Jessie J follows Lily Allen’s lead in airing her dirty laundry in public

Jessie J's new album, Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time, is a fierce takedown of ex-boyfriend Channing Tatum. Photo / Getty Images

Remember when break-up albums used to be poetic – even discreet? When an artist nursed a shattered heart in private, then slipped the evidence between the liner notes? Adele turned the dissolution of her marriage into a eulogy so tender on her album 30 that it left us crying in the shower. Fleetwood Mac, mid-bandwide romantic implosion, sublimated their grievances into Rumours, an album so good that it justified their mutual backstabbing. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks – written as his first marriage slid gracelessly off its axis – was once called “perhaps the finest collection of love songs of the 20th century”.

These were break-up albums with restraint. Artists’ hearts bled quietly, artfully, into their notebooks, rather than screaming into the mic. Which is why Jessie J’s new record, Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time, arrives with all the subtlety of a brick lobbed through an ex-boyfriend’s window. Where Dylan sighed and Stevie Nicks brooded, Jessie straps on emotional brass knuckles for a fizzy, no-prisoners takedown of her A-list ex-boyfriend Channing Tatum – one so ferocious it makes even Lily Allen’s sharpest jabs feel diplomatic.

Jessie and Tatum got together in late 2018, fresh off his divorce from his wife of nearly nine years and Step Up co-star Jenna Dewan, doing the usual Hollywood celebrity dating a pop star choreography: concerts, Instagram PDA, obligatory charity galas.

British pop star Jessie J and her all-American boyfriend Channing Tatum in 2020. Photo / Getty Images for The Recording Academy

They always seemed like an odd couple. He was the all-American Hollywood star, known for blockbuster hits such as 21 Jump Street and Magic Mike; she was an edgy British pop star whose promising early career – she performed with Queen at the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games and joined BBC talent show The Voice as a judge shortly after – had started to plateau.

Jessie’s social media accounts were suddenly filled with pictures of her and Tatum snogging (complete with soppy captions) rather than snapshots into her pop career. By the end of 2019 the pair had split, reunited briefly, and finally called it quits in April 2020. On paper: a tidy 18-month romance. In real life: a stop-start affair that always looked like it was running on fumes.

The album reflects her struggles with health, career, and relationship issues during a turbulent period. Photo / Getty Images

Jessie’s life was even more difficult behind the scenes. She was juggling health issues ranging from a heart condition to hearing loss, fertility struggles (including a miscarriage), and – as she’s recently discussed in the press – the beginnings of a breast cancer diagnosis.

Professionally, she’d taken one of the strangest detours in modern pop: disappearing to China, appearing on a televised singing competition, winning it, and becoming a household name there while being gently mocked back home. For a woman with a stadium-flattening voice, three UK No 1 singles and a Brits Critics’ Choice award under her belt, she’d somehow become a novelty act in her own country (a viral 2014 video that over-dubbed her hit song Bang Bang with awful vocals deepened her image crisis).

She complained in interviews that British listeners failed to “appreciate my voice” – once described by Justin Timberlake as the best in the world – and took on increasingly random side hustles, such as performing on a London open-top bus to promote McDonald’s.

Against that backdrop, the venom on Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time suddenly feels less like needless overkill and more like a release of pressure. When she sings “I put my heart out on the table … that’s when it got uncomfortable,” followed by “I gave you my love and you threw it away”, on Threw It Away, or “Your ego’s bruised” on The Award Goes To, she’s shading Tatum – but she’s revisiting a moment in her life when everything was tanking at once. Health, career, relationship: all circling the drain. “I’m the beauty, you’re the beast,” she snaps.

At a listening party in London, she told fans she wrote the song in 2020, and hinted “you can figure out who I was dating”. On I’ll Never Know Why, she laments, “When you left I lost a piece of my mind … how could you say goodbye without saying goodbye?”

Complicated sees her address her struggles head-on, from the “rollercoaster” of fame to being told, in 2015, that “I couldn’t have children” (she had a son with partner Chanan Colman in 2023). And she sends for Tatum, directly, too, when she sings “Met a Magic Mike, will that ever be forgotten? Cause everything they write / That’s the headline and the topic”.

It would be easy to frame Jessie as an artist going uniquely scorched-earth – her fury perhaps sparked by Tatum’s new relationship with model Inka Williams, who is 19 years his junior – but she’s really just operating inside the new rules for women in pop.

David Harbour and Lily Allen split in February of this year amidst rumours of Harbour's infidelity. Photo / Jeff Moore, PA Images for Getty

Lily Allen, too, has spent the last several months on a full-blown revenge tour, narrating the ups, downs and derailments of her (failed) open marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour in excruciating detail on her comeback album West End Girl. On Nonmonogamummy she sings: “I don’t wanna f*** with anyone else / I know that’s all you wanna do / I’m so committed that I’d lose myself / ’Cause I don’t wanna lose you.” Once upon a time, pop stars protected their heartbreaks. Now they weaponise them.

What changed? The culture did. Baring one’s dirty laundry has become a professional obligation – the entry fee for staying relevant in an era where celebrities livestream their morning routine and fans demand emotional transparency like they’re owed it. Tabloids expect drama. Algorithms reward confession. And artists know that to keep the lights on, there isn’t much choice apart from feeding the beast.

In this environment, the quietly dignified break-up album doesn’t stand a chance. Confessional pop is no longer a genre; it’s an economy. And women, in particular, are expected to provide the raw materials with a constant churn of trauma-as-content and heartbreak-as-PR. The incentives are unmistakable. If Fleetwood Mac wrote Rumours today, Nicks wouldn’t be scribbling in a journal – she’d be livestreaming her arguments with Lindsey Buckingham on TikTok.

So Jessie J and Lily Allen aren’t anomalies but the blueprint. Their break-ups and breakdowns have been absorbed into the entertainment package not because they lack dignity, but because dignity is no longer a marketable asset. The successful female pop star of 2025 isn’t the mysterious siren – she’s the woman willing to turn her private life into public property. Whether that’s liberation or just the latest iteration of self-exploitation is up for debate. But one thing is certain: in pop today, if you’re not airing your dirty laundry, someone else will gladly do it for you.

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