Alabama Barker's Stunning Transformation

Alabama Barker, the daughter of Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, is the latest in a legion of female musical progeny, ranging from legends like Roseanne Cash and Nancy Sinatra to one-hit wonders that include Kelly Osbourne and Moon Zappa. Time will tell where Alabama will sit on that celebrity spectrum, considering she has only released a handful of singles so far. Yet Barker is receiving far more attention, not as a musician, but as a social media influencer capturing images of her family, friends, and especially herself. It's been those selfies that circulate through the gossip pipeline and have the haters gleefully calling out the 18-year-old public figure by criticizing her provocative attire and body-shaming her physique.

It hasn't always been this way, though. As a youngster, Alabama and her siblings were afforded opulent lives from their dad's celebrity status, yet appeared outwardly normal. Years later, she impressed Blink-182 fans with signs of following in her famous dad's footsteps, but coming into her own the closer she gets to adulthood has hardly been a walk in the park, with detractors often attacking the young celebrity over her lifestyle choices.

"I'm not going to sit here & lie and say it's easy and to keep pushing," she said on Instagram (via E! Online). "It gets very challenging especially when they don't know you. I feel very misunderstood!" Judgments from the outside world aside, there's no doubt Alabama has changed a lot since childhood, as demonstrated by her evolution over the years.

Alabama Luella Barker never had to chase the spotlight. It was already waiting for her when she entered the world on Christmas Eve in 2005. Music fans already knew her father, Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, while others recognized her mother, Shanna Moakler, as a former beauty contest winner and model. Once upon a time, the family had a reality series called "Meet the Barkers," which ran on MTV for 2 seasons beginning in 2005. Alabama avoided the celebrity dysfunctionality running throughout the show until its swan-song episode highlighted her birth.

But it was during Alabama's infancy when her parents divorced in 2008, after allegations of infidelity ended their 4-year marriage. "I divorced my ex because, I saw them," Moakler revealed to Us Weekly in 2021, claiming a dalliance between Travis and Kim Kardashian killed their relationship. "I caught them having an affair."

Hoping to mitigate the pain that Alabama and older brother, Landon, might endure after the split required the parents to dramatically shift their priorities. "The kids' best interest is what we all have in mind — there's nothing else," Barker told People in 2016. "Our relationship was so long ago. We're just being friends. Doing the best coparenting is the most important thing."

Whatever exposure fans had to Alabama Barker was, for the most part, limited to paparazzi shots of her parents taking her and Landon to kid-friendly destinations like the 2011 "Puss In Boots" movie premiere. Save for an revelation by Barker to TMZ that his kids were on vegan diets, everything about Alabama and her siblings seemed rather regular. Fast-forward to 2015, with the tykes showing up with their cool dad at the Teen Choice Awards in 2015. While Landon graced the red carpet aping his dad's punk look, 9-year-old Alabama rocked it with a dress decked out with images of nail polish, a cream-colored fur jacket, and a pink boa with matching shades.

At the 2016 Grammys the following year, Alabama and Landon were back with their father on the red carpet, and Alabama was decked out in her Grammy best. While Landon's look was rather casual, with a black and gold t-shirt with grey pants, Alabama's wardrobe was a bit more fancy this time, as she sported an floor-length pink dress with a matching bejeweled top. "My daughter was like, 'I'm wearing this because this is what girls wear to the Grammys,'" said the proud dad to Us Weekly. Even at 10 years old, Alabama was developing her own fashion sense outside of her famous father's realm of punk.

When 6-year-old Alabama Barker was seen at a Blink-182 concert in Belfast playing a video game on the side of the stage while her father, Travis Barker, banged away at his kit, it seemed the youngster wasn't too interested in music. That couldn't be further from the truth, as Travis revealed that his kids were already playing the drums for a while. A 2017 Instagram video demonstrated her prowess behind the skins, although she ultimately sought a different musical direction.

"Alabama came to me at some point and said, 'Look I don't know if I want to be a drummer. I like playing drums with you, I like spending time with you, but I think I'd rather sing and play piano,'" Travis recalled on "Young Hollywood." "So we did that and then we've kind of never looked back."

