by Ayanna Costley
Behind every trend is a creator who set the foundation, an innovating trailblazer, and people who participate just because it’s popular. The current state of Jersey Club music is no different. In just over 2 decades, the genre grew from a hometown sound heard at local New Jersey parties to an undeniable force felt throughout the world. People discovering the sound for the first time on social media may think it started as a trendy musical moment on TikTok, but those who grew up with the genre are a witness to the fact that this is way more than that. Jersey Club is a movement. And Jersey-bred artist Tenaja (aka @Kia_BHN and DJ Loki) is the star-bright flame who helped reignite it.
In 2022, Tenaja’s song “Jersey Anniversary,” a Jersey Club blend of Tony! Toni! Toné!’s 1992 classic “Anniversary” and DJ Big-O’s “Ay Bay Bay” (a club remix of Hurricane Chris’ Ay Bay Bay), experienced the viral treatment. The song was everywhere, both online and in real life, from TikTok videos to DJ sets at parties to the radio.“It had been years since we heard a Jersey Club song on the radio. So to have that, that put me even further up to where I'm even at in Jersey Club culture,” Tenaja explains.
Tenaja grew up at the time when the aggressive, hard hitting 135 BPM club music was popping off in Jersey. The electric sound, complete with a sharp five count kick pattern, chopped samples from mainstream genres, fragmented vocals calling out dances like ‘sexy walk’ or ‘rock your hips’, and found sound like the infamous bed squeaks or gunshots, was undeniably infectious. When Tenaja’s older cousins threw basement parties she’d hear the bass knocking through the floor. And when she was finally old enough to attend parties, she started making her mark as a dancer. Jersey Club was male-dominated during this time, with almost all of the well known DJs and dancers being men. Instead of letting that stop her, Tenaja used it as motivation, admitting, “My motive every time was like, ‘Yo, I'm a girl. And I want y'all to know that I can legit do it just as hard as y'all.’ I just wanted them to see that I could do the same thing.” That motivation, coupled with the influence from the trailblazers who came before her, put Tenaja on the path to making an indelible impact. “I definitely followed in the footsteps, without knowing, of 40 Cal. From dancer to DJ to vocalist and from dancer to vocalist to DJ–he did it back and forth.”
It’s clear now that her multi-hyphenate creative history in the club scene prepared her for her defining, star-making moment. But when she dropped the title track of her 2021 EP, Jersey Anniversary, she didn’t set out to go viral. “I had that vision. I wanted everybody to dance again because I felt like the world had just stopped,” Tenaja tells me. “Nobody was bumping good club. Nobody was bumping good music.” Everybody became hooked on her sound, and as a result, everybody wanted their own version of it. “When it went viral– when I tell you I never seen so many artists jump on one song,” she recalls as she thinks through the song’s impact on pop culture.
Controversy tried to spoil the big moment when Hurricane Chris remixed “Jersey Anniversary” without featuring Tenaja as an artist or dancer after talks to do so. Unfortunately, he’s not the first or the last artist to commit a fast-grab appropriation of the Jersey Club aesthetic for a temporary rise in streaming ears. For artists interested in creating within the Jersey Club genre, there’s a better way to go about it. “I'm definitely not okay with people just making beats and just making it seem like it's a Jersey club beat. No, it's more than just putting that beat together. It’s way more because you never know what you can get out of really coming here and really acknowledging the sound and what the community really has to offer,” Tenaja says. Lil Uzi is a prime example of that, specifically the way in which he tapped Newark producer MCVertt for his viral song “Just Wanna Rock.” During a red carpet interview at the 2023 Grammys, Uzi even proudly stated his love for the influential genre. “I got so much love for Jersey…When I was younger, I used to go to the famous Camden skating rink…and kick it with my Jersey homies and sharp bounce…so I’m a real real Jersey representer even though I’m from Philly,” he said without hesitation.
Tenaja admits that it’s sometimes hard to talk about “Jersey Anniversary” because of the highs and lows she experienced as the song made its way around the world. In a moment of vulnerability, the Jersey artist shares, “I always have to remind myself how what I manifested really came into fruition. Remembering the process of how bad my hands were sweating because there's like four drafts of that song before it really dropped to what it was.” She also recounts working through the motions of grief after experiencing a familial loss in the midst of the creative process. That led to the creation of her song “Jersey 90s” which feels as if Jersey Club and 90s R&B had a baby. “‘Jersey 90s’ was my healing song,” Kia said. “That was my first step to healing. It was me getting back to myself like remembering who you are.”
Lately, the New Jersey DJ and dancer has been trying to answer a question that’s been racking her mind: In a world where Jersey Club’s popularity keeps growing, what specifically stands out about Jersey Club culture and how can we show that specialty? Maybe it's the fact that the very nature of Jersey Club culture is kinetic and dependent on liberating motion, both aural and physical. The one thing that is clear is that as Jersey Club music continues to dominate pop culture, it's easy to see that Tenaja aka Kia aka DJ Loki will continue to be in the mix.