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Jessica Mauboy has rediscovered her voice — both musically and politically — and is moving beyond her image as Australia’s pop darling. Alexandra English gets a moment with the star
on the day of Jessica Mauboy’s photoshoot for BAZAAR, the internet has gone into meltdown. In Miami, singer and rapper Lizzo has just brought pop heartthrob Harry Styles onstage for a duet rendition of her hit “Juice” and Instagram has all but buckled under the weight of the videos.
Has Mauboy seen it? “Yes! Oh my gosh!” she says, clutching her chest in a faux-faint of admiration. “Lizzo is so incredible. She’s been making music for such a long time ... it’s incredible to see a woman so in control and with such confidence.” A beat, a laugh, and then: “[Pop music] is really tasty right now.”
The shift in pop from the squeaky-clean autotuned girl-next- door of the early aughts to the raw, honest and vulnerable woman of the late 2010s also speaks to a shift that has taken place inside Mauboy, one that pervades her latest album, Hilda, named for her maternal grandmother, whom she never met.
It’s hard to imagine an Australia where Jessica Mauboy isn’t a household name. She has been our sweetheart since she appeared on Australian Idol in 2006 when she was just 16, and so the country has watched her grow up, yet never truly let her grow up. Mauboy dutifully fulfilled our vision of what a young pop star should be: polite, accommodating, ever-smiling, with not so much as a hair out of place, and any time she tried to break free from that image, the masses shoved her back into that mould. Her 2010 album, Get ’Em Girls, for example, was criti- cised by fans who thought she was ‘too sexy’ and had moved too far from her good-girl image. It should have come as a surprise to no one in 2013 when Mauboy fell out of love with the music world and went back home to Darwin to reconnect with her family and her culture. Who would have thought that today she would be throwing shapes in front of the BAZAAR cameras wearing a cheeky-cut black Khaite bodysuit and towering Gucci heels, bolder and more herself than ever before? Not Mauboy.
“When I was 16 and starting out, self-confidence was a huge [struggle] for me, and this album felt like that,” she says. “I had to rebuild with Hilda — I had to start again and learn, physi- cally and mentally, how to get back into music and be the artist and figure out what that meant. By being open again and not being afraid, I’ve discovered things I wasn’t able to do before, like walking around freely in this leotard, flaunting my body like that and being really deeply confident and less fearful. This is my happy place now,” she adds, laughing. “It feels new again, and those years of getting my confidence back and the past three putting together this record, it has been a whole other level of — I hate to use this word — rediscovery. This album is the most I’ve given personally. I wanted to be truthful about things I’ve never really been able to talk about that have made me.”
Mauboy’s newfound voice extends further than singing; news will emerge not long after we speak that she is parting ways with her agent of 14 years, David Champion. It’s a change she alludes to during the shoot: “I found a new way to be the boss lady in the room,” she says. “I started to put my foot down, and people listened.” That’s not to say the split was a nasty one — far from it. “There are people in my life I’m still really connected to, but from a business and musical perspective, we see things differently,” she adds. “It’s a big thing to be able to thank someone for their time and [acknowledge] that I’m different from when I was 16, and be able to leave on good terms.”
She has also found a way to express herself politically. “I think at some point all of us have this fear of speaking out. You feel like, maybe it’s not for me. Being Indigenous Australian, that was one of the biggest things: I felt shut down or that I didn’t have permission to say something. But it’s my identity, you know. That is my place. That is definitely my place.”
Mauboy recently spoke about the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which was signed by 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and calls for a First Nations voice in Parliament. “My mother [a Kuku Yalanji woman] always told me, ‘Never forget where you came from,’” she says. “I wanted to stand with my ancestors. If we were to gain that respect, it would mean freedom for anyone born in this country.
“There’s still a lot to be done, and speaking about it was only one step,” she continues. “But I feel really empowered. It’s really just about being able to work together and unite, and not have this thing sitting on our shoulders.”
And with that, an outfit change; Ja Rule’s “Livin’ it Up” starts playing and Jessica Mauboy is back on her feet to sing and dance her way into her future.
This story originally appeared in the April 2020 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR magazine. Image: Georges Antoni.
