Gwen Stefani: From Feminist to Fascist

Hey everyone, I just got my ashes and I'm ready for Lent.

It's gonna be the most transformative Lent

of our lives.

Check it out.

God bless.

Do you guys know Lisa from Blackpink?

Yeah.

She has this song called Rockstar where one of the lyrics in the chorus is

I'm gonna do my best Lisa impression.

Lisa, can you teach me Japanese?

I said, hi, hi.

Little known fact, she's actually recalling an interaction she had had with Gwen Stefani.

No, I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

Oh my God.

I thought you were for real.

I thought that was a real fun fact.

I just love the idea of Gwen Stefani being like, Lisa, can you teach me Japanese?

Okay.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

The other day, I saw a tweet from a one Gwen Stefani that absolutely stopped me dead in my tracks.

Would one of you like to read this Gwen Stefani tweet?

Because I feel like it needs the feminine touch.

Wow, at Jonathan Rumi, you are a powerful, inspirational human.

What an enlightening, intelligent, beautiful interview.

Thank you for being you, GX.

The interview in question was one between Jonathan Rumi, an actor known for his roles in various Christian TV shows and movies, and a one,

Tucker Carlson.

I was perplexed.

I was shaken.

I was paralyzed.

Gwen Stefani, Gwen Stefani of I'm just a girl.

I've been, you know, you know.

That's right.

I'm sorry.

I've spent I've spent the last 48 hours looking and listening to nothing except Gwen Stefani.

And so it's really just like her kind of, I'm just a girl.

Like the way she really kind of curls around certain consonants is front and center of my brain right now.

But this was Gwen Stefani of No Doubt promoting Tucker Carlson of the Great Replacement Theory.

For the rest of the day, there were but four words running through my head.

This shit is

bananas.

My day as I had planned it was over.

I needed to know everything.

I'd fallen into a sweet escape that felt neither sweet.

Sorry.

This whole episode is going to be puns.

I'm really, I started writing the intro and I couldn't stop.

I'd fallen into a sweet escape that felt neither sweet nor like an escape, rather a rabbit hole.

So I went to Gwen's Instagram, now littered with advertisements for the Hallow Daily Prayer app, advertisements on which thousands of commenters are saying things like, what happened to Gwen Stefani?

And bring back Gwen.

I went on TikTok to find a viral video of a gay man getting his tattoo of Gwen Stefani's face removed, where too I found similar comments, like, Gwen Stefani would hate Gwen Stefani.

This feels like a recurring script in pop culture lately, especially for people in and around my age group.

Pop culture fixtures that we grew up alongside, making, as so many have, the MAGA pivot.

In today's episode, I wanted to come together, Taylor, Kat, me, you the listener, to do what has become an unfortunate ritual lately, mourn a pop diva.

Specific to Gwen, I want to figure out where and why the pivot from punk rock princess to Harojuku culture vulture to trad wife occurred and draw from it broader conclusions about privilege, cultural appropriation, celebrity artifice, and whatever the hell is going on with that prayer app.

As usual lately, I am joined by two of my best friends, Kat Tenbarge and Taylor Lorenz.

Welcome back to the show.

Hi.

Thanks for having us back again.

And before we get into the meat of the episode, if you would like more of the show and or to support the show, we are over on Patreon with some bonus episodes.

I recently did a bonus with trans culture critic Fran Torado about Amelia Perez and the disaster that has come of representation politics.

And I am doing some live shows this spring, which I would love to see you at.

I'm so excited.

It'll be just like the podcast, but live.

We are doing shows in Toronto, Chicago, Philly, Brooklyn, Seattle, LA, and Portland this May and June.

So if you're interested in that, the link will be in the episode description.

So before we get into the chronology of Gwen's life and career and see how it shaped up to be what it is today, I want to ask you guys, like, how are you feeling going into this?

And what is the mood given, you know, your personal and cultural relationship to Gwen Stefani?

Well, when you texted us and were like, have you guys seen what's going on with Gwen Stefani?

I was like, no.

And then as soon as we started putting the pieces together and as soon as we started like doing research on this, I was just like, I should have really like it, it all makes so much more sense now.

And I almost feel silly for not realizing how transparent like the Gwen Stefani act has been.

But I think a lot of people are in the same boat.

So I'm glad that we're going to walk through it all.

You know, the Gwen Stefani thing was so wild to me because I haven't thought about her in years.

But she was such a part of my childhood, like as a millennial.

Like, I think literally in like fifth grade, I definitely did not have one of her CDs because I was not allowed to listen to like that sort of music, but she was like popular, you know, she was so cool.

I just remember having like young, emotional relationships and like listening to her music and being obsessed.

And she was so beautiful and she had like the perfect washboard abs and like perfect hair.

And I mean, now looking back at some of her costumes, there's deeply problematic.

But at the time, she just seemed so theatrical and cool and like emo and awesome.

I remember there was a theme park in Cincinnati where I grew up where, in like the kids' section, they would always be playing The Sweet Escape by Gwen Stefani.

Oh my god, Sweet Escape.

That was a song that I feel like my friends and I would like blast in the car in the summers and like blasting it and like getting ice cream.

And like, it was such a that was such a good song.

Truly one of the best pop hooks of the 2000s.

That woo-hoo, wee-hoo.

It's so instantly iconic and recognizable.

Well, Gwen Stefani was born in 1969, a few months after Woodstock, notably, in Anaheim, a city in Orange County, California.

And that's the end of our episode.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Taylor, as our resident Californian on the podcast, would you like to describe maybe the political significance of Orange County, California?

Orange County, California is kind of weird because it's actually kind of a Republican stronghold, like Huntington Beach and like so much of that area is mega.

Like now it's pro-Trump, but it's always been right-leaning.

A lot of big mega churches are down there, like Irvine.

Like it's very Christian.

It's very different than LA, even though it's right outside LA.

It's like a suburb of LA practically, but like culturally, it's much closer to like the South or somewhere else.

Like it is this like sort of different pocket of culture within California.

Gwen's Italian-American dad was a marketing executive for Yamaha Motorcycles and would often go on trips for business to dun-dun dun Japan.

Her mother was an Irish-American homemaker.

Gwen had an older brother named Eric and two younger siblings.

There's this great essay that I am going to reference a number of times throughout this episode.

It's from 2018 2018 and it's by a writer named Anne Helen Peterson.

It's called, The New Gwen Stefani is a lot like the old one.

I'm going to link that essay in the episode description if you want to read it.

But Anne wrote, Gwen had grown up in a devoutly Catholic home, which, over the years to come, she would describe as the Brady Bunch family, church every Sunday.

Her mom got mad when she used the F word on stage, but took solace in the fact that she didn't have any tattoos or piercings.

Her dad was thankful that Stefani spent her teen years playing piccolo in the school marching band.

Her family had once taken a trip to the Vatican, on which Stefani, then aged 21, was forbidden to talk to boys.

In a different interview, Gwen said, We weren't rich, but we definitely had whatever we wanted.

That sounds like you're rich, by the way.

Yes, it does.

So, Gwen really enters the public imagination as the front member of No Doubt.

No Doubt was formed in 1986 as a ska band by Gwen's older brother, brother Eric and his friend John Spence.

Originally, Gwen Stefani, I keep wanting to call her Gwyneth Paltrow.

Jesus Christ.

Different episode.

Let me know if you want it.

That is truly another episode.

That is another six episodes.

Gwyneth, Jesus, Gwen Stefani.

The year after No Doubt was formed, John Spence died by suicide and Gwen's brother Eric slotted Gwen in as the lead singer.

