Kehlani is behind the wheel, driving through the streets of Boyle Heights when I call them one Monday afternoon. I’m looking up at the 26-year-old singer over video chat, phone cradled somewhere between their car’s stereo and gearshift, as they head to pick up their two-year-old daughter from her father’s house. They’re describing a livestream concert of their second studio album, It Was Good Until It Wasn’t, that was broadcast this May, marking a year since the album’s release and just weeks after coming out as lesbian.
“I had to change so many words to even make it comfortable for me to sing,” they tell me. “I don't even think I realized how many times I said the word ‘dick’ on my goddamn album. I was like, geez, what was I on?"
For Kehlani, who goes by she/they pronouns, the livestream was a triumphant way to mark the beginning of reemergence from the isolation of the pandemic, which had nearly derailed the album’s release. Initially scheduled to come out on her 25th birthday last April, COVID-19 led Atlantic Records executives to suggest postponing It Was Good — and when Kehlani asked them to put it out anyway, they said she would have to take its artistic and visual direction into her own hands. So she did: quarantined with her photographer, Kehlani shot the album’s art in her backyard, self-directed a seductive music video for the single “Toxic,” and built a production studio from lockdown that led to some of her best creative output yet.
She directed this May’s livestream performance as well, which saw the artist flanked by an all-femme crew of dancers and musicians, dressed in head-to-toe white suits, delivering a fiery performance that underscored the album’s emotional weight. (“Sapphic Supreme Being Kehlani has truly made quarantine-era artistry her bitch,” goes the first line of one review.)
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As if to underscore how much Kehlani had taken her artistic and personal life into her own hands, she used the performance as an opportunity to switch up her lyrics, changing “he” pronouns to “she” and words like “dick” to “sex.” It’s the sort of transformation LGBTQ+ people often make to pop songs informally, when singing along to their favorite artists — but here she was doing it to her own songs, live before the entire internet. And while Kehlani has long spoken about her fluid relationship to her sexuality, gender, and other identities, the livestream offered a reminder of just how much she’s evolved since It Was Good’s release last May, giving her a chance to perform the album from a new place of self-understanding.
“It was fun finding a new love for these songs, because I got to learn them and sing them in this way,” she says. “Singing ‘Honey’ even felt different. It felt like I was releasing the song all over again, even though I've been singing that damn song for years.”
From a position of newfound clarity, the past can begin to look like a journey to a destination, rather than a series of random events. That, at least, seems to be what Kehlani’s finding as they take new stock of their career. “Honey,” for example, a one-off single from 2017, has come to be one of the artist’s defining tracks, despite never being part of an official album or mixtape. Instantly hailed as a woman-loving-woman anthem (“I like my girls just like I like my honey, sweet/a little selfish”), it went on to accrue tens of millions of streams worldwide, and is now a staple of Kehlani’s performances.
It was the reaction to “Honey,” in part, that first prompted the singer to make public statements about their sexuality. In 2018, they tweeted, “cuz i keep geddin asked.. i’m queer. not bi, not straight.” They have been upfront about the evolution of how they understand their identity ever since, part of the refreshing transparency with which they approach being in the public eye; they have never shied from discussing past struggles with mental health or with social media itself on social media.
This April’s revelation about their sexuality arrived in a characteristically off-the-cuff manner, on a friend’s Instagram Live stream as they prepared a meal. “You wanna know what’s new about me? I finally know I’m a lesbian,” they told viewers, tongs in hand as they bopped around a kitchen before an audience of a couple dozen people. Being in the public eye as long as Kehlani has meant there was no way the casual coming out wouldn’t make headlines. And though the fanfare seemed to pass as quickly as it came, Kehlani stands in its wake with new artistic avenues to explore.
Kehlani’s tomboyish style and crossover appeal was clear from the moment she first broke into public consciousness on America’s Got Talent in 2011. She appeared on the show as a standout among a plaid-clad band of boys called Poplyfe. She left the group after the show’s run, citing mismanagement, and after enduring two years of couch hopping and homelessness, she was encouraged to come to Los Angeles by Nick Cannon, the America’s Got Talent host, who set her up with studio time and an apartment in the Valley.
