You’ve seen Madison Beer. The 21-year-old singer-songwriter has permanent residency on your Instagram Explore page. Her nose has the enviable quality of having been pinched by a filter. Her eyes are brown, or could they be hazel? It’s difficult to parse, and becomes more elusive the longer you look. Then there are her lips, so puffy and pouty not even the spheric orb of an EOS lip balm could cover them all at once. (She got lip fillers at age 15, but has since had them dissolved.) To talk about her face – how this Long Island-to-Los Angeles transplant has become the talking head of whatever generic beauty standard offers free entry into the TikTok Hype House – seems reductive. Yet it’s all anyone can talk about.
Madison Beer initially struck me as talented but a little self-victimising after being called out for her missteps. She was more often in the press because she had “denied” staging photos at a Black Lives Matter protest; or had been “caught” hiding behind a bush outside of a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgery clinic; or romanticised the paedophilic relationship in Lolita; or “clapped back” at haters after period blood spotted her white bikini. A clip of Beer telling friends how she was asked to appear in Ariana Grande’s video for thank u, next (but couldn’t make it to the shoot) generated an onslaught of it-should’ve-been-me memes.
This was the Madison Beer I was confronted with, when not listening to her music. But she had a lot to say if you cared to plug in to her vulnerable and addictive songs and ignore the headlines.
If she didn’t have the talent to usurp the distracting blunders, I would say forget it. But she does. On her track Selfish, for example, she sings, “I bet you thought you gave me real love /But we spent it all in nightclubs” – a direct reference to her two-year relationship with club promoter and friend-of-famous people Zack Bia. Details from her private life were all there for even the most casual fan to glean. Was Beer’s fallible reputation – a hedonistic, lip-filling “liar” and victim of being “too pretty”, as many TikTok comments would suggest – the case of her words being twisted, or did she have a case of word vomit, arming her enemies and trolls at every turn with munitions? Maybe a bit of both.
