For over a year, Kanye West has been publicly berating Kim Kardashian for allowing their oldest kid, 9-year-old North West, to have a TikTok account. To be clear, Kanye has publicly stalked, harassed and threatened Kim for a while and only a fraction of it was “because North is on TikTok.” But that’s the thing Kanye and his defenders have latched onto, because it plays into like six different right-wing culture wars. Kim has always maintained that she “operates” North’s TikTok and approves of everything posted on there. Most of the time, it’s just North being a kid or being creative or dancing and what have you. Normal kid stuff.
Well, over the weekend, North got a chance to hang out with her favorite artist, Ice Spice. Ice Spice – real name: Isis Gaston!! – is 23 years old and a big part of her brand is her red hair and cute-girl persona. She raps about sex, relationships, men, d-cks, and how she’s a bad bitch. Ice Spice hung out with North and her little friends and they made some TikToks together:
😍💕💕💕 pic.twitter.com/7bShLFAMqQ
— Ice Spice ☆ (@icespicee_) March 4, 2023
What this said to me was that… Ice Spice is closer in age to North than Kim or Kanye. I thought it was really sweet that someone – probably Kim – arranged for North to meet her favorite artist. They filmed those TikToks in North’s room and Kim’s house, so it was practically a playdate. Hilariously, North must have spent the entire playdate studying Ice Spice’s mannerisms and expressions, because this is one of her latest TikToks:
north is funny as hell, that whole meetup with ice spice was really just character study for her pic.twitter.com/lXC4wERGJM
— ᵈᵒˣⁱᵉ❸❻ (@dox_gay) March 6, 2023
The WIG!! OMG. Anyway, I watched this and thought “North is going to be so embarrassed when she gets older, but it’s cute now.” I also think the red hair kind of suits her. But what Kanye West saw was yet more “proof” that Kim is an unfit mother because she lets North wear a red wig and lip sync to a popular song? I tweeted about this yesterday – every generation has kids singing or rapping along to problematic or “sexy” lyrics when they’re kids. A generation of kids sang along to Prince, Salt ‘N Pepa, Bel Biv DeVoe, “I Wanna Sex You Up,” all of it. Most of us had no idea what the lyrics meant. Anyway, I think Kim would probably rather see North exposed to a young, fresh female rapper than a father who keeps talking about how much he loves Adolf Hitler.
Kanye response about his daughter with ice spice pic.twitter.com/OMcIUpwUyc
— k 𖤐ri (@ihykari) March 6, 2023
why are you guys so worried about Kanye kids 😭North is having fun pic.twitter.com/n3mG0N3Lsg
— k 𖤐ri (@ihykari) March 6, 2023
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Fox News, North’s TikTok.
I’m not a Kanye supporter at all but I believe this is an old video and has nothing to do with the ice spice til tok.
The Kanye video might be a few years old
All I see is North being a typical kid. The only difference is the new technology. This ain’t no different than me pretending to be Janet Jackson or Madonna in my childhood bedroom.
I’m so not a KK defender but this is cute and age appropriate. I have complicated feelings about kids on social media but aside from that anyone who looks at this clothing, dancing, or singing as inappropriate (in the way I’m assuming conservatives do) is sick.
that family is getting her set up for endorsements. at age 9. it’s really gross but it’s on brand
I agree. She’s a young kid ffsake. While most celebs are trying to protect their children and suing the paps for photographing them, the KKlan is promoting them. North’s account should be set to private. I don’t find anything cute about this
“North’s account should be set to private.” THAT PART.
North singing and dancing and playing with her friends – even meeting a celebrity she likes and recording a video together- are all one thing. Her posting all of that on a public social media account – something entirely different.
But I’m a mom who does not post pictures of my kids on SM or allow others to do so, either.
This is a good take. I keep seeing this interaction referred to as a playdate which is super weird. 23yr olds do not have playdates with 9yr olds. This is a publicity stunt.
Out of curiosity, how would Kanye react to his daughter doing the exact same thing to HiS lyrics?!
