However, Braun and Lovato have jumped at the opening, or lack thereof, with boundless ambition. Lovato and her manager Scooter Braun seem to have misread this Tik Tok trend, and a similar one where Lovato’s 2015 hit “Cool For the Summer” resurfaced, as an opening in the market for a new iteration of Lovato, instead of cynicism towards her brand. In 2008, on her first solo hit, “La La Land”, Lovato asked, “Who says I can’t wear my converse with a dress?” In 2022, the song has become a Tik Tok trend where users parody a “hyperfeminine” icon attempting to break gender norms in a carefully calibrated manner that is more marketing than protest. Consequently, her honesty about things listeners already know falsely implies her music always had substance. After 15 years in the spotlight, Lovato’s life has become so public that not acknowledging public-facing aspects of it would be a misstep.
DEMI LOVATO GAPPED TEETH FULL
However, the second meaning of substance in the song, which refers to Lovato’s substance abuse (“Don’t wanna end up in a casket / Head full of maggots”), gives the track self-awareness. On the album’s second single, “Substance”, she asks, “Am I the only one looking for substance?” This chorus is a clever pun that portrays Lovato as someone looking for meaning when she has been a vessel for meaningless radio filler manufactured by Disney-owned Hollywood Records for most of her career.
However, taken in its own context, Holy Fvck succeeds not as a revisionist history of Lovato’s career but as an authentic step forward. Although Holy Fvck achieves what it set out to do, it struggles under the shadow of such a monolithic project released only a year before. That makes her sudden about-face all the more confounding.
Dancing With the Devil…the Art of Starting Over received critical acclaim but not sustained success on the charts. The accompanying persona – a goth alt/rock star – seems especially jarring considering that Lovato embraced post-pop stardom, enlightened guru persona only a year ago. In keeping with this trend, Holy Fvck is, in some ways, an album no one asked for. Actors must assemble with castmates under the banners of their old shows to bring back the magic, but musicians and pop stars need only make a public appearance or release a new single, an exceptionally easy task during the age of streaming. Musicians benefit from this trend in a unique way as the sole embodiment of their brands. Musicians who flourished during or before the early 2010s also experienced a renaissance, as Generation Z views all artists from that time as nostalgic to some extent. During the pandemic, the Friends and Harry Potter reunions cropped up out of nowhere, causing momentary pandemonium before fading into the obscurity of infinite streaming libraries. Whether the pandemic caused this trend, when people starved of new content grew nostalgic in isolation, or whether it’s a product of the digital era when the internet makes content from past decades widely accessible, many artists and corporations have benefitted from this resurgence. The early 2020s have been the era of the reboot. On her eighth album, Holy Fvck, Lovato expresses hope and renewal through a pop-rock sound rife with self-criticism and cynicism at her old ways. The redundancy of the title speaks for itself: it would be a long time before Lovato actually enacted what this book professed. Although Lovato had already undergone treatment for drug abuse and mental health issues before her near-fatal 2018 overdose, her music pre-2018 existed in a parallel universe to the Lovato of the tabloids, despite that she had publicly addressed the tabloid fodder in other ways, such as her 2013 memoir Staying Strong: 365 Days a Year. Before that point, addressing such negativity would have broken the fourth wall of her performance. It served as a landmark in her catalog for its honesty, as Lovato addressed the industry corruption behind the production of her music for the first time. Her previous album, 2021’s Dancing With the Devil…The Art of Starting Over offered a bloated but multi-faceted renewal of her persona. D emi Lovato has reinvented herself many times.
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