Barely Legal · Bonus Track · SoundCloud · 2016

Where You At

Ayesha Erotica feat. AlexZone

THE SONG WENT VIRAL ON TIKTOK WHILE THE PERSON WHO MADE IT WAS IN HIDING — AND THAT TENSION IS THE WHOLE STORY

Ayesha Erotica asked “Where You At?” in 2016 — and by 2020, millions of people on TikTok were asking the same question about her. She had been doxxed, deadnamed, and driven offline. Her music went viral while she was hiding. The song’s title became, accidentally, the question everyone was asking about its creator.

Who Made This Song, and What Actually Happened to Her

Ayesha Erotica is a transgender woman born in 1996 in California. Between 2015 and 2018, she built a devoted underground following on SoundCloud through two albums, an EP, and a string of singles that combined Y2K aesthetics, hyperpop production, and lyrics so deliberately provocative they read like a commentary on the genre conventions she was simultaneously inventing.

“Where You At” — technically credited to AlexZone featuring Ayesha Erotica, with Ayesha handling vocals, production, and co-writing — was released as a bonus track on her second album Barely Legal in June 2016. It’s a SoundCloud-exclusive track from an album that was later revised when Ayesha decided several tracks didn’t represent her best work.

In 2018, a fan on Discord doxxed her — leaking her private information, pre-transition photos, and deadname. She left the internet. Her albums were removed from most platforms. She retired from music under the Ayesha Erotica name, leaving behind what amounted to a complete artistic vision from a three-year period — and a vacuum that her fans were about to fill in ways she never asked for.

Famous While Hiding: The TikTok Paradox

Between 2020 and 2023, Ayesha’s music spread across TikTok without her involvement or consent. Fans who had preserved her tracks re-uploaded them to streaming services under her name, racking up millions of streams she couldn’t benefit from or control. “Sixteen” was used by Charli D’Amelio — who at the time had over 95 million TikTok followers — to celebrate her own sixteenth birthday. A mashup involving her production became the soundtrack to viral videos by the “Tube Girl” (Sabrina Bahsoon), viewed tens of millions of times.

Ayesha Erotica was, during this period, one of the most influential people in underground pop music — actively shaping the aesthetic of a generation of creators — while being offline, legally disputing piracy of her own work, and explicitly saying she didn’t want any of it.

What the Song Is Actually Doing

Ayesha’s work — including “Where You At” — operates through a specific aesthetic strategy that her imitators frequently misunderstand: the provocation is the surface, and what’s underneath it is craft.

Her Y2K references (the Paris Hilton era, Motorola Razr phones, AIM away messages, Juicy Couture, Playboy branding) weren’t nostalgia — they were reclamation. These were the aesthetics of early 2000s celebrity culture, a world that simultaneously objectified and punished women for their sexuality, especially trans women and women of color. Ayesha, a trans woman, was deliberately adopting and redeploying those aesthetics as armor, irony, and identity simultaneously.

“Where You At” sits inside that framework. The directness of the title, the blunt production style, the unapologetic vocal delivery — these aren’t rawness for its own sake. They’re a precision instrument built to operate in the specific cultural space between underground queer nightlife, internet culture, and the collapse of mainstream/niche distinctions that hyperpop accelerated.

What Ayesha Built — and Who It Reached

Before her retirement, Ayesha produced Slayyyter’s early sound — including “BFF,” which Slayyyter has credited as the beginning of her career. Pitchfork, Nylon, Paper, and the New York Times would all later write about Ayesha’s influence on the hyperpop genre. Kim Petras has named her as an influence. Doechii sampled her unreleased music in 2024. Joey Valence & Brae’s “The Baddest (Badder)” remix featuring Ayesha became a TikTok hit.

All of this happened in an industry that had, for several years, been building on her work without her participation and against her explicit wishes. The legal battles over pirated streaming uploads ran for years. Her music existed on Spotify under her name accumulating millions of streams from uploads she hadn’t authorized and couldn’t monetize.

She returned in 2023 — on her own terms, cautiously, with more control. Her third studio album Precum was released on her birthday, August 11, 2025. She now tours, releases music, and maintains a presence. The question “Where You At?” has, eventually, been answered.

Why Hyperpop Needed a Song Like This

The genre label “hyperpop” was partly applied retroactively to describe music that existed before the label did. What Ayesha was doing in 2016 on SoundCloud — the ultra-processed vocals, the Y2K aesthetic, the deliberately over-the-top sexuality, the DIY production that sounded simultaneously amateur and highly intentional — predated the Spotify playlist definition of hyperpop and was more interesting than it.

The genre she was working in was fundamentally queer. It was built on the tradition of camp — the aesthetic mode that takes what society considers low, tacky, or excessive and performs it with enough self-awareness that it becomes a critique of the standard. “Where You At” operates in that register: the bluntness isn’t lack of sophistication. It’s sophistication that has decided to dispense with the markers of sophistication in order to say something more directly.

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