There's this interview that Gwen Stefani does in 2004 with Vogue, where there are a lot of really insane quotes that I think are revealing of an attitude about what it means to be a woman that she's had for basically her whole life, including while she was in No Doubt.

In that interview, she says, I was very passive.

My brother did everything.

I was like, I'm just the sister.

And then after that, I was Tony's girlfriend, describing a relationship she had with a band member.

And that was good enough for me.

I never really had any ambitions or goals or dreams.

Listen, when I read that, I was just like, I was so mad because I was like, this is just so performative.

Like whenever a woman tries to say, I'm, I have no inner life.

Like, I have no ambitions.

I have no hopes.

I have no dreams.

I have no goals.

It's just not true.

But it is something where it's like.

Very clearly, you want people and men to have this idea of you that you're very non-threatening.

And I think that it annoys me, especially because it's like Gwen Safani here is creating a caricature of herself where she's dehumanizing herself.

Like she's basically saying, I'm just a blank slate for you to project onto.

Whatever your expectations of me, I can meet them, which is like a fallacy.

And it's also something that only a very specific kind of woman can get away with.

Like for a woman to be considered a blank slate, you have to conform to basically all of the most privileged aspects of being a woman.

It only really works for her because she was like a white, conventionally attractive, and therefore non-threatening like type of woman who came from California, who could just as easily be like edgy as well as the girl next door.

Like it's very easy for her to take on whatever role, whatever the audience, whatever the person consuming her wants to see, she can be that person.

But that in itself is a privilege.

And by sitting there and being like, and lying, because we also know that like she does, obviously, like like, she's very, clearly a very ambitious woman.

And so, it really pisses me off when women sit there and are like, I don't actually have ambitions.

You see this so frequently with like women in conservative media.

They're like, women should not have ambitions.

Women should not want to work.

Women should not want to own anything.

And it's like, shut up.

You literally are like a multi-millionaire who runs her own media company.

Like, you're literally Gwen Stefani.

Like, don't tell me that you have no dreams or goals.

Trad wife, Gwen Giofani.

It's ridiculous.

So No Doubt, they have sort of a following within California, but nothing national, certainly nothing international.

Nobody really knows who they are on the world stage yet.

And then in 1990, No Doubt is signed by Jimmy Iovine, who is the co-founder of Interscope Records.

Some years later, in 1995, No Doubt would release their Smash Hit album, Tragic Kingdom, of which you are most definitely familiar with, if not by name, then with the songs like Don't Speak, Spider Webs, Just a Girl.

Gwen Stefani really takes on this,

you know, feminist punk rock image.

She kind of becomes the image of those things in the latter half of the 90s.

Taylor, as the

I feel like Kat and I are both like Gen Z millennial cusps,

as the old one,

as the old hag of a bit, Brittie.

Well, we were talking on the phone last night, and you were kind of describing like what Gwen Stefani meant to you as a middle schooler during this time.

She was just so cool and so independent.

And I think also the lyrics, like, obviously, I'm just a girl who'd been out for a while, but like, it was so pervasive.

And it was, it felt like this like independent anthem because she, first of all, she's the lead singer of this like cool band, right?

And at at the time, so much of the pop music landscape, at least during my like tween and then later teen years, was it was like the Britney Spears era.

It was the Christina Aguilera era.

Like it was all about these like, this sort of like hyper feminine, like pop star women, single acts.

And then on the male side, you had like.

Blink 182, like Oasis was kind of like, I don't know, just like all these like male kind of like bands that I feel like guys were into and like they would listen to it, like the warped tour or whatever.

And so like, Gwen was this like kind of like gateway into that, like, more male world, or like, she just see, she actually seemed to be like challenging gender norms in a way.

I liked that she had this sort of alternative version of femininity in my perception because she wasn't just like, I'm a genie in a bottle or whatever, which obviously, like, you know, Christina's amazing.

We love her.

We love her.

And they were forced to, like, now we know so much about sort of like the way that the pop industry commodifies women.

But I think, like, at the time, it's, she seemed rebellious.

Like, she would wear these like low-slung, like big pants and like cool tops and had the chopsticks in her hair, which we can get into.

But like, I remember I actually went to Soho when in middle school, and there was this big, I can't remember the name, but it was like this big Asian market.

I think it's still there.

Oh, Pearl River Market, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's like Soho, Chinatown.

I would always go to Canal Street to buy knockoff.

I think I was trying to get like a knockoff Kate Spade bag on Canal Street and like we're walking around.

And I remember my friend bought like a, like one of those like fake kimono type tops because it was like in.

Because I think like Gwen was wearing it at the time, or it was like definitely part of that like late 90s, early 2000s style, which now reads as crazy cultural appropriation, but at the time seemed like alt and cool.

And she seemed alt and cool.

She really took on this sort of feminist image that, you know, you read early interviews with her, and it definitely seems like she wanted to take the mantle that had been handed over by like, you know, a Courtney love type and make it softer.

I think Gwen's image has always been attempting to hold two truths at once, which is on one hand, this sort of like creatively adventurous, feminist type, irreverent, creative soul with this like aspiring trad wife.

And again, from that 2004 cover interview that she did, she was describing when Jimmy Ivine signed her to Interscope.

Here's the quote, Kat, I feel like you're going to love to hate this, but she said, Jimmy took me aside and said, Gwen, you are going to be a huge star in six years.

I was like, first of all, who the hell are you?

And second of all, I'm not going to be in this band six years from now.

I'm going to be having 14 children and be married.

Then, practically to the day, Don't Speak was number one around the world.

It's pretty spooky.

We always laugh about that.

It's really funny because it's like, like you were saying, Taylor, just listening to Gwen Stefani's biggest songs, you would think that she was, if not feminist, just simply an alternative.

Like she presents this idea in her music and she did this throughout various eras of her career where she would kind of nod to the fact of like misogyny and like how she's considered as a woman.

Also very similar to what pink does, I feel like, in a lot of her music at around this time.

Like they're presented as like a thing that you can still consume, but that presents like a very slightly alternative view of womanhood.

And it's ironic that that's what she presented in her music, but that at the exact same time she was saying like literally I want to be a trad wife I want to be like 25 years old with 14 children on a farm and I also think it's very interesting the fact that like Disneyland has played such an important role like symbolically throughout her life because she grew up in Anaheim and she was part of like the Anaheim youth who would spend so much time at Disneyland, which as unfortunately a Disney adult, someone who reads a lot of, unfortunately, as someone who reads a lot of books about Disney history,

I think it's really interesting that she grew up in this community that was like very affluent and had like the resources to spend a lot of time at Disneyland, which don't get me wrong, at the time I think it cost like $15 to go there.

But still, you know, Tragic Kingdom, they use Disney as like a symbol and sort of are like rebelling against it and how they posture it.

But at the same time, like she has spent her whole life frequently going to Disney.

Today, she's known as a celeb who is frequently like spotted at Disney.

She takes her kids there.

And the juxtaposition of like Disney as the ultimate symbol of American capitalism, the ultimate symbol of being consumer-friendly, consumer-safe, non-threatening.

Like, I just think it makes a lot of sense that in the same way in her music and in her persona, she's combining these two things.

And like, that makes sense to me that that's part of her aesthetic.

Do you guys know about the 1995 Roe vs.

Wade anniversary show appearance?

Okay.

so this is something that is written about in that 2018 essay, but basically, in 1995, as No Doubt is exploding in fame with their album Tragic Kingdom, they're asked to perform at a Roe vs.

Wade anniversary show, where Gwen gets on stage and says, quote, if I got pregnant right now, I wouldn't get an abortion.

But isn't it cool that nobody can tell me what I can and can't do?

And

the organizers of the show were like, we did not know that she was going to say that.

I think it's so interesting how she's always actually been consistent with her conservative values.

