Tinashe Is so Much More Than Your Meme
With four adventurous albums under her belt and collaborations with everyone from Britney Spears to Kaytranada, it's time the world let Tinashe be great.
While scrolling on Twitter a few weeks ago, I slowed when I ran past a familiar clip of Tinashe’s “Die A Little Bit” video, 10,000 likes deep and quickly climbing, captioned, “I didn’t realize on first listen this is genius.” I immediately asked myself a question I’ve had to ask too many times when it comes to Tinashe: why? Why didn’t you realize it was genius on the first listen? Why was a Tinashe video from late 2019 just now starting to go viral? Why does this always happen to Tinashe?
The tweet (from an account that, at the time of press, has gone private) was just another in a recent bout of viral memes involving Tinashe — a triple threat singer, dancer, and actress who has proven herself time and time again and by all accounts should be an absolute music industry superstar by now. And yet Tinashe often gets the shaft, being relegated to a meme thanks to the horribly toxic yet incredibly potent combination of her former label fumbling her career and stan twitter’s obsession with kicking artists when they’re down.
For her first three albums, Tinashe was signed to RCA Records and under the thumb of label execs who incessantly micromanaged her work and yet had no idea to market her: a genre-defying, relentlessly creative artist who had no interest in being boxed in by the traditional methods of measuring industry wins. After the success of her major-label debut single “2 On” and the release of her first album Aquarius in 2014, Tinashe quickly announced a follow-up. Joyride was set to be released in 2015. And then 2016. And then 2017. It wasn’t until 2018 that the album saw the light of day, selling under 10,000 copies in its first week and quickly shuffling off the charts. In that time between Aquarius and Joyride, Tinashe and RCA made several attempts to recreate the success of “2 On” while trying to position Tinashe as the go-to pop/R&B hybrid. In August 2016, Tinashe dropped “Superlove,” initially meant to be Joyride’s lead single, complete with flashy pop production and a shiny, Baywatch-esque Hannah Lux Davis-directed video with full choreography. When the song failed to meet label expectations, RCA shelved Joyride once more. And though just a few months later RCA allowed her to release the more experimental companion album she recorded in the meantime, Nightride, they withheld any budget for Tinashe to properly market the project, instead funneling money into heavily misguided attempts at a big pop hit.
In 2017, Tinashe released the abhorrent pop ballad “Flame,” a complete sonic departure from anything she had done before. It sounds nothing like Tinashe. There is no artistry, none of the singer’s usual flair or sincerity, just one last swing at a major pop hit that missed so hard she nearly fell out of the ring entirely. In a 2018 interview with Cosmopolitan, Tinashe revealed, “I cried for two days when they told me I had to put that song out as a single. Dead-ass serious. They forced that 100 percent.” That much was evident for anyone who may have seen one of my favorite videos of all time, entitled “Tinashe on a FIRETRUCK to celebrate ‘FLAME’ single release!” In the dreadfully-conceived promotional effort, RCA rented a fire truck to pull up outside of the Hot 97 Radio offices in New York, where a mini flash mob of shirtless dancers clad in nothing but fireman suspenders danced to the song in front of Hot 97 station heads and employees from a nearby Gregory’s Coffee that wandered out to see what was happening. When the dance fizzled out, Tinashe emerged from the truck, careful not to stumble over any banks of brown NYC snow, to take pictures with the few onlookers kind enough to stop for a moment in the frigid New York winter. You can practically see Tinashe gritting her teeth, forcing herself to pretend she cares about the song just so Joyride might have a chance to finally be released. The entire bomb of an event is one of my favorite hilariously inept, totally awkward cases of major label promotional snafus.
RCA’s clumsy mistakes affected the public’s perception of Tinashe the artist. The label’s insistence on finding an avenue for a major hit resulted in a collection of dumped one-off singles and constant delays and PR misfires — and people noticed. Tinashe now found herself caught in the crosshairs of some of the music industry’s most feared, virulent individuals: Twitter users. There, she became a poster child for flop artists, a sort of underdog whose loyal fanbase was vocal but treated as a joke. Cries of “STREAM TINASHE!” became joking stan-twitter fodder thrown around whenever someone was looking for a few measly likes. Baiting articles like “Where Did Tinashe Go Wrong?” didn’t help.
