To get the measure of a pop star, check their social media. On the day of JoJo’s Koko show, which had sold out before many acolytes even knew she was playing, she responded individually via Twitter to several disappointed fans, offering to put their names on the guest list. Her generosity – repaid when she steps on stage and Koko goes impressively loco – stems from an unusually close relationship with her followers, who’ve supported her during a decade-long dispute, while her record label refused to release her music. The feeling is that after a charmed start, when she became the youngest solo artist ever to top the US singles chart, she didn’t get the chance she deserved, and this singing, Instagramming mob are here to put things right.
The Massachusetts-born singer, formerly Joanna Levesque, was 13 when the moreish Leave (Get Out) reached No 1 in 2004, and by 15 she’d put out two Top 5 albums of promising pop-R&B. When her third album, Mad Love, was shelved by the label, she released free mixtapes as placeholders, but it’s only since it finally came out last October (and promptly topped the iTunes chart) that she’s been able to take up where she left off.
And here, to the audience’s rapture, she is, opening with a raw account of depression, Clovers. As bosslike as it’s possible to be in a transparent sequinned onesie, she cuts the thread connecting her to the MTV-promoted wholesomeness of 2004. Like the remodelling of fellow former child star Miley Cyrus, JoJo’s new incarnation bespeaks not a musical transformation but a grabbing of the reins. “I have a zero-tolerance policy in 2017,” she announces, and not before time: the song that follows, Fuck Apologies, is a screed that sounds like she’s spent years composing it in her head.
Thus, this show isn’t defined by the old hits, which are mainly dispatched as a medley, along with the Drake cover version that’s rubber-stamped into every mid-2010s pop gig. It’s the Mad Love material that resounds, and not merely because it includes carnality as a byproduct of maturity. (At one point she writhes around a male fan, who announces that he has a boyfriend but accepts JoJo’s caresses with remarkable composure.) Installed with a voice that skims from delicacy to sledgehammer vehemence, she’s equipped to slay, and does. Motivational songs such as I Am, prefaced by an earnest admonition to not allow past actions to prevail, err on the side of American sincerity, yet have the same chip of pure granite that made Whitney Houston’s most unfettered balladry so undeniable. On the clubbier tracks, shunted along by her guitar-dominated live band, she’s voracious, consumed by her appetites. A handful of generic bangers are elevated by her mastery of them – in the parlance, she owns them, which suggests that her early success was just the first act.
- At O2 Institute, Birmingham, on 28 January. Box office: 0121-437 4150. Then touring.