But I guess maybe because the conservative movement didn't have the same sort of like cultural capital and power, it was so not perceived.

Like she's doing these things that like now today, imagine that on Twitter, you know, we would immediately sort of contextualize her differently.

But I think also just the media climate was so different and the media climate was so misogynistic back then.

She could maintain that like hyper-feminist independent image despite her repeatedly saying all of this stuff that makes it clear that that's not who she is.

So what this reminds me of is how in this, I feel like cultural period where it's like post-Roe,

well, Roe still exists at this time.

And like within like the popular discourse around abortion, you see this weird sort of thing emerge where it's like in Twilight, the whole end of the Twilight series is about how like Bella Swan wants the choice to not have an abortion, essentially.

And like the word abortion does not appear in the Twilight series, but this was a conversation at the time was like, why would you have a narrative that's so focused on a woman who like wants to choose to keep her kid and not like have an abortion.

And when Stefani's saying this at this like abortion-centered event, I'm like, she's literally, she's doing like the the Stephanie Meyer Bella Swan thing.

I am so appreciative of the breadth of your references.

You're just like, Gwen Stefani is Disney.

Gwen Stefani is Bella Swan.

It's so aspirational.

Cultural appropriation is obviously a huge through line in Gwen Stefani's entire career.

And it starts really early with Gwen Stefani, if you recall, during the No Doubt era, wearing a bindi.

Yes.

Which is, if you're unfamiliar, it's a jewelry or a mark, often a red dot, worn by a lot of South Asian women, specifically in India, as usually a spiritual symbol evoking the concept of the third eye.

And Gwen started wearing this.

You can see it like in all of her music videos and photo shoots and performances.

Gwen, who, again, Irish-American mom, Italian-American dad, she was in a relationship with her bandmate.

Tony in No Doubt, who was Indian and whose mother wore a bindi.

So Gwen Stefani would would go to their house for, you know, family gatherings and she was like,

I'm just trying to imagine like Gwen like being like, I love that, you know,

like, can I get one of those?

And then she did.

She just like, she went to like Claire's or something and she bought some stick-on jewels and she started wearing a bindi.

Yeah, this was so part of her aesthetic back then also.

Like, I mean, it's interesting how she was always tied in with like Asian cultures, you know?

And I don't remember any discourse around it.

I feel like they sold those bindies.

I mean, people replicated that.

Like that was an accessory.

Yeah.

I feel like any pushback in the 90s and early 2000s to cultural appropriation was like,

since there was no Twitter, there was not a way to communicate it to the masses really quickly in the way that discourse around cultural appropriation would later evolve.

And I feel like people who did speak out early on about it were oftentimes just like really easily dismissed.

Where would they even speak out too?

Totally.

Like, there's barely a mechanism to do it.

One of, I feel like, the hallmarks when we're talking about cultural appropriation, because people always love to say, oh, well, you know, appreciation versus appropriation, what's the difference?

Meow, meow.

But I feel like one of the hallmarks of cultural appropriation is the relative political power of the cultures which are being borrowed and which are borrowing.

And in this case, it's, you know, a well-to-do white woman in America borrowing from cultures that outside of like, you know, aesthetic costume value are not celebrated and are often, you know, denigrated and discriminated against in American culture.

It's about, you know, this white woman ultimately being able to profit and then discard accessories and looks from these cultures.

And Gwen really does that a lot throughout her career.

And Helen Peterson wrote, no matter how much Stefani borrowed from other people and cultures to create her look, it was framed as uniquely hers.

When Madonna showed up with her hand, I thought this was crazy.

When Madonna showed up with her hands henna'd at an MTV Music Video Awards in 1998, Entertainment Weekly suggested she was cribbing Stefani's look.

Stefani's response was, quote, I was a little shocked by that, but whatever.

I'm sure there are things I nicked off of her from the 80s.

Zero self-reflection.

Which is also a through line.

Also, didn't Gwyneth Paltrow, sorry to bring it back to her, but didn't she say she invented yoga or like she popularized yoga?

So I feel like this is like kind of like a thing that white women celebrities, especially especially in like the lifestyle or like cultural trendsetting space, are like, that was my thing.

And it's like, it's literally not at all.

And it's just like to such an offensive degree.

When we talk about Gwen Stefani and cultural appropriation, we often relegate it to things like the Bindi

and the way that she would seriously mooch off of Japanese and Harajuku culture, which we are about to talk about.

But when I was outlining this episode and I was looking at really just like the through line of who Gwen Stefani is and perhaps always been.

I think it's helpful maybe.

And you, you tell me what you think, but I feel like it could be helpful to make sense of her sort of like feminist punk rock era as another cultural costume and maybe the one that resonates with people the most because that's the one where she entered public imagination.

Yeah.

It is so funny because I don't even know that it's something that she embraced as much as like it was sort of put on her maybe by like the public and by the music industry and sort of trying to position herself as different and just like again being the front woman of this band at a time when that was seen as like sort of subversive and like you said she's like sort of alternative and cool but it doesn't seem like she ever embraced it herself it's funny like you said that it's it's everyone's first impression and first impressions are always our lasting impression because it's how we're introduced to this artist and often it's very hard for artists to like evolve past you know what they're originally known for but it's just kind of funny because it doesn't even sound like it was something that she really embraced.

From that Vogue 2004 interview, Gwen said, the scene that I grew up in with female artists like Bikini Kill and Hole and all these more punk rock girls, I always had the pressure of, you've got to be a feminist and you've got to hate guys and you've got to cuss and be tough.

And I was never like that.

I grew up like a Catholic good girl.

That always kind of scared me, the pressure of having to be so cool or like fuck you to the world.

But I kind of got over that and realized that, yes, I love to dress up and I love to wear makeup and be myself.

I like being a girl.

I like having a door open for me.

I like all the traditional stuff and I won't deny it.

So it's like basically in order to sell herself as countercultural rather than do something authentic because authentically she is not countercultural at all.

So in order to market herself and sell herself, the clearest path for her to do that was to just steal from another culture.

And we'll get into it more, but I think the way that she presents Japanese culture in itself is so deeply problematic.

It's like she's trying to create an edge where there is none.

So she's going about it by just pilfering from Japanese culture.

I also obviously like just the way that she perceives feminism is so warped and just the pick-me-type attitude of like, I'm not like those other female artists.

I like to have the door open for me, and that's why I'm not a real feminist.

Like, it's bizarre.

I would just like to take a quick break from the show to thank Factor for sponsoring this episode and making this podcast possible.

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And now let's get back to the show.

Something really interesting about this point in her career when she's transitioning out of No Doubt and transitioning into herself as a solo act.

I've been listening to the song What You Waiting For a lot recently and I watched the music video multiple times.

We can't play it, but I'll sing because I know that's what everyone wants.

What you waiting, what you waiting, what you waiting, what you waiting, what you waiting.

All right, Kevin.

That was really good.

So in this song, and specifically, I think the music video is really, really interesting because one of the things that stuck out to me about the lyrics in the song is there's a part where she's like, I know it's so messed up, how our society all thinks about women.

Like that's the implication.

And so listening to it, I was like, is this like a feminist anthem?

Slay.

And then I went and watched the music video and I was like, this is racist because in the music video,

The plot of the extended music video is that Gwen is preparing to launch her solo career and she does not know what type of song to write.

She doesn't know what type of aesthetic to have.

She doesn't know what to do or sing about.

And she's like, yikes, the pressure is really like ticking down because I have this huge record deal and I need to come up with something that's going to define my solo era.

So I need to get some inspiration.

And in the music video, she like goes to a doctor's office and like takes this pill, then has this fantasy where she's doing like an Alice in Wonderland scene, but all of the people are Japanese in the background of the scene.

