Child sexualization via Melanie Martinez: a compilation

Hello everyone and welcome to yet another compilation. This time around we will focus on a former The Voice contestant turned MK pawn Melanie Martinez.

Melanie is known as an eccentric millenial singer who writes songs from a standpoint of a child. Her stage persona, Cry Baby, is evolving throughout her music, which revolves around the concepts seemingly familiar to every child, like sippy cups (filled with alcohol?) and playing tag, you’re it (with a rapist?). In Melanie’s universe, child innocence is always being threatened — by addicted adults, dumb peers or literal predators.

Dualistic hair, red lipstick, bows and childlike clothes: it’s only fitting she chose Britney’s Toxic to perform at The Voice. This girl was bound for success.

Melanie thrives on making familiar, safe things we associate with childhood eerie and menacing. Dollhouse is a story of a family falling apart but posing happily for a picture. In Milk and Cookies, the cookies are poisoned. Wheels On The Bus is about kids doing drugs and having sex on the school bus while the driver is peeking. Innocent “Strawberry Shortcake”? Forget it. It’s v****a. Orange Juice is a story of bulimic girls purging fruit. Teacher’s Pet, however, is exactly what you think it is — a story of a married teacher grooming a doe-eyed student.

All this creepiness is richly peppered with swearing.

“You must promise to love me
And damn it, if you f*ck me over
I will rip your f*cking face apart”

“I love everything you do
When you call me f*cking dumb for the stupid s**t I do
I wanna ride my bike with you, fully undressed”

“Her face was f*cked up and my hands were bloody
We were in the playground, things were getting muddy
The teacher broke us up after I broke her”

“Teacher, can I sit right there?
This b*tch behind me is cutting my hair”

“That isn’t the life for me
Gotta look like a f*ckin’ damn Barbie
Going on TV, people have high expectations of me
Wanna be my best friend, then judge me
If I smoke a little weed, makes no f*cking sense to me”

“Teacher’s pet
If I’m so special, why am I secret?
Yeah, why the f*ck is that?”

K-12 ends with a wholesome advice that Grandma gives to Cry Baby. Would you like to hear it?

“Don’t let them f*ck you, honey, no, oh. Don’t let them try”

Truly inspiring.

Well, let’s see if there’s anything in the pictures of Melanie that might indicate something.

This is how Cry Baby’s image progressed over the years:

This is Cry Baby today.

There are several things Melanie always uses is her photoshoots. First off, toys and dolls. These  two are just notable examples:

Next, there’s gotta be a severed head.

One-eyed sign? Don’t mind if I do.

Her most recent thing are butterflies, levitation and chains. For obvious reasons. She presents it as “spiritual rebirth”.

Somewhere along the road her quirks got really dark though. Mind you, this singer is extremely liberal, LGBTQ+ friendly and most appealing to kids with her soft voice and airy, catchy, nursery rhyme-like tunes.

This last screengrab is from her most recent music video The Bakery, where she’s unrecognazibly satanic, but I have already posted about that. What I’d like to point out is the lyrics, which immediately threw me off.

Melanie’s sophomore album K-12 has a very eerie song called Show and Tell. In a music video from a whole film she made (amazingly covered by VC), she appears as a sinister puppet dancing for her peers in class. Melanie has scolded fans for judging her life choices before, but Show and Tell takes it to a whole new level. You’d think an internationally acclaimed singer would be greatful to her fanbase, right?

Show and tell
I’m on display for all you f*****s to see
Show, you tell
Harsh words if you don’t get a pic with me
Buy and sell (Buy and sell me, baby)
Like I’m a product to society
Art don’t sell
Unless you’ve f****d every authority

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’d like to end with a quote from The Bakery. The story of the song is that Melanie, a girl born in Queens, raised in New York, had to work her a*s off at a local bakery to raise some money in order to participate in The Voice. She’s singing that she doesn’t care about pastry like her boss wants her to, she’s here for the paycheck. Now, let us gloss over the fact that she had to raise money for a free contest for some reason. This is the line that alarmed me:

It ain’t for me to roll it out, it’s just for me to raise the dough

Are we absolutely sure Melanie is talking about her bakery and not the music business?