She didn't waste any time, releasing a pop single called "Our House" in 2017 and dropping "Heartbreaker" the following year. She also issued a couple of renditions of Yuletide songs in the interim. Alabama was quick to credit her father in providing some direction during those outings. "My dad always helps in any way he can," she explained to ET. "He does a good job of guiding me and my brother, Landon, with music and life in general." Travis noted his daughter adjusted quickly to the recording environment. "She has amazing studio etiquette, and she's a really hard worker," he said to KTLA (via Page Six).

Alabama Barker has seldom said much about her mother, Shanna Moakler, who has had her own share of scandals over the years. That all changed in 2021, when the mother and daughter started publicly feuding roughly the same time Alabama's dad Travis started dating Kourtney Kardashian. That's when Moakler — who blamed their marital breakup on her ex's alleged affair with Kourtney's sister, Kim Kardashian — saw red.

"My family is broken because of this family and now my kids and I are alienated from each other because of another sister in the family, so yay for me," Moakler complained to TMZ, railing against the Kardashians. For her part, Alabama questioned the romantic choices made by her mother, who was dating professional poker player Matthew Rondeau. "Everybody thinks my mother is amazing, Matthew is nothing but awful to her," she wrote in a 2021 Instagram post (via Daily Mail). "Not only that, but he cheats on her."

But Alabama reserved some verbal venom for her mom as well. "My mom has never completely been in my life," she further noted. "Can you guys stop painting her out to be an amazing mom? Did your moms ask to see you on Mother's Day [because] mine didn't? I'm done keeping it a secret, reality shows." She later seemingly announced severing connections with her mother in a TikTok video (via Page Six) lip-syncing to the hip-hop single, "Barking" by Ramz, and captioning it, "I cut off family too. They do you the dirtiest."

While the rapport between Alabama Barker and her mother had soured, her relationship with future stepmother Kourtney Kardashian was flourishing. From the start of her romance with Travis Barker around the start of 2021, Kardashian made sure to make a positive impression on his children, in particular gifting Alabama with all sorts of goodies, including a $795 Prada handbag. It might have been an expensive gesture, but apparently, Alabama was already sold on her dad's latest love.

Alabama has been understandably silent about the myriad of hot and heavy sessions between her father and Kardashian, but she was especially taken by the couple's touching "Heart and Soul" duet on the piano, which she captured on her Instagram Story. "This is what I come home to," Alabama wrote in the entry (via People). 

Both Alabama and her brother, Landon, supported Kourtney and Travis when they eventually got married in a posh Italian ceremony in 2022. But what was especially telling was a birthday note Alabama wrote in April 2023 when Kourtney turned 44. "You're the best stepmom I could ask for, you are so caring and generous for others, you are such a family person and such a hard-working mom," she posted on her Instagram Story (via People). "Even if you don't feel good or had a hard day, you always put your family first. You have such a beautiful aura, I wouldn't want another step mom."

Long before Alabama Barker reached adulthood, she was always conscious about her wardrobe. "Since I can remember, I was always given the freedom to wear whatever I wanted," Alabama told ET back when she was 12. "That really helped me establish a style of my own. I love fashion and dressing up."

But the older Alabama got, the greater the risks she took, sometimes crossing the line of decency according to some on social media. The online frenzy over her risqué fashion style started to go into overdrive in 2023 when a photo was posted showing Alabama posing by a Chicago Bulls logo with her jacket fully open with little underneath, alongside her shirtless father (via The U.S. Sun). "Shaking my head. She's 17! You should live your age!" noted one angry commenter.

The backlash continued with Alabama posting some more images of her in a revealing spaghetti strap dress and a series of online bikini shots that have since been taken down. None of that naysaying was enough to sway Alabama towards more conservative clothing, however. "Let's stop getting mad on my page that you felt the need to oversexualize me and have a problem with it," she wrote on her Instagram Story (via Buzzfeed).

Thanks to her father and stepmother, who have long been accustomed to truckloads of adversity thrown at them, via the tabloids, social media, and anything else capable of delivering nasty messages, Alabama Barker has proven to be anything but a wallflower. That said, when dealing with a slew of haters who take issue with everything from her fashion sense and makeup regimen to her figure, it helps that the singer has some 4.6 million Tik-Tok followers in her corner.

