ABC’s for the Telfar Bag Set
On the last Sunday morning in August, a line of very stylish children and their parents stretched alongside Flatbush Avenue toward the Brooklyn Paramount Theater. With few exceptions, the children were Black, their caregivers part of that older-Gen-Z-to-millennial Black parental spread that prefers Telfar totes over traditional diaper bags. The line created impressive ASMR: beaded braids clacking with every tiny head swivel, the soft crinkles of so many bags of cheddar Goldfish and Pirate’s Booty. Inside, the DJ warmed up the room with a disorienting preview of what was to come (did you know there’s a kids’ version of ODB’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”?). The cheerful, cocoa-buttered crowd waited patiently to see the first concert tour of the YouTube children’s-music sensation Gracie’s Corner.
Gracie’s Corner makes kids’ music for parents who don’t really rock with kids’ music. Sung by an actual kid — Graceyn Hollingsworth, age 13 — Gracie’s Corner has gained popularity with music inspired by a variety of traditionally Black music genres (R&B, reggae, Afrobeat, and trap, to name a few) without sounding as ear-grating as Kidz Bop. And the star of the show has grown up in front of our eyes, going from a 7-year-old who loved Taylor Swift to a 13-year-old whose current favorite artist is Tyler, the Creator. In the merch line, I overheard a first-time mom who’d driven from Elmhurst explain how she’d stumbled upon Gracie’s Corner when searching for a song that could help teach her daughter the ABC’s “without it being too annoying.”
Gracie’s music became part of my everyday life in 2021, when my then-toddler came home from day care singing Gracie’s “Clean Up Song”, a Soca-inflected banger with the chorus “Clean UP, UP, UP, UP / and put our things away!” Any song that makes a small child feel enthusiastic about gathering up Magna-Tiles is worth exploring, I figured, so I found even more Gracie’s Corner tunes. There’s “Row Your Boat,” a New Orleans bounce twist on the classic nursery song, with a remix featuring Big Freedia for good measure. “Colors Song,” a slow-rocking, ska-adjacent jam, slips in lines like, “There’s so many colors / But black is beautiful to me!” The song “I Love My Hair,” a mid-tempo Afrobeat tune in the melodic tradition of Davido, is more overt in its messaging: “Kinky, curly cute / I love down to my roots / Sweet like lemonade / I love my hair in braids.” Messaging aside, these songs slap, as the kids say, sneaking in overt upbeat messaging without, for the most part, feeling cringe.
“I’m big on positive reinforcement, self-talk, positive self-talk, affirmations,” Dr. Arlene Gordon-Hollingsworth, mother to Graceyn and co-creator of Gracie’s Corner, told me. “Obviously, as a psychologist, it’s a big thing.”
Gordon-Hollingsworth, a licensed clinical psychologist from Houston, started Gracie’s Corner in 2020 alongside her husband, Javoris Hollingsworth, who grew up playing music in church and worked as a chemistry professor at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. During the early days of the pandemic, the Hollingsworths found themselves relying on YouTube to entertain their three children more than ever, but most of the shows starred non-Black children.
“If you’re constantly seeing imagery where you’re not included,” Javoris said, “you start to question, like, ‘Okay, why am I different? What’s wrong with me?’” They set out to create an animated YouTube channel featuring music produced by Javoris, voiced by hired singers, with lyrics enhanced by Gordon-Hollingsworth’s belief in the power of positive self-talk. Javoris committed himself to making sure the music was kid-appropriate but not anathema to parents’ ears. Gordon-Hollingsworth convinced Javoris to let 7-year-old Graceyn, already a lover of music with YouTube-star aspirations, have a shot at the gig herself. “She got in there. She wanted to do it,” Gordon-Hollingsworth said. “She enjoyed it. She still enjoys it.” Javoris wanted to go beyond simply making a Black Cocomelon, researching musical traditions from across the African diaspora and including elements of them where he could. “There may be some kids who never would hear a reggae song,” Javoris said. “Now they’re bobbing their head to that.”
A quick confession: I am uneasy about “representation” as a selling point in and of itself. The idea of “seeing myself” in art simply because the principals or practitioners of said art and I share phenotypical features has long felt like an oversimplification of how recognition in art works. Representation does not matter to me as much as rigor — why should I care whether the avatars or creators of the art “look like me” if the art in question is not moving? And in the wake of the 2020 uprisings, when corporate co-opting of representation went into overdrive and was used to sell everything from tampons to beer cozies, any art that promises to make me “feel seen” first and foremost raises my hackles. But kids tend to kill the contrarian in you just by existing. Try going to a costume party and seeing a bunch of brown-skinned, kinky-haired toddlers in blue dresses with long, blonde braids tacked to their heads in tribute to Elsa from Frozen, and the issue clarifies itself quickly. Don’t even get me started on dolls.
I am uneasy about “representation” as a selling point in and of itself. But kids tend to kill the contrarian in you just by existing.
The desire to make sure your child has rhythm is secondary to the grand task of “feeling seen,” but it’s still important, especially if your child is one of the few Black children in their private school or in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. In Los Angeles, I went to a Kwanzaa party where the host was adamant about teaching the children line dances — from the electric slide to the cha-cha slide — in hopes of scoring a Kujichagulia twofer of skills: the ability to tell one’s right from one’s left, and the ability to hold one’s own at a cookout. Gracie’s Corner is good for this, too.
