2024 has been the Year Of Coffee In Pop Music. It started with Sabrina Carpenter’s ubiquitous earworm, Espresso, which is still the high mark honestly. Then it was Chappell Roan’s Coffee—though it technically came out last year but didn’t break unavoidably into the mainstream until post-Sabrina. (People needed another coffee fix, and can you blame them?) Now it is JoJo Siwa’s turn. The Dance Moms star turned Nickelodeon actor turned rebranded racy adult pop singer has released her latest single, Iced Coffee, and it’s safe to say that the coffee in pop music trend has been put to bed once and for all.
As reported by Pink News, the new song dropped Friday, November 22nd, and it already causing quite a stir, which is pretty on brand (or re-brand rather) for Siwa in 2024. Seeking to shed her child actor image, Siwa has released a handful of singles with not-so-subtly suggestive lyrics and a new look that’s doing sort of a Rainbow-Brite-goes-to-a-KISS-concert thing. She then went on to say she wanted to “start a new genre of music” known as “gay pop,” which went over about as well as you’d expect it would. (She later clarified that “I am not the inventor of gay pop… I might not be the president, but I might be the CEO.”)
Which brings us to Iced Coffee. It’s two minutes of high fructose corn syrup, about as sugary sweet as they come. I’m not particularly qualified to parse its merits as a pop number, but as a coffee journalist, I am uniquely positioned to offer critique these lyrics. And woof.
Pink News highlights the two grabbing the most attention:
“French-pressed up against my chest, oh, oui, oui,” the song begins, before: “Like the way you grindin’ my bean.”
Unsubtle, sure, but that’s fine. What I can’t abide here is the misuse of coffee implements. French press? In a song titled Iced Coffee? Never in my days have I heard of folks making an iced coffee with a French press. That metaphor is more mixed than an old-school Italian espresso blend. I guess you could make a French press and then pour it over ice and call it an iced coffee, but a tenet of this particular drink style is that it is brewed over ice. I’m not sure what you would call that, but I know for certain it’s not an iced coffee.
Now, onto the elefante variety in the room. No, I don’t like the way you grindin’ my bean. While most may balk at the cringingly on the nose description of rounding second base, the greater sin is calling the pit of the coffee cherry a “bean”. It is and always has been a seed. Technically half a seed, unless it’s a peaberry. (Peaberry, by the by, would have been the far superior innuendo: “Like the way you grindin’ my peaberry.”)
I also don’t love the what appears to be AI-generated cover art, but less because of coffee and more due to the technology as the death of Art-ness of it all.
If there is any hope, it’s that Iced Coffee will turn folks off from using the term “bean” ever again, that it will dismantle one of society’s most deeply engrained misnomers so that we can rebuild in its place something closer to correct. Coffee is not and has never been a bean. Get over it. And if one Jojo Siwa can be the unexpected cause of this long-needed shift in coffee nomenclature, then truly she will be our Iced Coffee Queen, our Seed Inventor, the Coffee President, CCO (Chief Coffee Officer) and all other available honorifics, for it will be Jojo Siwa who has slayed the almighty bean.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
