FEATURE:
Spotlight
PHOTO CREDIT: Kirt Barnett for Polyesterzine
through 2024, I want to spend some time with Aliyah’s Interlude. Aliyah Bah is someone who should be on your radar. Tipped by many as a name to watch this year, I will come to some interviews with her from last year. So that we can learn more about a sensational talent. I will start out with a GQ interview. They spoke with the artist behind the viral #AliyahCore trend on her move into music:
“In 2020, irl subcultures collapsed and were replaced by a deluge of TikTok aesthetics: cottagecore, goblincore, corecore. We -core’d to the point of absurdity, turning anything into a rigid aesthetic templates. One Georgia-based teen, with a penchant for fishnets, moon boots, and fluffy accessories, even -core’d herself. Her name? Aliyah Bah, the 20-year-old inventor of the ultra-viral ‘Aliyahcore’. With a mission to open up the gates for alternative Black girls, and to bring chaos and camp to a global audience, Bah kept blowing up.
After styling the likes of Cupcakke and Lizzo, as well as walking for Mowalola, Bah expanded her Aliyacore empire even further with the release of her first single “IT GIRL” in October of last year. For months, you’d hardly be able to make it through a doomscroll without hearing it. Now, she's looking to repeat that success again with her second single “Fashion Icon”. As Bah says, straight-faced, “it will be the greatest release of all time.”
Ahead of the stalwart MC's new album, On Purpose, with Purpose, he shares his thoughts on the UK rap scene and why there's nothing quite like recording in Gucci slippers
How long have you been making music for, and how long were you working on your sound before you allowed the world to hear the result?
I started like a year and a half, two years ago, but I was trying different things and nothing was really sticking out to me. Once I got into the house genre, dance music, I was like: this is where I need to be. I just loved it.
How did you work our your cadence and flow?
I listen to so much music, from Azealia Banks to Latto to Flo Milli — all of these people inspire me in so many ways. I’ve been studying Nicki [Minaj’s] old videos, her old mixtapes, even before I got into music myself.
What other music did you listen to growing up?
I actually grew up in a very straight Muslim household. My mum never let us listen to the radio or anything. I would just listen to whatever they would listen to, which would be a lot of Michael Jackson, a lot of early 2000 Destiny's Child, African music all day, every day.
Were you named after Aaliyah?
I was, actually.
When did your parents first start noticing that you were an artist?
I feel like ever since I was young, I was extremely fashion inclined. My parents were never the type to take us to the store and let us buy stuff all the time. But I've been thrifting since I was six years old. And a lot of times with thrifting, you have to make do with what you have. So you might find the ugliest material ever, but then if you cut it out, style it, and it can be some real cute shit. My parents probably realised I was this way when I was selling bows or decorating notebooks when I was in middle school. I would just sell them for $1.50, not making no profit, just doing it for fun.
How do you think your music reflects the essence and energy of Aliyahcore?
Aliyahcore and its essence is just not caring about being perceived; being yourself every day, no matter what you're going through in life and loving yourself authentically. The whole purpose of the music is to give off confidence vibes. I hope everyone who listens feels like an IT girl, a fashion icon.
Does ‘not caring about being perceived’ get harder the more eyes are on you?
I've always been the person who didn't fit into any box. I think that helps now that I'm in the public eye. It's something that I’ve always been used to, like, being ostracized or people having an opinion on what I do or wear”.
Apologies if this feature is a little scattershot. I am already a fan of Aliyah’s Interlude. For Polyesterzine, this remarkable artist discussed her personal style, TikTok strategy and #AliyahCore. I think that this year is going to be a breakthrough one for her. Her latest single, Moodboard, was released last September. I think that we will get a lot more material very soon. Exciting to see how she grows and evolves as an artist:
“I’m sorry, I hope you’re not disappointed with my outfit today,” Aliyah Bah tells me when our Zoom call connects. “I didn’t bring too many clothes with me here!”