Gracie’s Corner has released more than 200 songs since 2020. It has won two NAACP Image Awards, reached nearly 6 million subscribers on YouTube, and recorded a popular “Wheels on the Bus” remake with Texas rapper Paul Wall, whose guest appearance at the Houston stop of the live tour caused pint-size pandemonium. The night before the Brooklyn Paramount shows, resale prices to Gracie’s Corner Live momentarily rivaled the cheapest resale offers for the upcoming U.S. Open Round of 16 match between Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff, both at around $245.
Gracie’s Corner comprises a trinity of representation, each in Afro puffs. There’s Graceyn Hollingsworth, the voice behind the songs; cartoon Gracie, the star of animated YouTube music videos that are bright and brief and feature a style of syncopated movement reminiscent of jaunty robots; and the newest edition: mascot Gracie, who bops around onstage in her big felted head and feet. The mascot doesn’t appear to be able to speak, but name a dance, from the Bankhead Bounce to the Nae Nae, and Gracie the mascot can execute it. Graceyn’s parents said they chose these other representations to create some distance between the product Gracie’s Corner and their young daughter. “Our fear, of course,” Gordon-Hollingsworth told me, “is that she’s pushed too much behind the children’s music. When she’s ready to do her own thing, she won’t be able to pivot away from it.”
Graceyn’s parents’ favorite word might be “intentional,” as it came up at least ten times in our conversation. They wouldn’t be alone in this; it’s a buzzword for a certain kind of respectable Black person, one who’s not into the hand-wringing side of respectability politics. At its best, “intentional” is an attempt to share your values with others and to express how you’ve walked through an often hostile world in pursuit of them. At worst, it reads like a brand play. Your wedding might be intentional in its employment of Black-owned vendors; much was written about how Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour aesthetics were intentional in their appropriation of the American flag. The implication is that if we do not order our steps, especially in public, any old thing might happen. Enter child-rearing, yet again. If not intentionality during child-rearing, then when? We “vote with our dollar” even more than usual when children are involved, especially in a country that seems less and less interested in safety regulations, let alone basic decency.
Graceyn’s parents did not give in to her earlier entreaties to become a more standard-fare YouTube kid star (she wanted to do unboxing-and-review videos, à la Ryan’s World) because they were aware of the risks of exposing their child to the public directly. “There’s a lot of pieces that we weren’t too fond of with it,” Javoris said. “No disrespect to people who choose to go that route, but we just wanted her to have some level of privacy.” Intentionality aside, there’s only so much two very smart parents can do to protect their child from the downsides of YouTube fame. Graceyn has her own Instagram account, currently managed by her mother, with a modest 18,000 followers. She is coming of age in a public sphere where norms are rapidly deteriorating, where “reverse racism” is being taken seriously, and online bullying is as common as Crocs on kids in summer. Thus far, the demands of increased popularity and the family’s own ambitions for Gracie’s Corner — they’re releasing two children’s books this fall, and they record about two new songs a week at home — seem to have had little impact on Graceyn’s day-to-day life, outside of a few missed school days for touring. Time will tell how those ambitions alter her life moving forward.
At the concert, the animated Gracie appeared on a jumbo screen at the back of the stage, working as a kind of guide and queuing up songs to be played over the speakers as Gracie the mascot and her entourage of sidekicks danced to the songs. Many kids in the audience took a song or two to warm up to mascot Gracie and friends, which included an androgynous mascot in beaded cornrows and a smiling Latino boy mascot with a Bieber-esque side swoop.
Toward the finale — to our surprise, as it hadn’t been promised in the FAQs about the show (we had been forewarned about the mascots) — Graceyn herself appeared onstage. Wearing a denim jacket and jeans, the 13-year-old hit her dance moves just as well as her mascot and sang in a voice more confident than the warbling, younger-kid voice familiar from the recordings. Graceyn has “It,” that ineffable thing that makes some people excel at performance while others, try as they might, never quite swing it. If any toddlers had held back their enthusiasm up until this point, seeing the real-life Graceyn do her thing shed them of their inhibitions. Kids sprinted to the front of the stage, rapt in ecstasy like Michael Jackson concertgoers in early-1990s Bucharest. Parents stood or danced in their seats, bouncing along to Gracie’s Corner’s most popular song, a Jersey club–style ode to carrots and broccoli called “The Veggie Dance.” Confetti showered down on us from two stage-side canons. A brief, euphoric feeling floated through the room, which reminded me of footage I’d seen of legendary kids’ singer Raffi’s concerts in the ’70s and ’80s, except mingled in with the good vibes was a feeling of pride. Look at Gracie up there, growing up.
After the show, I waited for the meet and greet to end (the mascots posed for photos, too), while Graceyn — calm, self-possessed — received her tiny fans. In most cases, the parents seemed even more excited to spend a moment with her than their children did. Graceyn told me that she wasn’t originally intended to perform on the tour at all. “It was my singing teacher and my dance teacher who convinced my parents to do it,” she said. “Just to let me, like, get into knowing how touring is, and if I want to do touring again.” She did indeed like touring, and the more she spoke, the more I had the feeling that she was on the precipice of something. Not just young adulthood, but a new artistic life, one that would probably not include songs about vegetables.
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