Like all the different characters besides her are Japanese people.

And this is like a very marked entrance, I think, into this era where she particularly appropriates from Japanese culture.

And it's literally presented to the audience as like...

Gwen didn't know what to do.

So she took inspiration from Japanese culture and is going to make millions of dollars off of it.

Like that is literally the narrative that underlines the entrance of her solo career.

You know, like you mentioned, Kata, I don't think that she sees women of color as equal to her.

Like even in that video that you're talking about when I was just re-watching it, it ends and she's just sort of like performing in this room in front of this group of like four women of color where they're sort of like passively staring at her.

And she's like, this beautiful butterfly, you know, that's emerged and is superior or something can now like fly out of the wonderland.

It's like she views Asian women and Asian people as very one-dimensional, but by taking from them, it's like she views herself as more of a three, four-dimensional person.

So, as we've been getting at, in 2004, Gwen goes solo with the release of her

solo debut, Love Angel Music Baby, or Lamb.

This album has all of the hits: Hollaback Girl, Bubble Pop Electric, Rich Girl, What You Waiting For?

And the entire concept for the album was based on Harajuku.

Harajuku, it's an area in Shibuya, Japan, which is known for its youth fashion culture.

Harajuku as a style, it's very colorful, it's lots of layering, vibrant colors, maximalism, more is more.

It has a huge influence on fashion today, like even on TikTok.

She says of this album that her dad, who again was that Yamaha motorcycles executive, that he would come back from business trips from Japan when she was a child, and he would tell her stories of the street performers there.

And then when she could finally travel on her own, she says she went to Harajuku in 1996 when she was on tour with no doubt, and she became fixated.

And so part of, a huge part of, perhaps the part of

the album rollout, the album imagery, the tours, the promo was her Harajuku girls.

The Harajuku girls were four Japanese and Japanese American backup dancers that Gwen Stefani hired to promote the Love Angel Music Baby album.

This is like not news.

Like, I'm basically just describing this because I always like to give context for what I'm talking about.

And also, there are some listeners of this podcast who are either too old or too young to remember the Harojuku Girl era.

These four women, they were with Gwen everywhere.

They were at her performances.

They were in her music videos.

They were at her like red carpets where they famously would not speak.

They were instructed to be totally silent and just stand there.

Gwen also would sometimes introduce them as her, and I thought this was crazy, imaginary friends.

She named these four women who are, might just remind her, real women, love, angel, music, and baby.

There's this one lyric from Rich Girl, the song, If I Was a Rich Girl,

which I think

encapsulates her concept of these women and of the album at large really well.

She says, I'd get me four Harajuku girls to inspire me and they'd come to my rescue.

I'd dress them wicked.

I'd give them names.

Love, angel, music, baby.

Hurry up and come and save me.

I mean, this is dark.

Well, I just think it's like, it's shocking how she had these women dress.

So she has these quote-unquote Harajuku girls dressed up as like sort of a parody of like like geisha women where they have their faces often like where they're wearing like very like white makeup.

They have the red circles painted on their cheeks.

They have the little narrow lipstick of just sort of like just the middle of your mouth color, the high eyebrows, the thin eyebrows.

Like it's just, it's such a parody of, I think, what a lot of people in the West.

view as Japanese culture or sort of traditional Japanese aesthetics.

One of like the harms of what Gwen Stefani did with her portrayal of Harajuku girls and Japanese culture is that because she had such a huge platform in popular culture, her portrayal of Japanese people and of Japanese women in particular is the wide, most widespread portrayal that a lot of her listeners and people in her audience received.

So for example, as like a white tween girl growing up in suburban Ohio, I was not exposed to authentic, respectful portrayals of Japanese culture that were made by Japanese people as much as I was exposed to what Gwen Stefani was doing and how Gwen Stefani was portraying Japanese people.

That was what I had the most exposure to.

And so even though like I didn't walk away from it having a worse view of Japanese people, the view that I had was this Americanized, appropriative version.

And it wasn't until I was much older that I actually learned more about Japanese culture from Japanese people.

I think about the artist Rina Sawayama who talks about this and makes art about this and about being like a Japanese British woman and about how Japanese people are portrayed as a stereotype and about how that is so difficult to navigate.

And I think that the way that Gwen had the Harajugu girls stand behind her silently and the way that they were objectified and the way that ultimately they were sexualized.

because they were supposed to be like really cute girls who were playing into this album image that was ultimately sexy.

And that in particular is really damaging to Asian women.

Japanese women and Asian women are already infantilized and sexualized, particularly in the Western image of their culture.

And so I think that Gwen Stephanie, 100 million percent, not only did she contribute to this, but if you just look at how massive this cultural impact was, I think it's like, it's a part of her history that she has never apologized for or owned up to.

And it's, she should.

She has to.

The harm has not been undone.

It has not even been acknowledged.

I think also, I mean, like Kat, you mentioned, her impact on like suburban America and like women's fashion was wide.

Like this is a woman who, especially back then, was considered this trendsetter, this like style icon.

She was so ahead of her time.

And I think that you saw this ripple effect too, where you just had a lot of other suburban white American girls cosplaying Japanese people, like or their perceptions of Japanese people, right?

It was like going to get the like kimono style top from Delia's or whatever.

I saw this when we were talking about this episode that Gwen Stefani debuted a Harajuku mini line for kids for Target.

Yes.

Again, it just shows like she was just commodifying this other culture that she had really no connection to and then selling it to the masses in America very successfully.

Well, she had kids' lines, but she had an adults line.

She had a fragrance line called Harajuku Lovers, where there were five different fragrances, one for each of the women and one for her.

I think Forbes estimated that between 2007 and 2008, between the merchandise and the tour, I believe she made $27 million.

Wow.

It's also, I think, you know, looking at what Harajuku is like right now, everything that I've read about it talks about how Harajuku in particular has become so commercial since the time when Gwen Stefani first went to Harajuku versus now.

There's like massive over-tourism in Japan, generally speaking.

I just did an article about this for Wired, looking at how like TikTok has influenced people in particular to like go to Japan and it's led to massive over-tourism.

So Harajuku today, it's incredibly crowded and the people who are there are oftentimes Western tourists looking to capture some of what Gwen Stefani was talking about in like her early aughts music.

But the culture that she was stealing from is now actually eroding and disappearing in part because Harajuku has been taken over by American corporate brands.

Like if you go to Harajuku today, there's like a Nike store.

There's like all of these like American brands that have taken this very valuable space.

And part of like why American tourists want to go there has to do with the fact that Gwen Stefani Stefani popularized Harojuku to such an extent.

Something that you'll hear come up a lot when people talk specifically about Gwen Stefani and the Harojuku era was this idea that you know conversations around cultural appropriation were not in 2004 what they are today.

And I think that's a complicated idea because while it's true that cultural appropriation, the conversations about it were not like buzzy the way that they are today, there were especially Asian women at the time who were very vocal about the fact that they were not okay with what Quinn Stefani was doing.

And I was reading some essays from those women and I wanted to quote them.

So in 2005, this journalist named Mihi An in a salon article called Gweni Hana wrote, She's even named them Love, Angel, Music, and Baby after her album and new clothing line.

The renaming of four adults led one poster on a message board to muse, I didn't think it was legal to own human pets, but I guess so if you have the money for it.

Stefani fawns over Harojuku style and her lyrics, but her appropriation of this subculture makes about as much sense as the gap selling anarchy t-shirts.

She swallowed a subversive youth culture in Japan and barfed up another image of submissive, giggling Asian women.

While aping a style that's supposed to be about individuality and personal expression, Stefani ends up being the only one who stands out.