After becoming a solo artist, she began probing her sexuality and identity in her music almost immediately, beginning with the 2014 mixtape Cloud 19, which became a sleeper hit. A week after the 2015 release of You Should Be Here, her second mixtape, she was signed by Atlantic Records; shortly thereafter, she was nominated for a Grammy and embarked on a sold out North American and European tour. She soon began releasing music videos, kicking off the evolution of her public image and artistic voice. Sexual fluidity was a component of her art from the start.
In their first video, for the Cloud 19 song “FWU,” we see Kehlani as the leader of a group of girls, dance battling against boys à la Christina Aguliera’s “Can’t Hold Us Down,” inevitably ending up in the leading man’s arms by the end. Their next video, for the gay siren song “1st Position,” featured shots of the artist singing alone in a room interspersed with images of two women kissing in a car, neither of whom are Kehlani. They continued to flex their ability to weave their queerness into their music and videos over the course of their next few projects, delivering self-empowering bops and plumbing the depths of love and loss in a lush melange of R&B and pop. By the release of their 2019 mixtape While We Wait, with its lucid exploration of relationship dynamics, Kehlani had cemented their status as a captivating songwriter and commanding singer.
On It Was Good Until It Wasn’t, Kehlani continued performing sexual and gender fluidity with an ease that at times concealed the fraught industry considerations she has had to handle. “There was a lot that I, for the last couple years, felt like I was trying to figure out. And I feel like it was pretty obvious,” she says. “I did a lot of big switch ups, where people would be like, ‘Oh, you getting nails longer than your hand now. When you first came out, you were wearing baggy pants and sports bras and blah, blah, blah.’ I think a lot of that came from me genuinely not knowing how to navigate myself versus who I had to be for the world.”
She also found herself getting caught up in the hypnotic spiral of industry pressures and accolades. “I felt like I had to deliver. I mean, man, Twitter has a major thing to do with it,” she says. “Stan Twitter is really crazy. Like the whole concept of outselling and streaming and who charted and did that, it really takes a fucking toll on creating, because you're always in the mindset of, like, is this going to monetize? Are people into this right now? Does this have a replay value? It fucks up the entire reason we as artists were even attracted to doing it in the first place.”
Still, Kehlani’s never been a wilting gay flower in the music industry’s blazingly heteronormative sun. From the tongue-in-cheek, hypersexual camp of their 2016 track “Distraction” to their 2018 feature on the Kyle song “Playinwitme,” in which both Kyle and Kehlani playfully talk shit to, and vie for, a woman, Kehlani has knowingly smirked at the role they’re expected to play in popular music. Take their appearance on Hayley Kiyoko’s self-directed “What I Need” music video, in which the two gay icons play girlfriends. The video’s final conflict arrives when a man finds the pair secretly hitching a ride in the back of his pickup truck. He’s irate until he sees high femme Kehlani — gay, but in a way he can ignore — and proceeds to sexually harass them and ignore Kiyoko. Kehlani drives off with the man, leaving Kiyoko trudging heartbroken on the side of the road, until she sees Kehlani running to her in the distance. They collapse in each other’s arms, kissing between apologies and reassurances.
It’s a sweet, slightly schmaltzy video that, for a moment, touches on a long-standing tension in Kehlani’s music and career: how easily fluidity can become marketable in an industry hostile to nuance. In the past, artists like Madonna and Katy Perry have used sexual ambiguity to tease rebellion without fully alienating straight audiences or record execs. Meanwhile, out lesbians, like Melissa Etheridge or k.d. lang, could be pop stars as long as they weren’t too sexual and stuck to their folk and rock influences. By the time Kehlani’s career began, her femininity and queerness, which might have made her untouchable and unfathomable as an artist in decades past, was something the record industry could (and inevitably will) try to sell and celebrate for its authenticity. Her ability to appeal to queer pop/R&B fans of all genders while still offering a sexiness that’s palatable to straight men meant boundary-pushing superstardom could be in Kehlani’s cards.
