As bad as 2020 was, the year helped a lot of indie artists become known and make a name for themselves, for example, Laufey. Laufey had to leave Berklee College of Music’s campus due to the pandemic and quarantine. Being stuck at home with not much to do, Laufey had started writing songs and performing them to post online. This was a major success for her as she now has 11.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, as well as selling out concerts. However, with the rise of Laufey, debate about what genre her music falls into has led to waves of discussion. Laufey, her fans, and journalists all claim that her music is jazz. In fact, a lot of the journalists covering her music say she revitalized the jazz genre as a whole by engaging popularity in the genre itself within Gen Z. To contradict, there are many people who deny that her music is jazz and hold a firm argument against it.A lot of the reason her music doesn’t fit into the genre of jazz is from the fact Laufey is far removed from the culture of jazz itself already.Therefore, she can’t make any advancements if she isn’t in tune with the genre. Laufey’s music really falls into more of a musical theater kind of singing. Which has a very close history to jazz based on the fact they carry some of the same musical elements. That with the fact Laufey uses bebop vocabulary in her music is what makes people confuse her music with jazz.This also comes in with the fact her listeners are mainly Gen Z. Who wouldn’t be really into jazz if it wasn’t for Laufey’s lyrics.See, Laufey’s lyrics written by her as her own experiences through her life with each topic being something different from each song. Which is fine, a lot of artists that connect with Gen Z ten to like when lyrics are written from the artist themselves since there are more genuine lyrics when doing so. There’s only one problem with this, this never occurs in jazz at all really. A lot of jazz comes from the fact a lot of it is improvised when performing. It isn’t really common for a jazz artist to be writing their own music. Jazz mostly is based on playing something you’re improvising in that moment or playing a work from composers who would write jazz music but have room for the player to improvise. But since a lot of her fan base doesn’t have this knowledge about the history of jazz itself as well as the reviewers who don’t have jazz as what they write about in other articles. Journalists that cover her work aren’t ever writing jazz articles ever. They are writing about fashion,sports,etc. Most the time they don’t even write about other music even.So,this message of her being a jazz artist will keep getting repeated and people will keep saying she is the saver of jazz in this current generation.It doesn’t help that Laufey sometimes will call herself jazz artist but shes too far removed from jazz culture and her music doesn’t contain parts of jazz that make jazz actual jazz.