Or his son? Honestly, he should be more worried about the example he has been setting for his son in real life. There’s such a danger of young boys getting caught up in hate movements.
Kanye is a Nazi jerk, but… Ice Spice? Really?
She seems like a nice person, but she’s VERY sexual. The very first video I’ve ever seen of her got her bending down, patting her pum pum.
Cool for North, but questionable parenting.
Also, it’s somewhat troublesome how North is on several blogs multiple times a week with her TikToks. It’s clearly the newest promotional tool for the Kardashians, not just an app for North to have fun with.
She’s not doing that around the little kids, so I don’t see it as an issue. The level of exposure North, her siblings, and their cousins have is definitely questionable, but a parent not teaching their kid that they need to shun young women over sexual things they did in othersettings and places isn’t a bad thing. Hopefully it would be ok for a child to do something like this with Lil Nas X too.
Girls on film! That video!
First time I ever saw mostly naked women!
Didn’t scar me whatsoever.
It’s creepy, how people are commenting about North, & her mannerisms & her body.
I wouldn’t have my kids post to all, I’d keep it private for them, but I’m big on privacy & don’t post about my kids at all.
Some do, they post almost hourly updates about their lives. People over share, imo, like Kristen Bell. She violates her kids privacy all the time, they can’t consent to it.
People have different boundaries, that’s all this is to me. If North is ok, then let her be.
It is so weird seeing people my age clutching pearls abt this sort of content, when so many of them were the same 12 year olds I knew in middle school who would immediately start dancing when Low by Flo Rida would come on. I heard the song again a few weeks ago on the radio and it didn’t hit me until then how racy those lyrics were!! And we just thought that song was the bomb. If my parents had known then what I was listening to, they would have been aghast.
And yet, listening to that music, wearing halter tops and cropped cardigans and whatever else aren’t the things affecting me the most today. The stuff I discuss the most in therapy is actually the stifling environment I grew up in and the expectations placed on me by the adults in my life who were trying to protect me, but failed to validate me as a person in the process. Funny how that worked out.
Another song that comes to mind, that I again heard in middle school, was She Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC. Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin. Fat Bottom Girls by Queen. All songs with lyrics that, upon closer examination, were not appropriate for kids of that age.
Heck, at 12, a bunch of us were reading Shakespeare for class and cackling abt the double meaning behind the line “some of us are born great, some of us acquire greatness, and some of us have greatness thrust upon us.” And yet most of us grew up to be successful and discerning. Every generation gets its own iteration of this same exact moral panic, and every generation gets past it for the most part. I’m not even that old, but I’m just at a point where I just ignore it for the most part now.
Well said. Excellent post. There were so many female artists in the industry who were portrayed as The Tnd Times for those of us who were kids and teens in the 10’s/00’s. Protecting us was used to justify all the moral panics and the vilest treatment of many of them. But it seems like most of us, as you said, grew up to be discerning, productive members of society no worse or better than anyone else. It’s a shame that women were put through all that unnecessary drama and trauma.
Co-sign a 100% .
A generation of kids sang along to Prince, Salt ‘N Pepa, Bel Biv DeVoe, “I Wanna Sex You Up,”
Totally! I was seven when “I Wanna Sex You Up” came out.
My Mom still tells the story of when she asked me what I thought that lyric meant, and I told her it meant, “I want to make you look very beautiful.”
I sang the lyrics to Jagged Little Pill in the back seat of my parent’s Buick on a road trip to Ohio in 1997. I was 12.
(it was awkward but they didn’t take the CD away)
Ice Spice is 23 years old and North West is 9. How are we normalizing that they’re hanging out and making dance videos? It’s inappropriate, full stop.
Wasn’t Alyson Stoner only a year older than North when she was in that Missy Elliot video?
Our whole sixth grade class was into Huey Lewis and the News, lol, “I want a new Drug” and our teacher got angry and made us question the lyrics. I just laughed and thought she was stupid since most of us had MTV at home. I was annoyed by misogynistic hair bands at that age. We should have talked about THAT.