When you see a new artist’s act entitled Alice the G00n, you know you’re in for an interesting and eclectic experience. What I wasn’t expecting was a refined act that brings to mind the early days of pop acts a la Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga, or Billie Eilish, combined with the more underground work of artists a la Caleb Landry Jones, AIR, or back in the day The Crystal Method. Alice is in that once precarious place of being an internet star, but these days that being precarious in and of itself is starting to be a thing of the past. Forget good ratings, think of good algorithms. Alice the G00n is getting good algorithms, needless to say. She’s not alone.
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/alicetheg00n/?hl=en
While a unique and qualified act in her own right, Alice the G00n is one of many internet personalities differentiating themselves within the current, pop cultural consciousness by way of expressing themselves with total creative freedom and virtual impunity on widespread, digital platforms. Alice the G00n’s mediums currently are her personal site, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Through these, she has already demonstrated commendable commercial prowess. The videos are fresh, funny, dark, and somewhat of a throwback to the noughties when people (labels) took risks, unconventionality didn’t mean no commercial gains, and artists could breathe within their contracts – the contracts in servitude to the artist themself, rather than it being the other way around as it appears today.
She’s fiercely independent, she’s not adherent to any trends the suits have decided are God, and frankly she comes across like a cross between Beatrice Dalle’s “Joan of Arc, the suicide bomber version” (Rupert Everett’s summarization), and the throwback coolest girl in school who wears, a la Taylor Swift, Britney Spears’ Fantasy. There’s something intensely girly about her, coupled with this decidedly X-rated, very messed up sort of gnarliness substituting blood for pink fluid.
This is reflected in the self-published and self-distributed releases of Alice the G00n’s singles, such as Cya, along with her directing the music video entitled Cya: Chapter One, and more recently In Time: Chapter Two – The Road Trip from Hell. Both music videos, along with the music by Alice herself, feel like definitive stories, with beginnings, middles, and ends. Somewhere. We get these hyper-stylized glimpses of a bizarre, neon-pink hellscape – where Alice the G00n, in an incarnation that’s something of a cross between Sin City and The Bride from Kill Bill, dispenses justice to male ‘demons’ who have done her wrong, and get in her way. It’s all so delightfully inspired, trashy, goofy, funny, and effective wrapped up into one.
Add to the mix Alice’s genuinely beautiful singing voice. She sounds like a classically-trained singer, not someone who has taken this up as a hobby, or as a musical or performative entertainment exercise. Her presence is growing, and given she’s not just a recording artist but a writer, producer, and director of her own material – there’s no telling what she’s about to do next.
In this case, that’s a good thing.
Garth Thomas