I Actually Went to a JoJo Siwa Concert
And actually had a blast
By: Clara Smith
On Monday, February 7th, 2022, I dragged myself and my very patient girlfriend to the Target Center to see JoJo Siwa performing on her D.R.E.A.M. (it doesn’t actually stand for anything) tour. If you’re not familiar with JoJo Siwa, think of someone dressed like a six-year-old girl, but 18 years old and 5’9”. Having first gained media attention by being on the TLC show “Dance Moms,” she came onto my radar in 2018 when she was getting blasted on Twitter for having an uneven hairline. Incredibly amused by her entire brand, I vowed to go to her show when she came into town.
I can safely say that this was the only concert in my life where I got to the venue and thought, “What did I just get myself into?” Upon entering the venue, I was immediately surrounded by thousands of elementary-school-aged girls decked out from head to toe in JoJo Siwa merch. But, I had already bought the tickets, so I put my head down and clutched my girlfriend’s hand as we navigated through the crowd. My girlfriend and I thought that it would be funny to attend the concert in our full-out punk rock attire but immediately regretted it when the spikes on my vest set off the metal detector and the security personnel pulled me aside to search me. One frisk later, we were finally in our seats.
After 20 minutes of waiting with bated breath (and watching the side video screens play ads, JoJo’s nothing if not an opportunist), the lights dimmed, and JoJo Siwa herself rolled onto stage (literally, she was wearing heelys). She opened with “Worldwide Party,” the first verse of which cycles through greetings in different languages before ending in “come on namaste a while.” I spent the rest of the song searching for my eyes, which had rolled out of my skull. When I finally got them back in their sockets, I noticed that she didn’t have a bow in her hair. I remember thinking “hasn’t she sold millions of those things?” but quickly forgot about it due to being distracted by the intense visual stimulation happening in front of me. After the opening number, she heely’d around the stage as she made a standard opening speech, during which she informed us that she only had three rules for her concert. They were that we must:
sing along
not sit down
dance
After the metal detector debacle, I was feeling too self-conscious to follow rules two and three, so I tried to make up for it by obnoxiously following rule one and singing along to all of my favorites like “Every Girl’s a Super Girl” and “#1U” (a song about individuality, which I now find wholly ironic after going to that concert and seeing that her clothing line is effectively breeding thousands of JoJo clones). However, I was also incredibly surprised by the number of bops in her back catalog. “Hold the Drama” is an absolute club banger, complete with clipped vocals and sassy lyrics (my favorite one being “Wrap it up, tie it up with a bow-oh-oh-ay-oh” which I have now annoyed everyone around me with by reciting approximately once every 30 seconds). During the song, my girlfriend leaned over to me and shouted into my ear “If you blindfolded me and asked me to guess where I was, I would say the Gay 90s.” I thought that would be the highlight of the concert, but then she performed “Bop!,” which absolutely brought the house down. My entire peripheral vision was filled with frantic flailing of child-sized limbs. I’m surprised the Target Center is still standing after that number.
After a performance from JoJo’s very own dance group XOMG POP! (I shudder to think about the very real possibility of a JoJo Siwa media empire someday), the concert took an emotional turn. After a costume change into a glittery softball outfit complete with a backward baseball cap and cleats, JoJo sat down at the piano and told us that she had something to say. She proceeded to give a heartfelt speech where she talked about being gay to a comically silent crowd, most of which I’m not sure were old enough to actually know what being gay is. Though the audience might have been too young to really understand the impact of what she was saying, I appreciated the attempt, and my girlfriend and I did our best to be supportive (re: obnoxiously scream every time she said the word ”gay”). She ended the moment by telling the crowd that she was going to play us a song on the piano, then launched into a performance of “Only Getting Better” where she was clearly not actually playing the piano.
Once the softball theme had been thoroughly explored, she went backstage to change outfits again. As we waited, the intro to a song called “Back to That Girl” played while black and white pictures of her as a child slid across the screens. After a few minutes, she finally rose up from behind a large platform with a giant bow on it and proceeded to sing the rest of the song, which was about being the best that you can be (a common motif in JoJo’s work). When the song ended, she melodramatically put her hair up into her trademark side ponytail. She then held a bow out to the crowd and lifted it, the music swelling as she clipped it into place. The crowd’s cheers were noticeably louder than when she talked about being gay. I think that I was not really the target audience for this emotional moment because, as JoJo stood there triumphantly with the bow in her hair, I leaned over my girlfriend and asked “am I supposed to feel something?” It didn’t help that this was the song where JoJo asked the crowd to turn their phone flashlights on, which barely had an impact because most of the crowd wasn’t old enough to have a phone.
After performing a few more songs, JoJo called it a night at 9 o’clock sharp, leaving me and my girlfriend to make the perilous journey through an ocean of side ponytails to the exit. While walking to the light rail station, we got “Boomerang,” which she had performed as her encore, stuck in our heads so badly that we had to split earbuds and listen to it during the ride home.
Despite what you might think after reading this review, I genuinely had a great time at the concert. After the stressful hustle and bustle of college life, it was nice to get to turn my brain off and watch colors explode at me for an hour and a half. I’m also even more of a JoJo Siwa fan than I was before, and since that night I’ve had a tour poster proudly hanging in my dorm room (well, except when it periodically falls down) and listening to her music on repeat. I just pray to whoever’s listening that she doesn’t show up on my Spotify Wrapped.