Another really scathing article was actually from comedian Margaret Cho, who on her blog in 2005 wrote, I want to like the Harajuku girls, and I want to think that they are great, but I'm not sure if I can.

I mean, racial stereotypes are really cute sometimes, and I don't want to bum everyone out by pointing out the minstrel show.

I think it is totally acceptable to enjoy the Harajuku girls because there are not that many other Asian people out there in the media really, so we have to take whatever we can get.

At least it is a measure of visibility, which is much better than invisibility.

I am so sick of not existing that I would settle for following any white person around with an umbrella just so I could say I was there.

Even though to me a Japanese schoolgirl uniform is kind of like blackface, I'm just in acceptance over it because something is better than nothing.

An ugly picture is better than a blank space.

And it means that one day we will have another display at the Museum of Asian Invisibility that groups of children will crowd around in disbelief because once upon a time we weren't there.

Wow.

That like took my breath away because it's so sad.

I'll link that too in the episode description.

I'll link both of those essays.

And not to just like knock your socks off, but Gwen Stefani responded to this Margaret Cho essay.

We're actually, we're going to get into a few of Gwen Stefani's responses to these types of criticisms over the years.

And the first of those responses comes in 2007 to Margaret Cho in an interview that Gwen Stefani did in Entertainment Weekly.

She said, and I am so sorry to be reading this, Margaret didn't do her research.

The truth is that I basically was saying how great that culture is.

It pisses me off off that Cho would not do the research, then talk out like that.

It's just so embarrassing for her.

The Harujuku Girls is an art project.

It's fun.

What an abhorrent response.

Margaret Cho doesn't need to do research on being Asian.

So Gwen should be doing her research and frankly, has expressed no interest in actually researching this issue or learning about the nuances of these cultures.

And I think that that sort of response and that dismissiveness and her continued insistence on doubling down, it just shows that she has no interest in self-reflection and she fundamentally has no respect for these cultures because here is a incredibly prominent Asian woman telling you, educating, doing the actual work to educate you and writing so thoughtfully and in such a beautiful and nuanced way.

And I mean, her reaction is to just dismiss it.

It's wild.

Yeah, I think her response is honestly evil because it's like, if you didn't read Margaret's piece and you only read Gwen's response, which is like two sentences and much easier to digest, you would walk away with like, it's basically like disinformation because she's like, oh, she just doesn't get that I, my intent is not negative.

And it's like, that's not the question on the table.

Intent doesn't matter if the end result is harmful.

And I also don't think that Gwen went into this with good intent.

Like even if the argument is like, I appreciate the culture,

it's not true.

You don't appreciate the culture.

She fetishizes it in order to commercialize it and sell it back to people for profit.

Exactly.

It's the exact opposite of appreciation.

It's exploitation.

Seven years later in 2014, Time magazine did an interview with Gwen Stefani where they once again asked her if she regretted how she went about the Harojuku era, to which she said, no.

There's always going to be two sides to everything.

For me, everything that I did with the Harojuku girls was a pure compliment and being a fan.

You can't be a fan of somebody else or another culture?

Of course you can.

Of course you can celebrate other cultures.

That's what Japanese culture and American culture have done.

It's like I say in the song Harajuku Girls.

It's a ping-pong match.

We do something American, they take it and flip it and make it so Japanese and so cool.

And we take it back and go, whoa, that's so cool.

That's so beautiful.

It's a beautiful thing in the world, how our cultures come together.

I don't feel like I did anything but share that love.

You can look at it from a negative point of view if you want to, but get off my cloud get off her cloud get off her cloud i love that i started this episode with like talking about tucker carlson and the prayer app which we are going to get to that shortly but i wanted to go through the entirety of her career to demonstrate something that i think is really well encapsulated in quotes like this which is that like i think she's always been conservative yeah i think she's always been conservative like i think she's you know like honestly like always been kind of a white supremacist and has worn various costumes to artistic critical acclaim and made a ton of money doing that kind of thing, but it's never been out of respect.

And it makes sense that ultimately, like, the return to form is this trad wife selling prayer app subscriptions.

I also think her use of the word fan is really interesting because I think she's using it interchangeably with the word consumer, which is to say that, like, the only way you can interact or engage with Japanese people and their culture is to, in her case, profit from it, but otherwise, to buy it.

And I just think that it all kind of links back to this idea where one pillar of her conservatism is just the desire to profit and consume.

And I think that that in particular is so harmful when you look at cultures through the lens of consumption and capitalism only, because it's exactly what she's doing.

She's erasing the foundation and the vast majority of Japanese culture to distill it down to this thing that you can literally go to Target and buy for your children.

And now that conservatism and her specific brand of conservatism and trad wife culture is becoming more culturally dominant and there is like a

way to profit off that, she's able to lean further into who she always has been and just further her profit.

It's sort of like, oh, okay, well, I bided my time, you know, dipping my toes into all these other cultures, doing all these other things to kind of profit.

Like you mentioned, Kat.

But now she doesn't have to pretend.

She can shill her.

prayer app she can you know be who she always has been but more openly and not suffer any sort of financial setback for it.

Because if she, if the perception of her was as this trad wife, sort of like anti-feminist back a decade ago, she wouldn't have been able to make the money that she was making.

And of course, she's telling us who she is, obviously, through these interviews.

But I think also the marketing teams around her and how they're able to position her and her business team, which she runs, they can do the prayer app deal, right?

Like they can do these things now where it's like, all right, this is mainstream now.

And guess what?

She's always been around you know every single time she's given the opportunity to apologize or reconsider the harajuku era she always goes into this diatribe about like but cultural diffusion is so amazing again like never acknowledging the varying degrees of power and the flow of power that cultural appropriation entails but it's particularly egregious when you consider something that was unearthed on Twitter about a year and a half ago by this account called Tokyo Fashion.

They brought to like this legal document where Gwyneth Paltrow's legal team actually tried to-Gwynet Paltrow, Matt.

Fuck!

Where Gwen Stefani's legal team actually tried to trademark the word Harajuku in America under her brand.

And the trademark examiner was like, Harajuku is a place you can't trademark that.

And they were like, but the only reason anybody knows it in America is because of Gwen Stefani, which is just like, if you're actually interested in like organic, vibrant cultural exchanges, why are you trying to trademark Harajuku?

It gives the whole game away.

Like, like you said, Matt, this is white supremacy in action.

Like, if you're basically insinuating that Gwen Stefani is the only reason, you're saying that she's the only reason people know what Harajuku is, you've just given the whole game away.

In a trademark application, like, that's so on the nose.

It's a clear and direct desire to profit off of an entire place that is not yours, that does not belong to you, but you believe that it should.

And to control the consumption of that culture and to ensure that you always profit from the consumption of that culture.

It just goes back to like her earliest days, you know, when she had that feud with Madonna, right?

Where it's like, well, I'm the one that mainstreamed Indian culture.

So, you know, she should be thanking me.

People should be buying my line of bindies or whatever.

Because she sees herself as the one bringing these like exotic cultures to American suburbia.

And she kind of did do that, right?

Like, but the problem is, is that that's bad.

This trademark thing really gives, it's like the jig is up.

You can really see just how explicit it is.

And so I think we have to also recognize that she knows what she's doing.

And I think maybe she's in denial because she has these fundamentally conservative beliefs, but it's very transparent what's happening.

Quick break from the show to give a shout out to Blue Land.

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Now, let's get back to the episode.

Gwen Stefani is given yet another opportunity in 2023, another nine years after the Time magazine interview from 2014, to atone for the Harojuku era.

She does this interview with Allure magazine, the Beauty Magazine, with a journalist named Jessa Marie Kalour, who is a Filipina-American journalist, who asked her about the Harojuku girls.

