“But when I saw it taking off on YouTube and so many people were happy, I was like ‘Ooh.’ And the reactions and the energy - it just made me feel good. “I used to just make my little hood Vines and Instagram videos for a few seconds,” she said. At 13 she started posting short comedy videos. “It wasn’t really a fun place to grow up,” she said. Sylacauga, she said, was kind of a racist town in the middle of nowhere. Jones was born in Montgomery but moved to Sylacauga, Ala., (population just over 12,000) when she was in fifth grade. "It's just a struggle between creating who I want to be and modifying who I used to be,” Jones said during a recent Zoom call from her home in Atlanta. Now, at 20, Jones is adjusting to life as a newly married mother and a seasoned but underrated social media influencer who grew up too fast. They've been there since her parody ponytail tutorial went viral on YouTube, they've watched her music career grow, and now they're turning to her new Snap Originals series, "Meme Mom," which gained more than a million subscribers halfway through its first season.Īs the Snap Original's title implies, even if you don't know Jones' name, you've seen her face in countless memes, thanks to her ability to turn simple acts like looking down at her phone or straightening her hair into evergreen content capable of enhancing any joke or expressing the full range of human emotion. Jones' fans - 8.4 million on TikTok, 7.3 million on Instagram and 5.4 million on YouTube - know she contains multitudes. To the uninitiated she's funny and goofy, but her millions of fans know her real strength is in her ability to fluidly move between levels with ease in the next breath, the same woman gets a little more serious and tells the other young mothers out there that she's sorry if they have to go through this alone. She asks her husband if he wants to bring his Playstation and, in peak Gen Z fashion, shows off her hospital fit (a form-fitting black dress, a brown Michael Kors jacket and a matching purse) in front of a ring light while her contractions get stronger.
Minutes after her water broke, Jones jokes about showing the camera her amniotic fluid. If you've never seen a Nicole TV video, you might not get it at first. Two days after giving birth to her son Messiah in February, Kayla Nicole Jones uploaded a video to her popular YouTube channel, Nicole TV.
(Photo by Tim Caver illustration by Ross May / Los Angeles Times)
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