Author's note: Jangela speaks very quickly. She was gracious enough to spend an entire hour of airtime minutes on her cell phone to give the following interview. Most of it is transcribed here.
Pamie: Sorry to hear you got cut.
Jangela: Yeah, we were supposed to find out two weeks after the audition and it ended up being about a month. All of my friends -- well, all three that knew I went out and did this because I was too afraid to tell anybody -- were there and I had a camera taping myself. They called six times or so. They call two times before you talk to the judges before they tell you if you made it. As soon as they told me, they didn't give me a chance to ask any questions about why I didn't make it.
Pamie: So, Jaymes called you, then?
Jangela: I think it was Jennifer. Because Jaymes had a rougher voice. I assumed it was a staffer.
Pamie: Tell me about the Hyphentwins and Travis.
Jangela: It was really weird because when I went to the auditions the first day there were a ton of girls there and no one had a good idea of what was going on. You first talked to two talent scouts and then you went into another room and then you find out about the judges. I was impressed at who we were auditioning for, because at the time Coyote Ugly had just come out [Travis was the choreographer]. Their portrayal is warmer than they appear on television. They were just kind of walking around and interacting with anybody. They didn't even seem like the judges by the end of day two.
Oh, when Travis didn't like you he made the weirdest faces, like when a dog is confused. That was great.
We spent probably a total of twenty-two hours around these people because it was basically like a cattle call. Day One in Atlanta I got there at about six-thirty in the morning and I was done around five in the afternoon and they didn't finish until eight or nine that night and the day started at eight.
Second callbacks and dance were on the same day. They didn't tell us anything. Some girls got a call the night before to remind us that we were dancing. I got a call that said, "Make sure you still kinda look Popstarish." Dave, the field producer for the show, called to remind me to bring the U-Haul. Another girl called to tell me to dress up a little more Popstarish. They didn't tell me to bring anything to dance in. Some of the girls didn't get called at all and some girls were told to bring something comfortable to dance in.
Curtisha, the one you like, is a big sweetheart and when she showed up that morning she was like, "I didn't know I had to get all dressed up for today, I just brought my dancing clothes!" She literally danced the whole time for that second part of the auditions, so it was kind of mixed up.
Pamie: The U-Haul.
Jangela: They found out about the U-Haul thing by one of the cameramen. They ordered pizza for all the girls.
Pamie: Ha.
Jangela: What?
Pamie: Just… pizza, that's all.
Jangela: So, we're all sitting down waiting and everything and one of the cameramen comes over and he just started talking to us and asked if the audition was holding me up from everything. And I guess he told Dave and that first day I didn't have the U-Haul with me or anything. All of the shots are from the day. Dave filming it and making me open it up. And that day my keys got lost in the truck. I was nervous and I couldn't remember the words. They taped me writing it on my hands and all that other stuff. I wish they had shown more of the dancing parts with me.
My boyfriend's a really shy guy and I thought it was cute they added that in there. We filmed him falling asleep in the U-Haul truck. By the time it was over, my boyfriend was ready to kill my friend, so just to get away he went to the U-Haul and fell asleep.
They actually made me say all that. And really, if I was bummed that they showed me being cut -- the chances of me making it into the five girls was pretty small, so being featured in this show is just as steep. There are a lot of the girls in L.A. that no one's seen yet and once they're in L.A. they've got three episodes basically to get their screen time. So if it took a U-Haul to get my feature on the show, I'd do it again.
Pamie: What's your background in dance and singing that made you want to be a Popstar?
Jangela: The second I started talking I started singing to the point of annoyance. My parents have tapes of me singing "It's A Small World," as if it was the only way I could breathe, if I was singing that song. I've just always, always been singing. Your family and friends can tell you that you've got a nice voice, but none of that ever really motivated me. I kind of grew up with Madonna, and I think a lot of it, part of it was just watching her, as an artist. She's probably one of the few pop artists that has a head on her shoulders. She's smart, articulate, and I don't know, I guess in being musical and loving music and loving dance and also being an intelligent being, I figured if she can do it, why can't I? I write my own songs and I've been writing poetry my whole life, so if I weren't a musical artist my second goal would be to be a writer in some way.
If I had to pinpoint a moment that influenced me -- my senior year in college I almost sang for my graduating class and I get the worst type of stage fright for the first couple of seconds, kind of like driving stick shift for the first time. That's how I am onstage. I was working in a martini lounge at the time, and it was Mariah Carey's "Hero," and I can't stand Mariah, but it fit. One of the waiters dimmed the lights down and I sang and they all looked so touched to hear me sing. I don't know if it was really because they liked my voice or liked the song, but they just seemed touched by the music and if, I guess, there's a moment in my life that was, "This is what I want to do. This is my dream," that was probably that moment.
Pamie: How did you hear about the audition?
Jangela: I was actually thinking about this as I was walking to my car. I don't know if you've ever seen the show Blind Date?
Pamie: Uh, yeah.