For almost anyone else, getting glammed up for a Friday afternoon interview might not warrant an apology. But for the 21-year-old Georgia native, fashion has never been merely incidental – it has become a metonym for her brand.
Over the last few years, for anyone in possession of a TikTok account, it has been impossible to escape the mesmerising sartorial world of #AliyahCore. It started during the 2020 Covid lockdown, when Bah was in her freshman year at Georgia State University. Living at home and taking classes online, she started documenting her outfits on TikTok under the soubriquet Aliyah’s Interlude, inviting viewers to get ready with her, and showing off her addictive personality.
The content was fresh and, crucially, the fits were fire – each video brought a new maximalist, pink look inspired by Harajuku and Y2K culture, replete with earmuffs, furry boots, bikini tops, miniskirts, leg warmers and fishnets. Since then, her star has grown exponentially, with a barnstorming foray into the music industry led by her viral 2023 single IT GIRL, and her latest hit Moodboard.
When Bah calls me from a family gathering in Maryland, while her look is markedly more understated, the yellow Harajuku-style beanie and pink hoodie she is sporting still betray a hint of her signature style. Unsurprising, since, while #AliyahCore might seem made-for-TikTok, its genesis was entirely organic.
“While I was growing up, my parents owned a recycling business, like this thrift store where I would get all my clothes,” Bah says. “My mum was always against me buying [new] clothes, so I thrifted from there. But they wouldn't be clothes that kids my age were wearing, it was older stuff that you really had to upcycle and make personal for it to look nice.
“So I think that's kind of how I built my personal style, just by kind of working with nothing and then trying to make it look cute,” she continues. “Also, I was online a lot as a kid, watching Avril Lavigne, Beyonce, Rihanna – just that type of like, miniskirt energy… I used to love all of that shit.”
While Bah’s fashion might not have been contrived, her TikTok strategy was certainly purposeful. The now 2.8 million followers she has accumulated on the platform, and the recognition she has since received from celebrities including Lizzo, Doja Cat and SZA, were not a happy accident. At 21, she is part of a generation preternaturally adept at gaming social media’s sphinxlike algorithms.
“I really put in that work, I figured out the formula for that shit because I understood how the app works,” Bah says, with impressive insouciance. “When I tell you I was posting like up to six times a day when I first started.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Kirt Barnett
As well as her “FaceTime Call Get Ready With Me” videos, Bah’s most popular TikToks were the ones where she was just chatting to the camera, waxing lyrical about her outfits or hyping up her viewers.
“I was finding all these trending audios,” she says. “It took me like a full year to really start getting viral video after viral video. But at the beginning I was like, ‘damn do I even really want to do this shit, because I'm not seeing no results’. Thank God I had nothing to do in the house during the pandemic.”
It was last year that Bah’s aesthetic really began to move beyond the woman herself, and beyond her community of online viewers. In the space of a couple of years, Bah has skyrocketed from college student to influencer — now just as likely to be seen sitting at fashion shows or on a PR invite to Coachella than in her bedroom on TikTok. In October 2023, Doja Cat flew her to LA to appear in her Agora Hills music video – “she was cool as fuck!” Bah quips.
“I was eating it up to be honest, I was loving all of it,” Bah laughs. “I came from a small-ass town – I feel like nobody from my town has ever experienced this shit. I felt real cool, like I was really putting on for girls everywhere.”
It is certainly a far cry from her childhood. Her parents moved from Sierra Leone to Fayetteville, Georgia shortly before she was born, a city she describes as “backwards” – “imagine Atlanta but twenty years ago!”. Not, then, an ideal place for an alternative Black, pansexual girl to experiment with her style.
PHOTO CREDIT: Kirt Barnett
“I did get a lot of mean comments and bullying [at school], but I feel like after a certain point when they realised that I'm not gonna change, they kind of backed off a little bit,” she says. “They were just like, ‘oh this is just a girl who comes to school dressed up everyday, period.’”
