Lola Young has hit back at accusations that she’s a ‘nepo baby.’
Known for her 2024 song Messy, which seemed to explode out of nowhere to top the UK Singles Chart last year, the 24-year-old has been facing suspicion that she’s an industry plant.
But the singer-songwriter was quick to dispel rumours that her sudden fame had anything to do with family connections.
While her aunt is Julia Donaldson, the author of The Gruffalo, Lola took her creative drive in a totally different direction than her aunt when she joined the Brit School and won a national open mic competition at age 13.
What followed was years of hard work and struggle to get her music out there before she finally blew up on TikTok and rose up the charts.
She now works with Island Records and is under the direction of two managers – one who worked with Adele, and Nick Shymanskym, who managed Amy Winehouse – but was quick to deny family connections have anything to do with her success.
She said in an interview with Capital Buzz: ‘People are saying I’m a nepo baby because my great aunt wrote The Gruffalo. I mean what kind of rubbish is that? I have so much to say on that which I can’t even talk about.’
She continued, condemning those who want to dismiss her meteoric rise as a product of nepotism: ‘But I’m not a nepo baby, I’m not an industry plant, there we go I said it. I’ve cleared that up for all those losers that want to comment rubbish on the internet. Just find something better to do, you’re sad, you’re lonely.’
Lola continued: ‘The thing is industry plant is just a term for other artists and other people to use who just don’t know what they’re doing in life and feel upset that someone else is having their moment.
‘And if you are an industry plant, you’re not going to have your moment for that long, unfortunately. And maybe sometimes you will, it just doesn’t matter, none of these things matter. If someone’s got talent, then they’ve got talent,’ she concluded.
The artist refers to online convo, like a comment from one X user in a viral post who wrote: ‘Feel like this woman appeared out of nowhere in the past few months so I had a Google. Her Auntie wrote ‘The Gruffalo’ and she went to the BRIT school. LOL. Same as it ever was.
‘Hello aunty do you know anyone in creative media in which you also work and are very successful in,’ added @Michaelobusi.
An ‘industry plant’ can be loosely defined as any band or musician who is backed by music industry bigwigs in their nascent stages, with that support resulting in an easier road to success.
Examples include any artist who is discovered and signed before they have put out any music independently or gained any kind of following organically. This includes five-time Grammy winner Lorde, who has had a development deal with Universal since the age of 13, providing her with vocal training and songwriting lessons.
Queer pop princess Clairo, who earned her industry plant rep because her father happens to be the co-founder of Rubber Tracks recording studio, also falls into this category. In these cases, semi-realised talents are taken into the moneyed embrace of a record label to be polished and smoothed (in sometimes minor ways) before they’re presented to the world.
It’s an amorphous term without a concrete definition, given that almost every major artist has been helped by a record label or management or PR team at some stage of their career.
More than anything else, it’s an insult to call a musical act a curated product, not a ‘real’ artist with a persona representing genuine self-expression.
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Similarly, the term nepo baby refers to anyone who got a leg up in their career due to a famous relative (usually a parent).
A striking example is singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams whose father – Star Wars creator JJ Abrams – is so entrenched in the entertainment industry it was not difficult for him to give his artistic daughter meaningful help in realising her musical dream.
Nepo babies and industry plants are seemingly becoming more and more common, and while the terms don’t necessarily imply a lack of talent, they do tend to imply an artist did not work for their success or ‘pay their dues’ in a famously cut-throat industry.
Lola is set to perform at Radio 1’s Big Weekend at Sefton Park in Liverpool on Sunday May 25 alongside Mumford & Sons and JADE.
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