Jangela: I used to not go to bed until really late when I lived in Atlanta and I fell asleep to television and a commercial popped up during Blind Date. I think I saw the commercial twice. And it said for more information go to the thewb.com and I went to the website and the only thing it had posted at that time were the audition sites, dates, and times. Then they posted the songs that you could choose from. I think the girls that auditioned after Atlanta and Miami were more prepared. There were maybe four hundred girls in Atlanta, so they pumped more into the promotion for the subsequent auditions. So everyone that walked into Atlanta walked in blindly because all of us hardly had any information at all.
Pamie: Did you audition with any friends?
Jangela: When I lived in Atlanta -- and this is like, one of those sob stories -- I was working as a recruiter and I literally knew maybe four or five people in the city, and they were all older than me and I was on the road most of the week and I wasn't in town much and I literally auditioned the day I was supposed to move out of my apartment. They made it a little more dramatic on the show. I had flown in my boyfriend and my friend to help me move and the only reason why they were there on the first day of the show was the producers made them come back the second day. I told maybe two more people, and I just didn't know how far I was gonna get with it and I didn't want to get anyone's hopes up and I know a lot of people in the nightclub industry in Washington and I didn't want it to be a big deal. Close friends and family were the only people that knew about it. Even when the show was coming out, the field producer, Dave, said that more than likely I was gonna be on the show but I only told a handful of people that I was going to be on the show, so there are a lot of people surprised to see me on the show and call me up.
You sound a lot younger.
Pamie: I'm twenty-five.
Jangela: Your level of sarcasm I associate with someone much older than you are.
Pamie: It's called finely honed comedy skills.
Jangela: I just meant…
Pamie: I know. What are you working on now?
Jangela: I am working on a demo this Thursday. I've got a really weird life, I guess, in some ways. I went to school for policy analysis. Right now I'm working as a research analyst. It's great work and I probably have my dream job now in terms of what I would have wanted to do academically. In school, just a lot of discouraging things happened to me musically. I worked with a label that went under. And when I was finishing school and I was deciding whether to do the music thing or the academic thing, I thought academic was the way to go. This is the corny part, but the Popstars process -- and you won't see this on the show -- it doesn't compare with the people with the most minute shred of talent to the most talented in one space sharing the dream. Something about being a part of that, I just feel like…I just turned twenty-four and I'm not getting any younger. When I turned twenty I cried, and I told my boyfriend, in the R & B pop industry, if you're not in around twenty, twenty-one, it's a harder climb into the industry. So I figure this is the last year. You go to school to get into the most lucrative position in the field that you're in, so anyone that's in the entertainment industry and says they don't want to end up in the most lucrative section of it is full of it.
But it's funny, because I'm sitting in a room in a meeting with [corporate co-workers] and I'm thinking in my head, if they only knew what my real life is. I look at life the opposite way. I work in a nightclub on Friday and Saturday nights and I do Tae Kickboxing, and that to me is the real world and the professional side is fake.
Pamie: Okay, so, what about Baby Norman getting called back?
Jangela: I, too, am really surprised that Baby gets called back. She was so anti-social with all the girls during the auditions and kind of walking around and, um, it almost seemed like it was calculated where towards the end she started buttering up towards the girls, like she knew she was going to be judged for not being accepted by the other girls -- and I'm not saying this to be mean or catty -- but no one liked her at the auditions because she wouldn't talk to us. We were all singing and dancing or bonding or whatever, and there's a clip in one of the tapes where one of the field directors is telling the girls that half of us are going to be cut that day, and if you notice, Baby's all by herself in a corner, there, and all the other girls are together.
It's so easy to mistake it for me being catty or jealous. It really just surprises me. I think we tried calling her once to see if she heard anything. It's weird because on the show they show her, she was so off-key all the time and she was running around singing and being off-key when she ran around singing and really rubbed everyone the wrong way. She looks different in real life than on camera. Like, if you lined her up with everyone else and you were just going off a vibe or whatever else, that girl had it. There's something about her that's like: "She has it." Whatever it is. She had it. And after the auditions the Atlanta girls just had these horrible rumors that she was a stripper at the Gold Club in Atlanta and I don't even know if it's true or what. That Prince wrote a song about her, and I think we called to find out if it's all true. That Prince gave her this leather vest and she doesn't wear leather, that she's a vegetarian, whatever.
Pamie: Were there rumors about you?
Jangela: Someone found pictures of me at work at a nightclub and I'm wearing a Playboy T-shirt and bunny ears and someone found them but I was just goofing around at work bored one night. And that girl Alexandra -- there are some very revealing pictures of her. It's clear that she's modeling or whatever, but she's not wearing much in them, so clearly she's older than she said she was at the audition, for her to be modeling that way. It's amazing how much dirt people will look for. I just don't know where they find the time to find that.
Pamie: It looked like the last part of each audition was this separate audition. Like in Dallas sometimes the girls were just auditioning in a room with three other girls. Were some girls auditioned separately because of their agents?
