Inside Sir Babygirl's Neon World Of Offbeat Pop And Devoted Fans

By Dani Blum


There’s a neon knot of hair flopped over a guitar on the Rough Trade NYC stage. Like a follow-along dot in a children’s musical TV show, it shakes to the sounds of shredding. In three hours, the room will be packed with teenagers in muscle tees and slim boys with single earrings, however now, it’s just Brooklyn-based pop songwriter Sir Babygirl, her glowing green hair, and the guy running soundcheck. This is the ninth stop on her tour supporting the musical group Petal, a run which features a missed flight in Pittsburgh where she was hospitalized for food poisoning. Though Sir Babygirl has only released four tracks of frenetic, bubblegum pop, she has amassed what she calls “an exceedingly sticky, tiny, cult-like following” — like the teenagers who came from Syracuse, New York, to be able to see her in Philadelphia, or the fans who linger at her shows and cry any time whenever they visualize her. Her debut album, Crush On Me, comes out this week on indie label Father/Daughter. She sells CDs of it at her shows to fans who don’t even own CD players.


“I don’t wish to hurt people’s ears,” she shouts to the sound guy any time the amp screeches. “But, like, I'd like to be heard.”


Sir Babygirl, place on Earth Kelsie Hogue, has an evil plan. It begins with memes: Her Instagram is a mood board of early 2000s nostalgia and bisexuality – a grinning Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove joking about period blood, Reese Witherspoon from Legally Blonde reading a textbook labeled “Flirting W/ Girls: 101.” “I was like, I’m going to get a following that way, and then it will cross over to my music,” she says. “I’m very calculated.”


Her sound attracted a persons vision of Chloë Grace Moretz, who tweeted a link to Sir Babygirl’s debut single, “Heels,” in October. Her streaming numbers have stayed steady and modest since the song came out in August; now, it has 117,000 listens on Spotify. The song is technically perfect: a pulsing pop song with lyrics about leaving a lover and coming residence. The track builds into a clear, high shout: “You don’t know me anymore / I changed my hair, I changed my hair, I changed my hair.”


In the light, Sir Babygirl’s hair has shoots of pink peeking out beneath the green. We’re in the front area of Rough Trade, which doubles as Williamsburg’s staple records store, next to rows of vinyl and also a DIY synth kit labeled, “TECHNOLOGY WILL SAVE US.” Her lip ring glints under string lights. Sir Babygirl is a character, she’s explaining, an absurdist version of a self. In back of the music is Hogue herself, a 26-year-old bisexual who identifies as non-binary. These identities are centered in her songs, yet they’re not the only appeal.


“I’m not a higher end artist because I’m queer, and it’s not worthwhile music because it’s queer,” she says. “It’s worthwhile because it’s fucking good music.”


As an assignment, Sir Babygirl has existed for a number of years. Hogue thought of the name because she’s “obsessed with the extremes,” she says. “So what’s the most absurd, colonial male term? Sir. And then babygirl, the most infantilized.”


She was torn between singing and comedy. She studied theater at Boston University, where she was “the fucking weirdo, the ostracized gay” and then moved to Chicago to try stand-up. In one set, she dumped LaCroix on herself and shrieked; she called that bit “My Morning Routine.” She paid rent by hosting at a spy–themed restaurant, asking tourists for the password in a thick European accent. The room where she sat and waited for them wasn’t heated in the winter; she complained to her boss that it was a workers’ rights violations. She was asked to leave the restaurant. After, she left Chicago, moved back inside her childhood bedroom in New Hampshire, and forced herself to write an album inside of the year.


“People think ‘Heels’ is about heartbreak,” she says. “No. I wrote it because I got fired from my fucking spy-themed restaurant job.”


When Sir Babygirl talks about her production fashion, she talks about songs that “sound like ballerinas fucking.” Any time while she talks about bi visibility, she clears her throat and throws her voice a pitch lower – “I hope to be one of several bi artists, not like, hem hem, hello, I’m THE bi.” And once she talks about her burgeoning success, she is aware this isn’t supposed to happen – to have a cross-country tour before you put you first album out, to find the best production partner by posting a telephone call for non-cis engineers on Facebook. Her A&R rep at Father/Daughter discovered her immediately after one of his coworkers at a smaller label in Florida played “Heels” out loud in her office, curious immediately after following Sir Babygirl’s memes.


“Nothing I’ve gotten has been off a daddy connection,” she says. “It’s been people just literally fucking with my music.”


Tonight her eyes are coated in orange eyeshadow she’s put on herself; she learned the basics of makeup from a friend who’s a legally blind makeup artist, then watched YouTube tutorials while depressed and burrowed in her apartment in Chicago. “I don’t have a pop-star financial range. If I want pop-star hair or pop-star makeup, I have to do it myself,” she says. She dyes her hair every few months, although has to keep the green and pink for a while – they’re her album release campaign colors, ones she picked herself. “That’s how obsessive I am,” she says. “Nobody invited me to do that.”


Ten minutes before Sir Babygirl’s set to go on stage, she sneaks into the audience. The other musical group she’s touring with, Cave People, is playing something sleek and crooning on stage, and she leans near a row of backpacks against the wall, attempting to go unnoticed. It’s not working. “It’s her,” a cluster of backpacks and hairspray whispers beyond me. They shove forward any time if she comes on stage.


Sir Babygirl twitches once she sings. She wants the vibrations in her songs to hit your body a certain way, and so they do, synths burbling up from the floor and into your pulse, shoulders swishing automatically. “I really wish to prepare it a 3-D experience,” she says. Crush on Me is her love letter to Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” – crying-in-the-club music. “I wanted it to be catharsis, as instead of inundation of trauma,” she says. “There’s motion. I want there to regularly be a driving force through it. Like there’s all this trauma, and we’re moving through it, and we acknowledge it. Although we’re going to keep moving.” For all its sparkling synths and buzzy beats, Sir Babygirl’s music is flecked with pain. Screams and shrieks stab through songs. There really are two reprises in the tight, nine-track album, and so they both build to a hyperactive breaking point and then end abruptly. The effect is pristine chaos.


“It’s like this positive nihilism where it’s like we all understand we’re in an apocalypse,” she mentioned. “The world’s ending. We know what’s going on. Nevertheless we also deserve to escape. That’s piece of the healing process.”


The last song of her set is “Heels,” and it’s the one the crowd’s been waiting for. “You can come up here,” she says to them, “really,” and there’s a pause while each person waits to be able to see if she’s serious. She is. Someone rustles past me, and then another, scooting themselves onto the stage while Sir Babygirl strips off a floor-length dress to reveal a millennial pink harness. She slaps her own ass. The stage clogs with twisting arms, heads jumping; a girl grabs Hogue’s hand, and so they twirl. They leap so hard their eyes vanish. All I can visualize is hair.