This is one of the craziest things I have ever read.

Here's an excerpt from that interview.

As an adult, Gwen was able to travel to Harajuku to see the Harajuku girls herself.

I said, my God, I'm Japanese and I didn't know it.

As those words seemed to hang in the air between us, Gwen continued, I am, you know.

During our interview, Stefani asserted twice that she was Japanese and once that she was, quote, a little bit of an Orange County girl and a little bit of a Japanese girl and a little bit of an English girl.

I mean,

what this reminds me a lot of the White Lotus episode that just came out with that man who's like clearly having some like trans identity thoughts and was like, and I was wondering to myself, am I an Asian girl?

Like that was literally Gwen Stefani in 2004.

Yes.

And it's so egregious.

And I think it just really reinforces the fact that like to Gwen Stefani, identity is so one-dimensional because for her, she can afford for identity to be one-dimensional.

In reality, Gwen Stefani is just a woman from Orange County.

She's not a woman from the UK, and she is certainly not a Japanese woman.

And it is so easy for her as a white woman from Orange County who is very rich and very famous, not really threatened by much and perceived as non-threatening to others, it's very easy for her to say, oh my god, I'm Japanese.

She carries none of the baggage or the stigma or the experiences of racism that come along with being a person of color in America.

And so it's incredibly offensive for her to say this.

The fact that she's speaking to an Asian woman, the journalist who she's speaking to, and the fact that she's saying this, and the journalist is clearly writing out, like, these words hang in the air between us.

And then she just says it again.

Like, Gwen Stefani has, on one hand, the lack of self-awareness to conduct herself responsibly and respectfully in this conversation, but she has enough awareness to know that what she is doing reinforces what she's profited from and what she has benefited from all of these years.

I really think her behavior in these interviews and in response to Japanese women and Asian women is so egregious because I really think that she is intentionally doing this.

Like she knows exactly what she's doing.

She knows she can get away with it.

That's why she keeps doing it.

Every five years, it's like, Gwen Stefani, have you changed?

Have you evolved?

Will you apologize?

And each time she's like, absolutely not.

Why would I do that?

I don't have to.

Like, there's no consequence for her behavior.

So she just relishes in it.

Yeah, Jessa writes later in that piece in her own voice.

Between March 2020 and March 2022, there were 11,467 reported hate incidents against Asians across the United States, 917 of them toward Japanese people.

Stefani has often spoken up about her deep love and appreciation for Japanese culture, but to Allure's knowledge, she has not publicly expressed outrage or made any statements of support during this cycle of anti-Asian hate.

Japanese culture for her is only one thing.

It's the thing that is attractive to her and that she can profit from.

But hate crimes against Japanese people and hate crimes against Asian people, that's not part of what Gwen Stefani loves about Japanese culture.

That's not the thing that made her think I'm Japanese.

It's because of the one-dimensional nature of what being Japanese means to Gwen Stefani.

And I also think that it's no surprise surprise that she's zeroed in on the Harajuku fashion culture, because what she's not including in sort of what the culture that she appreciates about Japan is like the actual culture and history of Japan, because that would require her to actually be invested.

in what Japan is as a country, what the history of it is as a place, and what its people have experienced.

That would be difficult.

That would be nuanced.

That would not be palatable to the average American consumer.

And so when people ask Gwen Stefani if she's sorry or if she feels regret for anything that she's done, why would she?

She's just sat here and profited from all of it.

Like I think a lot of people, and I think even myself included, as Gwen Stefani has been in the background of my life, have just given her kind of a benefit of the doubt that she has evolved along the way.

And I think this is a benefit of the doubt that is particularly given to white women, even when they have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

And in fact, have done the the exact opposite.

And so I think it's really important not to view Gwen Stefani as like someone who was culturally progressive or politically progressive before and has had this sort of like de-evolution because she has been this person all along.

And to act as if there is a marked difference between the Gwen Stefani of two decades ago and the Gwen Stefani of today is dishonest.

It imagines that she's a better person than she actually is.

The fact that people do give Gwen Stefani the benefit of the doubt, the fact that people don't view her as problematic as she actually is gets to the heart of why she's been able to get away with this and why this is so appealing for her.

It's so appealing for so many white celebrity women to put on cultures and then drop them once the baggage becomes too heavy.

I would love to say that this is the end of the Gwen Stefani cultural appropriation timeline.

But unfortunately, dear listener, I cannot say that.

Are you familiar with the 2012 No Doubt comeback album?

No, I'm not.

No, most people aren't.

So

in 2012, No Doubt puts out a comeback album called Push and Shove, one of the singles from which is called Looking Hot.

Looking Hot is a song that, first of all, isn't good, which is fine.

Bad music is just bad music.

But it's also, as so much of popular music was in 2012, it's not really about anything.

And I mentioned that only to say that they could have made this music video anything, and yet they chose to make it about cowboys and Indians.

After Backlash, it was swiftly removed from like its official release on like Vivo or whoever was putting out music videos at the time.

But the video still exists online and it's exactly what you think it is.

It's just, it's like, I almost said Gwyneth Paltrow again.

Jesus Christ.

I'm going to need to get like electric shocks.

But it's like Gwen Stefani wearing like, you know, a Native American headdress and like cowboy in India.

It's, it's crazy that every time Gwen Stefani has had a new project.

Like, has any culture, has any minority culture gone through Gwen Stefani's career unscathed?

I don't know.

That alone like speaks to kind of this like thing about white mediocrity because it's like we're getting to the point where we're like, we're now reaching peak Gwen Stefani in terms of like her current evolution and who she currently is.

But had we known that that was Gwen Stefani at the beginning, she would never have become the global superstar that she is today.

Like the real Gwen Stefani, if you strip it back to just her, is not successful enough.

Like it's not the successful Gwen Stefani that we all know and love.

In order to reach these career heights, she has to put on a costume because just Gwen Stefani doesn't sell.

Gwen Stefani only sells when she's like stealing from someone else and using that as what is marketable about her.

And I also, that's why I know that she knows what she's doing.

That's why I know that she's known all along that this is all so offensive and she keeps doing it anyways, because it's been called out to her over and over again repeatedly.

And she keeps doing that because I think she's kind of a one-trick pony, but the trick is like trying on these different costumes and cultures.

And we now fast forward just a little bit more to 2015, where she goes through a divorce from Gavin Rossdale, with whom she had three children.

And later that year, she romantically links up with a one,

Blake Shelton.

The singing in this episode is like so amazing.

Yeah, I like to imagine, I don't know, I wish I had like a monitor in their house to hear what's like, hey, Blake, did you make the coffee this morning?

I love, I'm sorry, this is kind of a Gwen roast, but I really do love like her voice.

She just, she's, Gwen Stefani has such a singular voice, not even like a singing voice, but like how she sounds when she speaks.

Again, it's the way she like really curls around the consonants.

It's like, hey, Blake, like,

I feel like it's so Southern California.

Yes.

100%.

But so Blake Shelton is this country star.

And if you recall from the time when they first get together, and I think still a big part of their image is this, like, Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton.

What could they possibly have in common?

Like, alternative feminist rock chick with this, like, hillbilly country guy.

But I think you, the listener, can already get a sense for what I'm about to say, which has been such a theme of this episode, is like, they have everything in common.

Yeah, and the voice has brought so much evil onto our planet.

Like, revisiting this era, like this 2015 era for her when she released the album that was like, why do you have to go make me like you?

And also, the other one, um,

make me like you, make me like you.

Or, no, that's the same one.

She had two heads.

I don't even remember what they are, but like, so this era, she was like trying to like do like a musical comeback as well.