But those cards seemed to reveal a different destiny the instant she blurted “I’m a lesbian” on Instagram Live. “I didn't plan to come out in that way,” she says. “I was going to just let my new music speak for itself. All the music I've been making has been from this new perspective and this new clarity. That shit blew up and I didn't expect it to when I said it — it just took its own life.”
For Kehlani, coming out to family and friends, then living a quietly queer life, was never a realistic possibility. Instead, for years, they have had to deal with countless media headlines and a mid-career moment of reckoning. “I was having full-blown identity issues [before]... [with] the balance of [my] masculinity and femininity. Especially being under the public eye,” she reflects. “The pressure to be sexy, and what does sexy look like and mean and feel like to me? How does that trail into my participation in the fashion world? What does that mean for photo shoots? What does that mean for everything? There's this extra gigantic layer of things that I have to think about besides just waking up and being myself.”
Does coming out as a lesbian threaten to derail Kehlani’s potential for superstardom, even in the at least outwardly queer embracing music industry of the 2020s? Some homophobes lurking in the shadows think so. “I've seen some behind the scenes, not so nice text messages of like, ‘Oh, she's a dyke now.’ Interesting energies,” Kehlani says. She adds that calls from other artists to collaborate haven’t stopped coming in, but have just gotten more attractive instead.
“It's been actually cool to think about collabs in this new way where, if I'm doing a collaboration with a guy, I get to come from the same perspective as the guy singing it versus having to come in this typical duet form that's like, you're singing to me, I'm singing to you back,” she says. “It's like, no, we talkin’ ‘bout the same girl!” she says with a laugh.
While Kehlani’s coming out may go down as a turning point in their career, the ways COVID-19 forced them to change how they approach their creative work might be just as significant a shift. The music videos and other work they made while in lockdown are the product of a new production company, Honey Shot Productions, which they helm alongside their photographer and frequent collaborator Brianna Alysse. Kehlani’s Macbook-filmed video for “Toxic,” released without their label’s permission, proved a hit with fans; Kehlani and Alysse then helped produce 5 more “quarantine style” videos for singles off the album, each more polished and innovative than the last.
It was the realization of a dream that, until then, had been on the back burner. “I always wanted to have a production company and be a director. So I'm like, let's just start it so every video looks like it's coming from somewhere professional, but like, plot twist — it's just me and one home girl with a camera in a room editing these videos.” Though Kehlani looks forward to directing other artists’ videos as well, their creative and personal moves over the past year seem to signal a newfound artistic freedom.
It’s hard to predict what that freedom — the freedom to come out, make art, and live on her own terms — will bring in the future. And even in 2021, it remains to be seen if a lesbian pop artist can ascend to the same levels of mass-market superstardom as straight ones can and have. Yet despite her meteoric rise, it’s possible the kind of career Kehlani is crafting makes that model of superstardom look dated. Right now, Kehlani is more interested in seeing where the ride can take them.
By the time we wrap up our conversation, Kehlani’s mind is on their next stop. A friend’s mom is in town celebrating her birthday, and Kehlani plans on bringing her flowers. As we end our call, it’s not music industry success that occupies their mind, but rather the more personal joys in their life — like the loved ones and homemade Nigerian food awaiting them.
“A lot of people was like, ‘If Kehlani is not the biggest shit in the world, then she fell off,’” she tells me. “I feel like I'm the type of person who really enjoys life. Where some people, music is their life and then they live on the side — I live and I make music. I've gotten to the point where I realized that the biggest success comes from joy, and a lot of the joy is in the things that we overlook while striving for success.”
Photographer: Naima Green
Stylist: Oliver Vaughn
Hair: Kahh Spence
Makeup: Pircilla Pae
Production: Hyperion LA
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