Jae Stephens is making room for the girls who were told pop wasn’t theirs

Growing up, Jae Stephens invested years learning the language of ultimate pop stardom. She’s an eyewitness to the stan wars, like so many of us web surfers. A Tumblr sensation of the early 2010s, she ran the popular blog “beyoncebeytwice” like the navy. Now belonging to the same musical landscape of her teenage online fixation, the 29-year-old Dallas-born Stephens has surpassed all expectations of what an online celebrity buff can and can’t do. “I do feel very dialled in, it’s all starting to become real, in a way,” she says, assured of her artistic authority. Despite its dawning, AUDACITY, her lovingly crafted debut LP, is a detail-oriented undertaking unlike any other pop campaign in the modern market. Instead of the typical, metaphorical worldbuilding terminology expected of a new album, she’s quite literally created her own mythology. By the well-documented order of Miss Andry, Mayor of Auda City, to get your Auda Citizenship you are an ambitious girl on the go. Busy, hard to pin down, and even harder to figure out. As the subject of Stephens’ record closer, she is also very good at playing mental gymnastics. “You know, this shit has lived in my phone for so long, so it’s nice ...