And she was not appropriating cultures.

Like, as far as I'm aware, I haven't watched the music videos.

So, you know, from the from the lyrics alone.

Can I name three songs off the album?

I i am not an authority on who has ever listened to any music but i will tell you that no i cannot and i think that that kind of also gives the game away which is like once you lose all of the personas that gwen stefani has put on the end result does not sell nearly as well as when she's doing cultural appropriation like that's the version of her that was so commercially successful and now that she's older and even with all of the cultural clout and capital that she's accumulated over the years, her return to music was not a big success.

I won't say it was like a total flop.

And when I was listening to the lead singles, I was like, I think it's fun.

I like the beat.

But they weren't hits.

They didn't, they were culture-defining.

And it would have never, if Gwen Stefani had come out swinging with the type of music she started making around the 2010s alongside Blake Shelton, it would have never established her as the superstar that feminist punk music and then this sort of like Harajuku-inspired look made her.

What is also really interesting about the voice era, Gwen Stefani, is that it reflects like the voicification.

I think I'm the first person to say that.

The voicification.

The voicification of our culture.

I think like what Gwen has sort of retreated into at this point in her career, which sets her up so beautifully for what she's doing now, is she's retreated into like, It's not really a retreat, it's the same thing.

What's happening in suburban America right now?

Like what will get the suburban American listeners to appreciate me, Gwen Stefani?

And so, she goes for this route that is very comfortable, like, it's the opposite of being edgy.

It's stuff that's like palatable in a different way, it's stuff that like isn't going to cause a conversation about cultural appropriation.

Because now that in this period of time, in the 2010s and in the 2020s, those conversations are now happening.

Like, social media is now a thing.

If Gwen were to try to do like a Harajuku rebirth, it would cause a lot of issues for her.

And so I think she knows that.

And so she is kind of retreating into like this more openly conformist sort of career model.

And at the time that she gets the divorce and she's already co-hosting with Blake Shelton, it makes so much sense for her in terms of like, you look at how conservatism has had this cultural swing in relevancy, which is what I feel like we talk about on this podcast over and over again.

It's like you can track politics in America through the careers of these like white celebrity women.

And with Wen Stefani, it's like, okay, now what's going to be profitable?

What's going to be popular?

What's going to be successful?

It's like cookie cutter, TJ Maxx shopping, white suburban America.

I'm going to marry a country star.

And I think that her relationship with Blake Sheldon actually makes so much sense because she's always just riding the wave of what is mainstream and what is popular.

And people don't want to admit it because we have taste.

But like, what's popular?

We on the A Bit Fruity podcast, we like to think.

We like to think we have at least gay taste.

But, but, like,

the voice is like one of the most popular TV shows in America.

And Blake Shelton is one of the most popular people in America.

The voice draws more viewers than RuPaul's Drag Race.

I wouldn't know.

It's not on my radar, but when I go back to Ohio to like see my parents, they have it on their Ti-Bow.

Well, this kind of brings us to Gwen Stefani today.

And I would like to talk about Hollow the Prayer app a little bit.

I know you've been waiting for it and you've been sitting very patiently, my dear listener.

Kat, have you seen the advertisements?

I have now.

Because I sent them to you, but we're going to pretend that you haven't yet so that we can all be on the same page.

I think this is insane.

Okay, here it is.

Amen.

Hey, everyone.

I just got my ashes and I'm ready for Lent.

This year, I'll be doing Hallow's 40-day Lent prayer challenge.

It's going to be incredible.

Check it out.

God bless.

Are you looking to grow closer to God this Lent?

I'd love to invite you to join me in praying every day leading up to Easter on the Hallow app.

I love this app and I use it every day.

You'll join millions of Christians around the world, including the incredible Mark Wahlberg, Jonathan Rumi, Father Mike Schmitz, and so many more in meditating on Jesus' Jesus' way to the cross.

It's going to be the most transformative Lent of our lives.

Christmas season has always been my favorite time of the year.

It's the season that we get to celebrate the birth of our Lord.

This year, I'm excited to share that I've partnered with this amazing prayer meditation and music app called Hallow on their 25-day prayer challenge leading up to Christmas called Advent Pray 25.

Join me and millions of other Christians around the world as we celebrate together the truth that God so loved the world that he gave us his only son.

I, the first time I saw this, I thought I was hallucinating.

What exactly is the Hallow app?

Well, I'm glad you asked.

It is a daily prayer and meditation app that you have to pay for, which I've always just found it interesting when like things that are supposedly purely about like religion and faith and God are also like, and here's your monthly subscription, but you know, never mind that.

It has raised tens of millions of dollars in investment funding and is backed notably by gay right-wing activist and billionaire Peter Thiel and

JD Vance, our vice president, our vice president.

It has a number of celebrity faces, including racist hate crime committer and sometimes actor Mark Wahlberg.

One of its spokespeople is Jim Caviesel, the QAnon activist and actor from Sound of Freedom.

The prayer app is so interesting to me because it really does get back to her roots.

Like we're seeing the real Gwen Stefani here.

She's finally emerged back as her like Catholic trad self.

My biggest thought about this is like religious people are really good targets for scams because religious people have already trained themselves to submit authority on what they do with their money, what they do with their time to people who they view as authorities in their church or their religion.

And so religious people are really easy to scam for money.

And that's kind of like a defining factor of religion.

But when you see stuff like this, it's just so transparent in a way that it hasn't been in the past because of like the emergence of digital technology.

Because obviously you can just pray.

You don't need to buy an app to pray.

You can just do that.

That's what people have been doing since the invention of prayer.

You can like take out your Bible and you can read it and you can pray.

And so the fact that they've invented a new thing, like they've invented a new spiritual need for people to have, and that itself, I would argue, is also sacrilegious.

It is ridiculous.

And people in Gwen's comments, like, called this out, were like, why are you profiting from like spiritual spirituality and prayer?

That's unethical and counterintuitive to religion.

But I think in reality, it makes a lot of sense because I think that a lot of religion in reality actually is about sort of financially exploiting people.

And I also think that like the fact that this is run by Peter Thiel and has investment from Thiel and JD Vance, like that's not surprising at all either, because if you look at everything that's wrong with modern society and you're like, who's the, who has a hand in everything that's wrong with modern society as we know it, it's Peter Thial.

Yes.

I

love Peter Thial lashings on this podcast.

It's like my favorite, Peter Thial and Sam Altman, because I hate billionaires and I really hate gay billionaires because I feel like I have something in common with them and that is embarrassing.

I also think that like in terms of the celebrities who promote this app and like the fact that you have these right-leaning celebrities, like you have these very overtly conservative people, but then you also have people like Wen Stefani who still is considered someone in liberal America.

I also think it's probably really easy to get liberal celebrities to like switch sides because so much of what they have like preached over the years has always been, at the end of the day, like capitalist.

And so it's not so much like they were really strongly believing in social progress as much as they were really strongly believing in whatever the mainstream majority would like and therefore financially support them.

So now that that's switched, like there's, there's nothing to hold them back from like switching over to literally Trump's administration because they were always kind of doing this.

They were always kind of just looking for way for things that they could sponsor that fell in line with like the biggest possible paying audience.

Vice did a write-up about the Hallow Prayer app where they shed some really interesting insights.

Here's one quote from that article: The app features voices known for their conservative stances towards sexual and reproductive health rights.

Lila Rose delivers prayers on the app, who is a president and founder of Live Action, an anti-abortion advocacy group with a significant social media presence, which has recently been protesting outside drugstores that disperse abortion pills.

Her prayers on the app are mainly focused on the Virgin Mary, as well as a litany for life, which she says, quote, helps us to respect human life from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.

