should give pause. ![]() In July of 2020 Montes released her eponymous album after her first song “Emily” went viral on Tiktok, garnering 29,000 followers. Instrumental in understanding the origins of the six-year-old sensation, is Montes’s first masterpiece. “My name is Emily and I’m five/I like playing Roblox and going outside/I like going to school, but I’m stuck inside/this virus has me losing my mind” ![]()
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