Audrey Hobert’s loosely autobiographical, offbeat pop on Who’s the Clown? sets the tone for a new generation of mainstream music.
On a song named after a popular HBO series, the singer-songwriter Audrey Hobert says, “This isn’t Sex and the City / Nobody’s watching me write in my room.” While emphasizing the solitude of a writer, this observation combines that profession with celebrity. On her debut album, Who’s the Clown? Hobert invites listeners into this contradictory headspace.
The newly minted pop star has no trouble finding comfort in isolation. On “Phoebe”, a song named for the well-known Friends character, Hobert equates the ability of her work to earn positive reception to her own ability to belong among peers. She wonders if Joey, another character from Friends, would see her potential as a star and want to “take [her] home for that reason only?”
At 26 years old, Hobert bridges the gap between millennials and Gen-Z, representing a shift in culture where certain touchstones have become so commonplace that mentioning them in a narrative does not distract from the individuality of the narrator. In “Sex and the City”, Hobert vents to an Uber driver about her romantic difficulties, something a 2025 version of Carrie Bradshaw might do.
In “Bowling Alley”, Hobert continues to contemplate belonging, using an innocuous setting as a parable for social anxiety. At the song’s conclusion, Hobert wakes in the night to “stare at [a] prize”, presumably a trophy won at a bowling tournament. This moment of appreciation is not the happy ending it appears to be. Hobert’s narrator wonders if popularity is worth the required maintenance, as she only appreciates it in isolation.
External validation is central to the existence of a pop star, and Audrey Hobert wants to be one. In “Silver Jubilee”, a raucous, self-effacing party anthem, the singer admits, “I wanna make it / But it’s fun to be a normal girl.” On the album cover, Hobert smiles half-heartedly at the viewer, while a clown lurks in a window behind her. Of this image, the singer told Russh magazine, “I wanted to scare people… I didn’t think there would be anything interesting about me posing semi-sexually.”
Every celebrity makes decisions about how to appear to the public. Because famous people are a “personal” brand, as opposed to a purely business brand, they are hostage to their own humanity. Another songwriter whom Hobert credits as an inspiration, Taylor Swift, has navigated this distinction. In the music video for Swift’s hit “Anti-Hero”, a giant version of the singer crashes a dinner party of normal-sized people. As she wrecks a tiny dining table, Swift wears a political campaign button that reads “Vote Me For Everything.”
This slogan satirizes the climate in which Swift came of age as a pop star, when the public demanded that celebrities be everything to everyone. However, in the 2020s, specificity is rewarded. Another descendant of Swift in pop, Gracie Abrams, is Hobert’s childhood best friend. Abrams wrote “Good Luck Charlie” about witnessing her friend go through a breakup. “Audrey still has a picture of you in her wallet,” Abrams said, addressing the song’s subject directly.
Once a detail in someone else’s lyrics, Audrey Hobert has conjured her own universe through songwriting. The viral single “Sue Me” describes the painful nostalgia of encountering an ex: “Just me or does he look amazing / When he’s all in his Amazon basics?” This line is another instance where Hobert uses a banal aspect of contemporary culture as a diaristic detail in her own life. In the song’s music video, she dances in a clumsy yet choreographed manner, striking a tone just short of ironic, serving as an idol for a reluctant audience.
This writer would count himself as a member of that audience. A few months ago, I viewed a video on Hobert’s TikTok account where she wanders around an ambiguous urban area. Due to public transportation signage, I recognized the city as Boston, where I live, but most of the video was unfamiliar to me. However, a few weeks later, I was walking through Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood when I crossed a bridge with a distinct feature: hanging along the chain-link fence that lined the bridge were padlocks with people’s initials written on them. I recognized the location from Hobert’s video.
Pop culture captures normalcy but becomes highly specific at random times, and Audrey Hobert is a representation of its ability to do so. Aside from “Sue Me”, most of the songs on Who’s the Clown? do not sound like radio singles, a format traditionally associated with “pop”. Instead, Hobert uses this structure as a platform for verbose storytelling, much like she employs celebrity as a means to discuss the pitfalls of fame. Unlike other pop stars, Hobert does not seek to be aspirational. Instead, she accumulates fame by emulating her audience, a celebrity paradox.
Hobert concludes the song “Thirst Trap” on a hopeful note: “I once read that some people’s beauty can’t be captured.” This notion contradicts a pop star’s enterprise, which relies, at least partially, on visual media. A Taylor Swift song, “The Lucky One”, warns of the inherent contradictions of stardom. In the track, Swift used the word “lucky” to describe a celebrity who escaped the spotlight. Hobert lives in a world where such a mentality applies to everyday peer interactions, and she turns that angst into a form of celebrity. Because it already wrestled with social unease, Hobert’s brand of fame has the potential to be bulletproof.
While the upstart songwriter may not attract the kind of scrutiny that makes a person feel like a giant in a room, the title Who’s the Clown? hints at such ambitions: Hobert is poking fun at herself for harboring a goal she has yet to accomplish. “Sue me, I want an award,” the singer said in an interview with Wonderland magazine. Although the public creates and consumes fame as a product, stripping it away from its benefactors is often part of the customer journey.
Audrey Hobert seems to have already grappled with a fall from grace on a personal level. If the pop culture arena rejects her, it will only prove her original thesis: she never belonged there anyway.