But even a force as powerful as stan twitter couldn’t keep Tinashe down. After finally parting ways with RCA in early 2019, Tinashe dropped Songs for You — her first self-released proper album. The record spawned great critical and commercial success, especially for an independent artist, with reviews praising its range of styles as finally catering to Tinashe’s expansive talents. Singles like “Die A Little Bit” and “Save Room For Us” are Tinashe in top form, sincerely melding R&B with pop and dance in a way that none of her contemporaries have been able to do as successfully. Their accompanying videos both include breakneck choreography routines, showcasing Tinashe’s unflappable talents as a dancer — she’s maybe one of the best in the game. Aside from Ciara, I can’t think of an artist under 40 who dances with such precision, hitting a drop and a split so effortlessly that it’s jaw-dropping.
The perception of Tinashe’s career now exists online in a unique place: her critical acclaim has risen so much that the talk surrounding her almost always falls back on, “why did y’all let her flop?” It seems that the public has come back around and rewritten the narrative they created for her. After spending so much time pegging her as a flop, they’ve now expunged their records and are questioning why others haven’t done enough to bolster her success. The conversation keeps positioning Tinashe as underrated without anyone taking the blame for it, turning that underrated status into meme material. And in all fairness…the memes are funny. One of the greatest tweets of all time is, “You called Tinashe a flop but now you want me to retweet your missing sister?” And who can forget, “I hate hanging out with gays oomf [one of my followers] just said ‘Secure your wig sis Tinashe is coming’ with 0 context after 5 minutes of silence.”
Currently, Tinashe drifts somewhere between total supernova and an artist so self-assured she seems almost underground. She’s artistic and exciting, unafraid to do something just to do it. Literally. One of the infamous memes is of Tinashe throwing up seemingly random photo edits of herself, with someone quote tweeting, “You just be doing shit.” And she kind of does! Her unpredictability and penchant for being a part of new experiences are what make her such an intriguing artist. There’s no telling what Tinashe might end up doing next. She might do you a favor and hop on your song to make it listenable. She might throw a high-concept, stunning virtual reality concert, which she has done multiple times during the length of the pandemic. She might release a fantastic one-off single and stylish accompanying visual just for fun. She might put out a holiday EP. She might become the next great House music diva, something she’s on her way to with “Love Line,” a stellar, high-energy collaboration with Shift K3Y released on Friday that will be sure to level clubs once they can safely reopen. Now that she’s independent, free from any label higher-ups diluting her energy and vision, Tinashe has only begun to tap into her full potential as an artist.
And yet, frustratingly, Tinashe being so consistently ahead of her time seems to have the public struggling to catch up. Tinashe has been going viral over and over lately, but rarely is it for any of the recent work she’s done since cutting ties with RCA. Last month, a mashup of “Superlove” and Charli XCX’s “Unlock It” began going viral on TikTok, with Charli’s vocals atop the instrumental from “Superlove.” Tinashe reacted in stride, posting a video of herself jamming out to the mashup on TikTok, captioning it, “When one of your old songs is trending on tik tok again but never your new songs.”
To compound that, “2 On” received a huge viral push from Twitter last month as well, with people using Instagram’s music feature to put the song’s chorus on meme photos which led to other users searching Twitter for innocuous tweets with the words “two on” in succession to retweet them with Tinashe’s music video attached. And, of course, on 4/20 people celebrated the tree being way too strong, with Tinashe fans jumping into the replies to draw attention to her recent virtual concert while the old song was getting hyped. Though Tinashe is finally getting the love she has deserved all along, it’s somewhat disheartening to see her always being relegated to a meme. Maybe that’s why, like the viral tweet featuring “Die A Little Bit,” people aren’t immediately recognizing the greatness in her music. But that’s their loss. To treat Tinashe as an artist trying to make a comeback or one chasing a hit would be a mistake. Tinashe has already established a stable and successful body of work, she need not wait for anyone who isn’t paying attention.
Maybe Tinashe is content with this level of fame, free from a spotlight bright enough to scrutinize every last move and creative iota within her. She was never meant to be a major label’s star performer, that kind of public pressure never suited what she does. And though she seems to always remain on the verge of a major mainstream breakthrough, she’s still receiving a great amount of hard-earned love — even if a good portion of it stems from social media virality. Maybe one day her creative genius will be recognized immediately instead of months or years later. I guess that’s the curse of Tinashe being perpetually ahead of her time.