This makes me so mad.

Live action is one of my number one enemies.

They don't know that I exist, but to me, they're one of my number one enemies.

This is so crazy.

I did not realize there was a live action tie-in with this app, but live action is super, super notorious if you are in the abortion rights space whatsoever.

They're like one of the biggest arms of anti-abortion propaganda, especially in the social media age.

And the whole Gwen Stefani pivot to marrying Blake Shelton and being like a southern bell and being like a religious southern-esque woman, like country woman, and specifically also having lived in Orange County.

Do you know who Cole and Savannah LeBrant are?

No.

Okay.

But But wait, can I guess who they are?

Are they like an influencer couple?

Yes.

Cole and Savannah.

That gives influencer couple.

Yes, and they go by Cole and Sav.

They were Cole and Sav and now they're the LeBrant fam.

Okay.

I'm going to keep this brief, but I know there's going to be at least one person listening to this who is like cheering right now.

The LeBrants command a really big audience of people who are skeptical and people who are haters.

Savannah LeBrant lives the life that Gwen Stefani said she wanted to live when she was a teenager in no doubt.

She's the girl who like got married and started having all of these kids and was like religious.

And Savannah LeBrant is from Orange County.

And when she and Cole got together, they lived in Orange County.

But along with some other influencers, like a small trickle of conservative influencers and like super religious influencers over the past like five years, they moved to Tennessee.

And they have worked with live action.

And so that's why I'm like, ooh, it's all coming together.

Wow.

I'm looking at a photograph of this family and they look like

AI generated.

Yes.

Yes.

100%.

Sorry, continue.

It's just like there's a cultural movement happening right now that involves like a few things.

Anti-abortion stances,

Christianity loosely defined, like Christianity without any of the like standards right right christianity without any of the teachings of christianity but more of just like the idea of like american white nationals christianity that's come to light the aesthetics of christianity the bigotry and white supremacy inherent to it the um anti-abortion stance and then like the celebrity influencer lifestyle brand all of these things and fifth thing peter teal and always peter teal fuck peter tiel these are like all coming together and creating this really big thing that i think a lot of people aren't picking up on in popular culture, which is ultimately like the erosion of women's rights.

Peter Thiel is also heavily invested in fertility tracking apps.

So between the fertility tracking apps and the anti-abortion prayer app that Gwen Stefani is promoting on Instagram, you have this movement that's ultimately like the intention of all of this is to get young white women pregnant and popping out kids and have them be conservative and have them be religious.

And like, that's what this is all about.

Like, Gwen Stefani is officially a part of like the modern fascist project in America.

A rare moment on the Abit Fruity podcast where I'm actually rendered speechless.

I just have to pause and say direct to camera, like, this sucks.

This sucks.

Like, I loved Gwen Stefani's early stuff.

Yep.

And now she's like, yeah, she's, she's just

doing modern fascism's work on Instagram.

It's sad what is happening to our country.

It is sad.

And also, I just, you know, these types of people are always in my comments and messages about how I'm like grooming children or whatever.

The Hallow Prayer app has a section of prayers targeted towards what they label as littles, which are three to seven year olds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A three-year-old shouldn't even have an app.

Well, I mean.

But you know what?

Like, it's like they know that those kids are watching Coco Melon.

So it's like they're past the point of being like, should children be on technology?

They know it's happening.

So of course they're going to take advantage of that.

Of course they're going to.

It's the same people.

It's the Republicans.

I mean Democrats too, but like Republicans are like, we got to get kids off these phones.

No.

You want them on the Hallow app for three years old.

You want them at age three to be listening to virginity prayers on their phone.

Like, it's ridiculous.

And we made it on the the journey right back up to where we began at the Tucker Carlson promo tweet on Gwen Stefani's Twitter account.

And while a week or two ago when I first saw that tweet, nothing made sense, going through this entire journey in my head allowed it, unfortunately, to make a lot of sense.

And I don't yet know at the time of this recording what I'm going to title this episode, but a note that I made here, which seems fitting for a title, is, this is the most honest Gwen's Ever Been.

I feel like when I read all of those comments, especially on Gwen Stefani's Hallow Prayer app, Instagram advertisements, and on the TikToks, where people are like, the old Gwen Stefani would hate the new Gwen Stefani.

And what happened to the Gwen Stefani I grew up with?

I'm like, not to sound like a broken record this episode, but this is, I think, the clearest picture of Gwen Stefani we have ever had.

We talk a lot on this podcast about people's radicalization to the right.

We talk a lot about the various radicalization pipelines that different people go down for different reasons, whether that be financially motivated or spiritually motivated.

And we try to bridge empathy with all of those different pipelines to understand how they happen and ultimately raise awareness so that less people go down them.

But I think with Gwen Stefani, as with Kim Kardashian, who we talked about a month or two ago, I think this is less of a pipeline to radicalization and more like a return to form.

I think the Kim Kardashian comparison is so perfect because I really think that we're seeing the veil lifted on all of these people where these Kim Kardashian, Gwen Stefani, these people were never feminist icons.

They were never who the people that we sort of perceived them as 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

But now they can lean into that conservative ideology.

They can, you know, pose with the Tesla robot.

They can have their prayer app.

They can.

basically just be who they really are.

Again, at a time when authenticity is rewarded and people are looking for authenticity more than anything else from these influencers and celebrities.

But I think it's so funny to see the parallels and to see kind of like all of these celebrities, especially women that were held up as these feminist icons, just go completely mask off.

And it's really been since, I think, like Trump's ascendance that we've seen that, where they feel like they can go mask off.

Because again, there is now this alternative profit structure to support them.

them.

There's an alternative economy on the right that will ensure that they continue to profit profit and continue to make their millions.

And so they don't have to play pretend anymore.

It can be easy, especially as white people, to fall into this pattern of thinking where we're like, these conservative celebrities who I used to love have been like taken from me, like they've changed.

They're not the same person that I grew up loving.

And I can empathize with that because it's comforting to imagine that Gwen Stefani was not always someone with fascist leanings and has been radicalized by some unseen force, but it's so important to critically examine what in the past led us here.

And we've literally walked through all the steps that showed us that this person who we see now was always the person who is Gwen Stefani.

Like she's always been this person.

And so I think it's like really important not to overlook that because the way that we avoid having people become outwardly fascist is that we extinguish things like, oh, cultural appropriation.

We start with like the problematic patterns of behavior and the refusal to apologize for them and the refusal to feel bad about them.

Because if we don't stop that, if we don't hold people accountable for that, then we end up here.

Gwen Stefani, in the event that you're listening to this episode, I would like to round out this conversation with just two words to you.

Don't speak.

I know what you're thinking, and I don't need a reason.

Don't tell because it hurts.

You've mastered her vocally

it's incredible to watch the listener is currently disagreeing

the comments

the comments in fact he had not mastered her vocals

I Kat and Taylor thank you so much as always for going down the not-so-sweet escape with me thanks so much for having us if you would like to follow more of Kat and Taylor's work, they are both doing incredible independent journalism and their newsletters, podcasts, et cetera, all of their work will be linked in the episode description.

Thank you so much for joining us for the morning of

yet another Pop Diva.

I hope we don't have to keep making these.

Again, if you would like to come experience the podcast live with perhaps some special guests, perhaps some special guests that were on this very episode, who knows?

You can grab tickets now at at the link in the episode description to the tour.

I am so excited for it.

I really am.

The internet can feel so strange and dissociative and disembodied sometimes, so I can't wait to hang out with you all in person.

If your city is not on one of the tour dates listed, there is a place in the tour website for you to submit your city if you want me to come hang out.

So feel free to do that as well.

I love you so much, and until next time, stay fruity.