JoJo Is Finally Suing Her Record Label, So Maybe There’s Still Some Good Left In The World After All
Absurdly talented singer-songwriter and generally flawless human being JoJo has been effectively held hostage by her all-but-bankrupt record label since the release of her last studio album The High Road in 2006 — and now she’s suing them in a bid for freedom. The New York Daily News reports that Joanna Levesque filed legal papers against Blackground Records and imprint Da Family Records, citing a New York State law that holds that minors can’t sign contracts lasting more than seven years. Since she signed a contract in 2004, when she was 12, her contract should have expired in March 2011, JoJo’s camp claims.
As fans know all too well, JoJo’s struggle with her label has been long and twisted; she took legal action against the label in 2009, though it’s not clear how that case was resolved. The chanteuse worked briefly with Interscope Records after Blackground signed a distribution deal with them in 2011, but when that folded, she was unable to properly promote her single “Disaster” or its follow-up “Demonstrate,” for which a video was shot but never premiered. Kept from releasing music commercially, she instead gave away two mixtapes, 2010’s Can’t Take That Away From Me and 2012’s Agápē, to wild critical acclaim.
Sincerely, this is the best news I’ve heard all week. The sooner JoJo is out of these shackles, the sooner she’ll be able to sign elsewhere, record the greatest damn pop album of the decade and start stacking Grammys. What she’s been able to do while in this awful bind is nothing short of extraordinary — with actual resources at her disposal, she’ll be unstoppable.
Get your “Free JoJo” t-shirts out — it’s time for a demonstration.
[via New York Daily News]
