By Rami Mansi
No matter how hard a novice in the music industry can try, there is a semi-fixed circle of A-listers.
Underneath you have your B-squad, but after that, you leave the mainstream circle of culture. To keep with the demand, many celebs constantly reinvent themselves and their image; But what happens to those who fail to stay in the mainstream’s eye? To the people who go from A-list stars to one-hit wonders and smaller hitmakers?
Stan Twitter, a community that’s comprised of stans of celebrities, coined a term for a fictional place where once mainstream celebrities reside. Named after the one-hit-wonder artist, this place is called the Khia Asluym.
Khia, who became famous for her 2002 explicitly charged hit single “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)”, faded into obscurity following a downhill stream of less successful singles. The term was officially coined after a fan posted a picture of them meeting Khia, and an internet user replied, questioning why anyone would cry over someone obscure like Khia.
The Khia Asylum would further take on many artists at its helm. Singers who found immense success, but failed to make it sustainable, such as Ava Max, Bebe Rexha, Camilla Cabello, and Madison Beer all landed in the virtual prison. This often followed as they found their success in multiple projects or a few songs, but ultimately failed to replicate that energy going forward in their career. The public is ignorant of any and all artistic growth the singers present.
However, how is it possible that the public eye would subjugate successful artists to obscurity, even if the public knows that they are talented and willfully ready to take on pop stardom? Take Bebe Rexha for example. Labeled a “pop chameleon” by Rolling Stone due to her ability to adapt to any genre thrown her way, the Albanian-American pop star made her fame off her EDM-inclined and lyrically lovely pop songs, but also her awarded work as a songwriter for artists like K-pop boy band Shinee, as well as Eminem and Rihanna for their grammy-winning song “The Monster”.
The answer lies in how much of the fame stuck with Rexha in her solo career. When Rexha would perform a collaboration, she was boosted to levels of fame any A-lister would receive. Her country song “Meant to Be” with Florida Georgia Line brought her a Grammy nomination, yet her debut album “Expectations” failed to make any loud noise in the industry.
This trend of collaborations being the singular source of success for artists has brought many talents to Khia Asylum’s doors, like Chloe X Halle through the duo’s work and Kim Petras’s Grammy win being attached to her song with Sam Smith.
Through the artists that fade into obscurity, a trend is apparent with Stan Twitter’s choice of singers: Most, if not all, of the artists are women.
The Khia Asylum is notorious not only for its crude entrapment but its sexist ideologies.
Female artists are constantly pushed into the streaming river of pop culture, meant to be defined by beauty, grace, and talent. The same feminine powers that solidified their charismatic careers are the same that subjugated them to the constant criticism of the collection of cultures that is Stan Twitter. Not judging male artists nearly half as much, from both pure boredom that follows male artists’ creative outbursts and the demand for male singers is much less intact and structured than the opposing gender.
For this, the Khia Asylum is fueled by female pop artists who have either failed to find success in their solo endeavors, failed to seek public approval or catch their interests, or have simply just, as Stan Twitter says, “fell off”.
The gates to the Khia Asylum may be locked, but the key to exit can always be found. Any artist can leave the fantastical and busy prison, but it takes a lot of convincing, marketing strategies, and, at its core, a new persona with sounds unheard of.