SPOTLIGHT: Lexa Gates Releases New Music Video for “Rotten To The Core”
ASTORIA NATIVE — Lexa Gates released her latest music video for single “Rotten to the Core” last Tuesday after an unexpected launch into popularity within recent months. Her newfound fame found her still making beats in her basement when a well-known TikToker posted a clip singing her song “Angel.” The track quickly went viral, and its streams have come just shy of half a million as of this month.
In our interview ahead of her newest release, she explained that her hometown instilled inspirations of color, playfulness, and a lack of fear toward the unfamiliar, particularly through artists such as Austin Babbit and Father Steve.
“I know they’re visual artists, but I just love how they're super colorful,” she shared. “They're very true to themselves. They make authentic stuff. And they're from fucking Astoria, which is … crazy to me because I feel like nobody's from Astoria.”
Growing up, Gates explained that she gained musical influences in her family. Her mother, who raised her and her little sister on her own, used to want to be a singer, but Gates said things never really worked out for her. When she was young, her mother put Gates into classes for singing and piano. The singer-songwriter remembers enjoying it for the few years she took them, but she never considered music as a medium to express her emotions until she experienced a death in the family at age nine.
“I was in a weird position with everybody devastated about a death in the family,” she said. “And I didn't really understand it. I obviously couldn't put the emotions in the room into words as a child. So … I naturally found a way to let out how I felt with an instrument.”
Since that day, family has remained a part of her fanbase. She and her little sister, who’s only a few years behind her, have navigated Gates’ development as a musician in tandem — she’s kept her sister involved in a majority of her music videos thus far, and stayed on set for the recent filming for “Rotten to the Core.”
When asked about the process she’s gone through to get to this moment of success, she described it all as relatively surprising. “I just heard [about the streams for “Angel”] for the first time when I talked to my cousin this morning. And she said, ‘You're blowing up like that!’… I don't know what's happening. I really don't know.”
At age 15, Gates dropped out of high school.
Originally, she admitted that it wasn’t an opportunity to fully dive into art, but instead she focused more on the typical vices teens fall into early on in high school, supervised or not. “I was just diving into drugs and boys, I guess,” she said. “Just … stupid shit.”
Gates remembers that those early relationships taught her to become somewhat apathetic toward relationships — a toxic mentality she brushes on heavily throughout “Rotten To The Core.”
Her first song, “Bring Me Down,” was released after the guy she was dating at 17 helped her realize that releasing her own music could be somewhat unserious. He was taking classes in music nearby and opened Gates up to a new world. “He kind of just showed me that you could just buy a microphone and make music at home. I didn't know that,” she laughed.
Her first release attracted an impressive amount of streams. When she checked for the first time, it was around 10K. “I guess I got addicted to seeing the numbers or having support from people,” she said. “It feels really good.”
As she grew into her own style, she described how she stopped reaching for elusive themes or grand ideas and made more of an effort to write about real life. And this is what her songs have felt like to her thus far: a live journal with the exact things Gates was doing, the exact emotions she was feeling at the time she recorded each song. For listeners, it creates a sort of intimacy with an artist that mimics the experience of peeking into someone’s diary.
With vocals that switch between distanced and faded right into verses that feel like a tongue-punch, Gates describes her music as somewhere in between “dreamy” and “gangster.” In a lot of her songs, the rhythm gravitates toward something akin to rap.
“I just naturally gravitate towards rapping, but it's kind of like spoken word,” she said.
Her pace and tone gives her songs a refreshing take on a female artist unafraid to take on the more stereotypically masculine style of musical “rizz,” as Gates uses to describe the effect.
“Angel,” her most popular single to date, was inspired by The Divine Feminine by Mac Miller and “Whoopy” by Westside Gunn. “There’s love songs for guys, but a lot of those are kind of sexy,” she said. “[‘Angel’] isn’t sexy. It’s kind of almost love-bombing. But it’s like, ‘I want you.’ But it’s not sexual at all.”
It’s a mindset nearly completely opposite from the one she was in when she recorded “Rotten To The Core” a little over a year ago.
“I was with somebody but not really with them, you know — that type of bullshit,” she explained. “We were just using each other for … self-harm. I was writing that song to try to get back at him, or just rub it in his face. Like, ‘I don't care.’ It was supposed to be a burn.”
But toward the end of the song, there’s a switch-up. “It’s me realizing that … “I don't even want to be acting like that,” Gates added. “And I don't even want to be participating in that type of energy at all. I know it's super popular these days to just be toxic or [a] ‘sneaky link’ or all that shit. So I just dabbled in that and then realized that … as a woman, you can't win that game.”
Heading to Jersey to record a video for the track nearly a year later, Gates shared how she was happy to allow her team to take the reins on most of the shoot. She came with a basic idea of the colors and moods she wanted the pictures to take on, then let the professionals pick up choosing the site and outfits.
“I did tell them that I wanted it to be colorful, dreamy — ‘I want to look sexy,’” she said.
Her management had the idea to loosely base scenes on the merry-go-round off the iconic teacup ride scene in Uptown Girls, starring Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning. The rest of the video was shot in a motel also based in New Jersey, transitioning between high angles of Gates in bed and in a red tub.
The editing feels amateur in a very intentional way, maintaining that intimate and raw journalistic feel that Gates aims to express through her lyrics. It made sense, then, when she added that she insisted that she should take over the editing portion of the music video.
“I mean, all the other videos I've done are just me and my sister and my friends,” she said. “And I always edit all of them. I used iMovie to edit this one.” The whole process only took around five days.
For the year ahead, Gates has kept her goals pretty simple. She aims to allow herself to evolve naturally, write more genius lyrics, and “start writing about rich people problems.” When Luna sat down to speak with her this week, she had just returned to New York after an extended stay in LA, where she was working on a new album.
“I want to be touring and collaborating and being in a studio — all of that,” she shared. “I really do love what I do. I feel euphoric every time I leave the studio with something that I really like. And it just makes me happier than anything. But also to add on to all that, I'm trying to buy a house for my mom like Sexyy Red.”
