This Is Why We’re All Uplifting Tinashe
The meme has become a rallying cry for supporting your favorite underrated artists
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
There is a particular kind of music fan who has been telling you about Tinashe for years — at pregames, in group chats, via unsolicited aux cord takeovers. They were right then. The rest of the world is simply catching up now. According to Harper's Bazaar, Tinashe's new album Popstar debuted at No. 6 on the Billboard 200, earning her her first-ever Top 10 album — a milestone more than a decade in the making.
The chart placement didn't materialize out of nowhere. It was turbocharged by a social media movement built around one deceptively simple question: what are you doing to uplift Tinashe today? The meme started as a winking acknowledgment that the "2 On" singer had been criminally underrated for too long, and it snowballed fast — fans pushing tracks like "Too Easy," "Melatonin," and "Cloud 9" onto playlists and timelines with the energy of a full PR campaign, except unpaid and genuinely enthusiastic. Tinashe noticed. She responded on social media: "All of this 'uplifting Tinashe' is soo wholesome I'm literally teary eyed."
The Moment the Meme Became a Movement
The cultural inflection point arrived at Austin City Limits, when Charli XCX pulled Tinashe out as a surprise guest and told the crowd to "f*cking uplift her, baby" — a line that landed perfectly because Charli knows exactly what this particular arc feels like. She spent years operating in the industry's margins before Brat made her inescapable in 2024, its green aesthetic eventually becoming shorthand for an entire cultural moment (and, briefly, a presidential campaign). The through-line is obvious: critical darlings who were never actually niche, just underserved.
And Tinashe isn't alone in finally cresting. The current pop landscape reads like a vindication list. Slayyyter performed for an estimated 50,000 people at Lollapalooza. Zara Larsson and PinkPantheress scored their first global No. 1 with the "Stateside" remix. Raye is Grammy-nominated. Madison Beer is selling out Madison Square Garden. Something has shifted — partially driven by the so-called "Khia asylum" discourse online, which reframed how stan culture talks about artists who've been overlooked — and the beneficiaries are women who kept working regardless of whether the industry was paying attention.
Tinashe put it plainly when the chart news broke: "I've always known my value as an artist was not based on a chart position but DAMN this sure feels amazing to be reaching new career heights after 10+ years in the game." That's the whole story, really — an artist who never needed external validation to keep creating, finally getting it anyway.
The best thing you can do for the artists you love is be annoyingly, relentlessly loud about them — because sometimes, the meme is the movement.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