Jangela: Yeah. And there was this one girl, Crystal, she's been in a lot of the commercials. She's got an incredible voice and there was this girl that kind of befriended her at the audition and the girl just cut down every girl at the audition, and this girl came dressed as a prostitute and she didn't even make it through the first cut. But there were girls that had their music teachers with them that somehow found out about the auditions.
Pamie: Did every girl bring her parents and her best friend?
Jangela: Not really. Most came by themselves. Very few the first day brought anyone with them. You really didn't know what to expect.
Pamie: But you auditioned in front of everyone.
Jangela: Yeah. I didn't stick around once I found out because I was so tired. I hadn't started packing. So I had been up all night long and had maybe four hours of sleep. It was such a slow, slow process. In between every time they went up there was something wrong with production where they had to reshoot the girls auditioning all over again.
Pamie: Did that change the outcome of the audition?
Jangela: No, most times when they restarted they had already decided and announced. But something happened to the tape or someone forgot to press "record" or something happened or they'd redo it. Most of the times when they stopped and restarted production was when people said their names. The producer came out and apologized to all the girls.
Pamie: Most of the time, were all the girls in the initial group of five cut?
Jangela: Actually, in Atlanta, in almost every group at least one girl got picked.
Pamie: What do you wish they had shown that they didn't?
Jangela: On the dance auditions, Travis didn't come up in front of us for long periods of time like he did with the other girls. He came up and showed us one move and said, "I want you to do this," and we did it and that was pretty much it. He had us walk forward towards the camera and then walk away and that's it.
Pamie: Have you kept in touch with any of the others?
Jangela: Before we found out who the twenty-six were, I kept in touch with Shaunda Johnston. She's from St. Louis. There was an unconfirmed rumor that she had a record deal going into the auditions with someone else, which may have been why she's in Atlanta. Shaunda, they kind of show her as being this egomaniac, because she's confident of what she's got, but she's the first girl who if you had a problem or needed help at the auditions for a dance move or getting a certain pitch, she would have been the first girl there to help you out. After the auditions were over she was in tears. That second day, by the time we got to the third cuts or whatever, we didn't have anything to do but sit down, talk, sleep, sing, whatever, and get to know each other. And she was pretty overwhelmed by that because she's used to being by herself, so she was upset to see everything end. That's why it was so great that she got to go to L.A., so everything didn't end for her just yet.
My friend Sunday became famous at the Atlanta auditions. She is nuts and anyone that auditioned in Atlanta knows how she is.
I kept in touch with Crystal, who you'll see, and CJ and I have kept in touch. That's Curtisha, CJ. She goes by CJ and is going to be so embarrassed when she finds out they're calling her Curtisha.
Pamie: Tell me about your auditions.
Jangela: Anyone that sang "What A Girl Wants" seemed doomed. I switched at the last minute to the Leann Rimes song.
It's different when you're singing for people so they can enjoy you versus when they critique you. Toni Braxton [her callback song] has a low range anyway, but I started too low.
Jaymes was like, "It's a really tough song, especially when you start too low" and let me start from the chorus.
Pamie: Do you feel you were represented fairly?
Jangela: To this day I don't know if I was brought back because they liked me or if because they had a story on me. They didn't ask me any questions at all and they had made their decisions so quickly about me. And there were tears streaming down the right side of my face after the second audition, and it's because I had something caught in my contact lens and it was killing me.
What you can't see is that there are like thirty other people behind the three of them, and they're all over there and one of the crew brought me saline solution because I was so puffy and weird-looking and I come out of the audition room with tears streaming down my face and I'm completely red and everyone went into consolation mode and I'm all "No, I made it. I made it. I just got something stuck in my contact lens. Thanks for the confidence." I wish they had kept that part.
Pamie: Do you have any advice for other aspiring Popstars?
Jangela: Be wary of anyone that's going to promise you overnight success. If it's too good to be true, it probably is. In this business, you will hear more rejection than acceptance. But when the doors finally open, normally those are the good entries to go into. Don't be discouraged. I've definitely been discouraged. Once you find the motivation, stick with it. Someone out there is going to hear you if you keep pushing it.
Stay in school and make the money because it's not cheap to get into this business at all. I'm grateful that I have a brain on my shoulders or in my head because there are a lot of talented people out there, but talent can only take you so far. I just have this feeling that a lot of these girls will end up chasing a dream without a brain, and that's just not helpful at all.
I really did have a good time with it.
I don't know. I look at O-Town and they've got this number-one hit and they put you in this threshold that is hard to get into. Everyone's trying to work with them, but O-Town, they really suck and they don't have any artistic say-so. I'm really interested to see what type of music these girls are going to do. They've supposedly got Diane Warren on it, and I'm curious as to what she'll do for them. If they're singing a really good producer's stuff, it'll still sound crappy if they're crappy. These girls are working really hard, whoever they are, because they're putting out their first album the week of the final episode and they only started working in October. Whoever they are, they're working their asses off. But they're also doing what they want to do.