Despite growing up in a conservative Muslim household, Bah has been remarkably vocal about LGTBQ+ issues, and her own sexuality, which she sees as one of the defining issues of the upcoming US election. “I feel like my entire life I've always been a black sheep…I didn't really fit into any community,” she says. “It's so fucked up that people can't live in their truth just because of somebody else’s bigoted opinions, like y'all need to grow the fuck up honestly. And we need to elect Kamala, period! If Trump comes into office, this is gonna get so much worse.”
Bah also says offhand that, due to their religious beliefs, her parents didn’t allow her to listen to the radio growing up. “The only thing we could ever listen to was like – what's that shit called? – those kids’ CDs from Wendy’s that they used to put in the Happy Meals,” she laughs. “It was like always Michael Jackson and like Beyonce, that's the only shit they would ever let us listen to because they were like, ‘we don't want y'all listening to profanity!’”
It is somewhat surprising, then, that Bah has, in the last year, ventured into that very industry – and with staggering success. “Bitch — you know I’m sexy / (Ugh) Don’t call, just text me,” opens her breakout viral TikTok hit IT GIRL, released in October last year. Crafted from an Azealia Banks–esque beat Bah found on YouTube by producer LxnleyBeat, it is the sonic version of #AliyahCore – oozing self-confidence, a well-deserved paean of praise to herself.
“It was honestly just some fucking around shit, I'm not even gonna lie,” she laughs when I ask her how the song came about. “I used to find beats on YouTube and I was like, ‘let me get into my rapper bag’”. Unlike her fashion videos, IT GIRL was an instant online hit. “I swear to God,” she says. “I posted it [on TikTok] went to sleep and I woke up and it had like 600,000 views”.
I am going to end with an interview from Ladygunn. They saluted the unstoppable rise of a boundary breaker. Someone who is unmistakably and confidently in her own lane and league. I am excited to see what the next few years hold for this artist. I am new to her but I am committed to following her career closely. Make sure you follow Aliyah’s Interlude on social media:
“You started off making humorous content on TikTok, then switched to more fashion focused content, and now you make a lot of music-related content. At the same time, you still make all three kinds of content. How do you balance and prioritize these three aspects of your social media presence?
Because of the way that I started, it’s not as hard to balance all three because I don’t think people are expecting me to ever do just one thing. That was one of my main goals when I started, to allow myself the freedom to do everything so that people don’t box me into one specific genre. Honestly, the content that I make is always true to myself and how I’m feeling on that particular day. And fashion is something that I’m truly passionate about and I have been passionate about since forever, and a lot of my music talks about that too— so they kind of just intertwine with each other.
With music, my first ever song was “IT GIRL,” and I’ve always said that an It Girl is somebody who is authentically themselves and shows up like that bitch every single time they pop out. That was the entire point of a #Aliyahcore in general. It just made so much sense because I’ve been talking about being an It Girl for so long, which played into fashion as well as music.
What is your musical background like? Was “IT GIRL” your first experience making music?
I played the violin growing up for six years, so I know how to read music, and I’m classically trained. Even when I was younger, I used to be in theater classes; I took acting classes and we would sing. I’ve always done and been around lots and lots of music. But when I started going to the studio, I was actually in Atlanta. I went with some of my friends and we would just play around in the studio and make different songs. But I’ve been writing for so long and I think that’s one of my biggest strengths.
The side of Aliyah we see online is always super high energy and confident. How do you maintain that, and how much of it is a created persona?
I am actually a very high energy person in particular— but I will say that when I make content, it’s when I feel like I have the energy to give my all. I’m not gonna get in front of a camera if I’m feeling horrible. If I’m not feeling [confident] inside, it would be wrong for me to express that on the outside. But I really love this happy, high energy because it makes everything more fun.
PHOTO CREDIT: Shervin Lainez
You often credit your success to your hard work and consistency. What does the daily grind look like for you?
