The DIY Pop Star

Photo: Hope Glassel

It’s not considered late if you show up in full Aliyahcore. The maximalist, Harajuku-inspired style where every day is a rave and every night is emo can’t be complete without a thrifted accessory on every appendage, rhinestones tacked onto the face with eyelash glue, and too-cool-to-care energy. There’s no starter pack for purchase at your local mall (secondhand is preferable), so its visionary, Aliyah Bah, the 21-year-old style influencer and TikToker who performs as Aliyah’s Interlude, intends to spread the message of Aliyahcore beyond clothes — and her 2.9 million TikTok followers. “I’m trying to create an environment where people actually feel comfortable being themselves all the time,” she says over an espresso martini the morning before her Studio 54–themed birthday party in Bushwick. “I love getting sexy and going to the club and hearing my music.”

If Aliyahcore is what to wear, her song “IT GIRL” is how to act. Crafted from an Azealia Banks–type beat she found on YouTube by producer LxnleyBeat, Aliyah’s breakout 2023 single grabs your attention immediately: “Bitch — you know I’m sexy / (Ugh) Don’t call, just text me.” Though her initial post teasing the song faced shady comments telling her to stay in her lane as a style content creator, the girls who got what she was going for soon drowned them out. The full track went on to earn a million streams in five days and a co-sign from Paris Hilton.

“When people are talking about you, they obviously have to care about you even a smidge,” Aliyah says. “So, I don’t know, I guess I’m poppin’.”

Unlike Bella Poarch and Addison Rae, who began their music careers at an almost absurd level of fame (when they first debuted, Bella had 90 million followers and Addison had 88 million), Aliyah skipped the typical TikToker-to-musician pipeline by having a small but dedicated following. “I’m telling you, I feel like the most cunt and influential people in music are never the most famous ones,” she says. In addition to her “FaceTime Call Get Ready With Me” videos, Aliyah’s most popular TikToks were the ones where she was just speaking her mind, going off about her outfit, or hyping up the viewer — all while enraging lurkers every time she showed up in a new locale (“Tokyo next week”) wearing the purest form of Aliyahcore: moon boots with a bikini. To prove some commenters wrong about its wearability, Aliyah started styling different body types, genders, and modesty preferences, giving makeovers to TikTokers across algorithms like an alt-fairy godmother. “IT GIRL” would arrive at the same time as her first M.A.C campaign, a collaboration with Marc Jacobs, and an appearance in Doja Cat’s “Agora Hills” music video.

Ahead of her second single, “Fashion Icon,” Aliyah took her music and signature style offline and onto the dance floor with Cunt Bitch Headquarters, a cross-country series of themed parties that connected her audience with Black-women DJs like Siobhan Bell and fellow fashion icon Dylan Ali. “I be outside,” Aliyah says with a laugh. “Girl, I love the club. I’m so sorry.” This summer, the parties inspired a mini-festival tour titled House of Cunt, where she performed a set every weekend of Pride Month. As she puts the finishing touches on her debut EP for RCA Records, she is fashioning pop stardom the same way she wears clothing: her own way.

Aliyah never felt like she was “meant to be completely seen or heard by the masses” until she started dressing for herself. “Love Me,” her latest song, is inspired by overcoming the harassment and self-hate she faced growing up in Atlanta as a dark-skinned pansexual girl. “I was getting bullied almost every single day,” she says. “I would go to school so mad because they finna get me again. Everything that I’ve been through in my entire life has prepared me for what I do right now.” On “Love Me,” she channels that energy by singing, rapping, and trying out different inflections, channeling ballroom MCs like Willi Ninja, the voguer made famous in Paris Is Burning, as well as Michaela Jae of Pose. “I really love me / Have no doubt please,” Aliyah sings in the chorus. “They tried to make me hate myself.”

“Although I’m, like, such a loud and vibrant person, I really don’t share too much about my personal life online,” she admits. “But in this new era, I’m sharing more about my life and about my experience being a Black woman within the fashion and alternative-music space.”

To complete the full music pivot, Aliyah has been taking voice lessons, writing in the studio four times a week, and practicing her dance skills with voguers. She’s also been exercising and doing breath control to make sure her performances are “tea.” So far, it’s been “a whole other level of commitment,” one that’s pulled her away from social media. She even took a break from styling other people. “Fashion is obviously where I came from,” Aliyah says. “But music is another way to express who I am as a person.”

Following the success of Aliyah’s first two singles, some of her most direct musical references — Azealia Banks, SZA, Charli XCX — began reaching out to compliment her. She later opened for Charli on the brat tour in Chicago, wearing an on-theme, lime-green “cunt” tee, and joined SZA onstage in Sydney to perform “IT GIRL” in front of 20,000 fans. “SZA isn’t the person to learn how to be a pop star from because she’s just so normal,” Aliyah says. “She creates an environment where you wouldn’t even know that she’s a fucking pop star.”

With the well-documented emphasis on musicians needing to promote themselves on social media, Aliyah has a head start establishing balance between her work, her art, and her life. “Sometimes I create a ‘Get Ready With Me,’ and it ain’t got shit to do with my music, you know what I mean?” she says. “TikTok can definitely be promotion, but I don’t think it’s the best way to promote shit. Obviously, right now it’s the biggest audience, but to have a long-lasting impact within the industry, labels need to put more work into their artists.”

Over the years, Aliyah’s label, RCA, has received complaints from fans for allegedly suppressing its own artists, including SZA and the now-independent Tinashe. But Aliyah has only positive things to say about signing with the company, insisting her deal was “very lax.” “I own all my masters, and it’s literally only one album,” she says. “If it works, I might re-sign; if not, fuck it.” Plus, she notes, when Tinashe first signed with RCA, “shit within the industry was a lot different. Artists now have more agency over their music.”

Instability is scary for a Taurus like Aliyah. But her major-label debut could be the freedom she’s envisioned for herself, especially as her largest platform, TikTok, faces a ban in the United States. But if that does happen, she’s confident someone will create a similar app. “And I’ll be a poppin’ bitch on that, too,” she says. With or without followers, Aliyah says she would still be pursuing the same career to the best of her abilities — maybe just from Atlanta instead of New York City. “Fame and all of this shit comes and goes for everyone, but for me, I really just want a core group of people who care about my creative process, who care about all the creative shit that I release.”

Photos: Jared White; John Krug.

Photos: Jared White; John Krug.

“It” girl: scenes from Aliyah’s 21st-birthday party in Bushwick. Photo: John Krug

That over-the-top creative vision was all over her 21st-birthday party. Aliyah pulled up on a white horse (like Bianca Jagger, she didn’t ride it into the club; she just served face on it), a grand entrance that could have easily been mistaken for a My Super Sweet 16 reboot. Each pose she hit perched on the saddle was punctuated by the crowd yelling “Yes!” in various lengths, hyping her up the way she does for others on TikTok. The Aliyah’s Interlude fan base unites all the different tables in a high-school cafeteria. Cool Gen-Z Bushwick regulars wearing printed pants and septum-pierced outcasts in fishnets lined up on the dim sidewalk, as artsy creatives who came in themed sequins took pictures against graffiti walls.

Inside, aerialists, stilt walkers, mimes, jugglers, and dancers wandered around while Aliyah stood in the DJ booth pouring wine into people’s cups. The dance floor filled up when she got on the mic for “IT GIRL,” and the loudest voices in the crowd joined her for the opening “Bitch!” Breath-control training in full effect, she took over the backing track as every phone in the room pointed in her direction. “This is purely for the community,” she described the party earlier in the day. “To turn the fuck up with the people that fuck with me.”