Jax Emerges as a Body Positive Storyteller

Pop-Rock TikTok Sensation Jax Emerges as a Body Positive Storyteller

Mixing comedy and candor, the rising star is finding light in difficult situations.

by Rachel Ecker

Photo by Braverijah Gregg

Published on November 24, 2022

Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and TikTok sensation Jax stepped down on Canadian ground for the first time earlier this year for her featured performance at the Dreamer Day Festival, celebrating International Day of the Girl. Her first stop was a sporting goods store where she unknowingly picked up a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey created by Drew House, Justin Bieber’s famed clothing brand. Clearly, the born and raised New Yorker has good taste.

It’s no coincidence that Jax wound up at the conference designed to uplift young women ready to smash barriers in pursuit of their dream career. Rather than a music festival or awards show, this particular gig complemented her thriving career of no-nonsense pop tunes with inspirational undertones. She found her biggest success yet with a series of TikToks celebrating body positivity, scored by her anthem “Victoria’s Secret.”

The singer’s stardom has been marked with an unmatched humour and unwavering honesty. Jax’s original satirical songs have accumulated millions of views, comments, likes, and saves on TikTok. She writes and sings about anything and everything; a song for Elon Musk, breaking all the house rules with the girl she babysits, Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘good 4 u’ from the perspective of the singer’s dad, her celebrity crush serenading her, and much more.

“I think art in general is all about communication,” Jax says in conversation with RANGE. She shared that finding light in unlikely or difficult situations is the simplest way to get through them and understand them. This openness in her artistry is how she’s built a fanbase that operates as a community.

When it came to creating her most recent single “Victoria’s Secret,” which quickly became her first Top 40 hit after being used in more than 90 thousand TikTok videos, Jax says it “was a very long process and then very quick.” The song manifested from feedback she got from her community: fans, fans’ parents, and even Chelsea, the girl she babysits. All of these people reached out through TikTok and social media expressing their struggle to find the right way to overcome harmful body expectations and talk about how it affects their mental health. The singer reflected, “I don’t know what to say, but I can write a song about it. ‘Victoria’s Secret’ had been in my notes for years. I never found the right words. Once I got in the studio, it kind of poured out all at once.”

“Victoria’s Secret,” which debuted at the Governor’s Ball Music Fesitval in New York over the summer, is a boisterous pop-rock anthem that uplifts Jax’s typical style of musical storytelling. Marrying comedy and candor, Jax sings about how narrow ideals of beauty have pushed her to develop harmful eating habits and subsequent self-hate, while also casually revealing the famous Victoria of Victoria’s Secret as some random dude from Ohio.

The single comments on how these body expectations really exist to serve a capitalistic and patriarchal purpose that has nothing to do with us. What would happen if we took that power back? What if we chose not to subscribe to those ideals? What if we lived in the light of radical self-love and self-acceptance?

Jax is one of many public figures that has engaged in the conversation of self-love and body acceptance. When asked what she contributes to this conversation in a new way, without hesitation the singer says “Nothing. No, like absolutely nothing. The only difference is I had a check mark and was able to get something to go on TikTok enough for a company to pay attention to it.”

The candor continues. Jax is real about the fact that the main contribution of this song is providing a platform for people to share their stories. Suddenly, Jax’s fans and their parents have a place to start in a conversation they didn’t know how to enter.

The songwriter talked more about how she is still traveling through her own self-love journey. “I honestly haven’t spoken about it in public, what I’ve gone through, because I’m still going through it.”

She continues, “The weight of it feels a lot lighter than it used to. I had no idea that there are so many different versions of what I’ve been through. Even if you’re not able to see your body in the mirror with the right goggles on. I think when there’s somebody else next to you that is going through something similar, it’s way easier to crack a smile and be like, hey, we’re in it together.”

At the Dreamer Day Festival, Jax was joined by a rally of CEOs and young women in male-dominated industries to take down a sliver of the patriarchy with music and conversation. In anticipation for the event, Jax shared, “I really hope to empower some of the young girls out here and get to meet everybody and have a good time together, singing from the top of our lungs.” For Jax, it always comes back to community, connection, and paving a way for young people who might lie outside of societal expectations to flourish as themselves.

With both eyes forward, the singer is eager to hop on a tour and experience the connection she’s fostered with her fans while on stage, outside of numbers and usernames. When her songs aren’t afraid to get as deep as they do, that real-life connection will naturally flow.