If anything, she has more sympathy than spite towards her detractors. "I just feel like it's a self-projection," she said to E! News in September 2023. "And I hate that for them because I wish them the best and it's just them projecting their insecurities. And you just need to know to keep going when people do something like that. "

When Alabama does strike back, it's usually with some creative tact on TikTok, where she'll lip-sync strategic lines like "I'll tell you what you look like, but you won't like it," with the caption, "When Kathryn with 3 kids only waterline liner, 4 different colored blonde & Tom shoes, talk about my makeup or my age." On other occasions, she'll refrain from retaliation, choosing instead to offer some sage advice, such as this TikTok nugget from March 2024: "Please be more mindful and have proof and be very, very smart with what you say to people, because you never know what's happening behind closed doors."

Alabama Barker seems to be impervious to attacks on social media, thanks to a thick hide and a rapier wit capable of deflecting all that bombardment, especially when it comes to her looks. "I would love to see you guys getting random pictures of you taken of you when you're leaving the grocery store, middle of a sentence, and your mouth wide open, and let's see how beautiful you look," she responded at one point on TikTok in 2023.

Still, such a virtual arsenal hasn't been particularly useful in dealing with more real life matters, such as issues with her thyroid gland and autoimmune system responsible for her weight fluctuations in the first place. "Once my thyroid is balanced and my autoimmune disease is balanced, I will go back to my normal weight — which is causing the weight gain," she added.

Those concerns are hardly shallow. The Mayo Clinic cited weight gain as one of many symptoms of a thyroid disease, which is manageable if detected early, and autoimmune diseases are much trickier. Barker was hospitalized in February 2024 and asked for prayers in an Instagram story, but didn't reveal whether she was treated for those maladies. She was out of the hospital the next day, posting a selfie at an airport, writing (via Us Weekly), "I'm back, baby!"

The perks of good fortune and celebrity haven't been enough to mitigate the pain surrounding the loss of a loved one. In July 2023, Alabama Barker and her family were crushed to find out that 13-year-old Alex Etheridge, a family friend, had died from bone cancer. The family didn't know Etheridge very long, but only the lad — who idolized the Blink-182 drummer — cast an extremely positive impression on them when meeting at a concert a month earlier.

After his passing, Travis Barker shared a letter he was writing to Etheridge before he died, revealing it was actually Alabama who had connected the young drummer with her father. "When my daughter Alabama told me about you and your story I couldn't wait to hang," he wrote, in part. "I will keep my time with Alex close to my heart forever."

Alabama also lost grandparents on her mother's side that year. In August, John Moakler died months after his wife, Gail, had passed on. In her Instagram account (per The U.S. Sun), she wrote, "I love you very dearly, both of you! & I hope you are reunited & finally at relief. 'Til we meet again." More recently, in May 2024, Alabama has been publicizing a GoFundMe page to provide assistance to a close friend named Julie, whom she called a "dear aunt" and was diagnosed with brain cancer. "It could be an honor if you could donate even $1," she wrote on Instagram (via E! Online).

For nearly two decades, folks have seen Alabama Barker transform from a wide-eyed infant to a music-oriented pre-teen to an all-out-glam adult splashed all over the media. But one aspect that has remained consistent has been an unwavering bond with her father, Travis Barker. This may have surprised people, given the immature behavior that Travis demonstrated during his more raucous years with punk-pop act Blink-182. Still, that hasn't stopped social media moralists from slamming Alabama's famous dad for letting a few things go, such as allowing his daughter to dress provocatively in public, including a catsuit she wore after she turned 18 in December 2023.

But while Papa Travis doesn't see himself as strict, a TikTok quiz his daughter conducted in January 2024 demonstrated that he has set some pretty clear boundaries. When asked what he would do if he found out she had snuck out of the house the previous night, he bluntly replied, "I would tell you how dangerous it is, and maybe try to put you on restriction." Alabama laughingly responded, "I'm not even kidding you, restriction was his thing," as proof that her dad was hardly a softie. Most telling about their relationship was the online exchange that occurred when Travis's wife, Kourtney, was undergoing fetal surgery in 2023 (their son Rocky was later born in November). "[You're] truly the best dad," she wrote (via E! News).