I usually wake up around seven or eight every single day. And I plan out my days, usually before the week even starts. I like to know what I’m doing throughout the week. So this week, for example, I’m filming a lot of content, and then I have to work on some of the performances that I’m doing for Pride. I’m very much a consistent person and I think that consistency is the key to everything that you want in life. If I really want something, it’s gonna happen regardless because I work hard for it, period. And that’s just how I feel about everything. I think that anyone can achieve anything if they truly want it. If they work hard for it, it might take a minute, and it might cause lots of rejection in the process, but you just have to know your end goal and be passionate about the things that you do.
You’ve talked about how “IT GIRL” was a very do-it-yourself endeavor, with you sourcing a beat from YouTube. Now, with so much applause and two songs under your belt, how has your process of making songs changed? How about writing songs— do you still build your songs around an initial vibe or idea, as you did with your first songs?
It’s changed a lot because now I’ve been in the studio with different producers. And now when I make music, it’s a whole collaboration effort. I’ll go to the studio, and we’ll make a beat in a studio with a producer, and I’ll tell him, like, I really want a house beat, or this or that.
The [songs], it’s just like when I wrote my first song. It’s really energy based and how I’m feeling on the day, but there’s a lot of times where I already have an idea of what I want to write down and ideas of what type of music I want to make. And that’s the outline from where I go. Usually I’m like, let me write the hook out. And let’s build a song around this. I’ve been trying so many different things recently.
Could you talk specifically about your process of coming up with and creating “Love Me”?
Oh my gosh, ”Love Me” was a song that really came about because as somebody who was on the internet from 17, that comes with a lot of strength, because you are subjected to people’s opinions 24/7. Within fashion, especially being a black woman, a dark skinned black woman, I feel I was forever and always really, really targeted and there’s been times where people, you could tell, really hated that you loved yourself. And the hook goes, “I really love me, have no doubt they tried to make me hate myself.” But I really love me type shit like, it’s really crazy how people have an issue when you don’t care what people think about you. That’s what the song is about. When I was writing it, I was like, I need to make music about loving myself because that’s the whole point of #Aliyahcore and the whole point of what I do in general.
PHOTO CREDIT: Shervin Lainez
Was your sort of ability to turn painful situations like this into something positive and strengthening intrinsic to you or was it something that you had to develop?
No, it’s definitely something I had to develop. I was a very shy person growing up; I was always the girl who had two friends. I didn’t talk to nobody. I got bullied so much growing up, it was really really sick. But honestly, I think when I got to high school and when I got into fashion— and I think this is why I love fashion so much— it really was like an armor for me. When I started dressing and being and showing up as the person that I wanted to be, people started realizing that I don’t care about what they think. That grew my confidence and it made me realize that no matter what you’re wearing, or what you’re doing, people are gonna have something to say about you. So you might as well just do whatever the fuck you want to do.
Where does your name come from?
I’m actually named after the singer Aliyah. My mom was pregnant with me when she passed away and they were really, really big fans of hers. And they told me that when they decided to name me, they kind of felt as if Aliyah and the stuff that she did on Earth was something that they would love for me to do too.
And what about “ Aliyah’s interlude”?
It’s really just a username. I actually found it from Snapchat when I was in ninth grade, actually. When I was in ninth grade, I remember this one girl I followed on Snapchat had a playlist on Apple Music, and she would update it weekly. And she would call it, [her name] interludes. I was like, wait, this is fire! I’m gonna use this as my username.
Could you tell me more about how growing up with social media impacted you and your music making?
I think it impacted my music for sure— with YouTube, I’ve always looked at mixes on there like Azealia Banks mixed with Nicki Minaj. I remember when I would look stuff up, all these tight beats would come up, and I would listen to them. I was like, huh, I might need to hop on this real quick, but I used to do it for fun. When the time came to do [make songs], I was already familiar with all of these different things and remixing music, and being online. It was all familiar to me already”.
I will end things here. If you have not checked out Aliyah’s Interlude then please make sure you correct that. I feel this year is going to be her biggest yet. Let’s hope that she is able to play in the U.K. at some point. An artist that deserves to be shared…
WITH the world.
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