Kehlani Gets Real About Social Media and Celebrity Culture

Editor’s note: This shoot followed the CDC’s recommended social-distancing guidelines during the coronavirus pandemic. We hope it gives you some solace or escape in this trying time. Currently, our whole team is social distancing as we work from home. We sincerely hope, if you are able to, you are too.

It’s been 45 minutes since we got off our Zoom call and Kehlani’s been tweeting. For the past week she’s stuck to the script of promoting her album It Was Good Until It Wasn’t with retweets of fan art and gifs of her album cover. But this blast of tweets is about an ex-friend. Apparently the two fell out, it’s public knowledge, and she’s anxious to address things. Without mentioning anyone, she narrates a story of an intimate friendship that ended because a collaborative project didn’t pan out.

The 25-year-old singer explicitly says she didn’t want to unpack the fallout online, and not long after, she deletes the tweets. She says it will all be addressed in her own words with an Instagram Live interview days before the drop of her 15-track project.

“I’m not annoyed [with fame]. It’s more like I pick and choose my battles,” Kehlani says during our talk, minutes before this Twitter frenzy. “I get scrutinized so much … It’s one of those things where I think I’ve been so open with how much it’s affected me that people know I can be poked at, so they continue to poke.”

The singer grew up in the social media age. She’s incredibly aware of how all her actions — what she says, does, likes, wears, whom she dates, befriends, and tweets — will be either applauded and celebrated, or judged and mocked.

“That’s why when people do that whole, ‘These new girls, they need to be like Beyoncé and Aaliyah. Aaliyah would never be on Instagram, commenting back.’ It's like, ‘Bro, Aaliyah didn’t have an Instagram! It didn’t exist. Beyoncé was a whole grown adult before Instagram came out.’ You can’t compare us. We grew up getting dissected.”

Kehlani’s tweets and statements are constantly misconstrued. She says she spent so much time in the past analyzing everything she said in public, crafting her words so that no one would take offense or manipulate her intentions. “If I’d have spent more time knowing myself and getting to know myself and learning to really, really trust and love myself, then all of that wouldn’t have bothered me so much and I could have saved myself so much unnecessary bullsh*t.”

Kehlani is an open book. She’s wearing a white hoodie and sweatpants, no makeup, with her glossy black curls pulled into a high bun as she sits cross-legged in a bedroom of her Los Angeles home. This is her very first Zoom call, ever.

She’s been spending her days in isolation watching her daughter Adeya Nomi play, reconnecting with loved ones, and working. Kehlani is also a bit of an empath, so she feels the pain her community is going through. “Every time I sit down and think about one, I start thinking about the next thing, and then it all piles up,” she says. “I can’t stop thinking about and extending my heart to [people].” A running theme with the singer is her self-imposed obligation to take care of other people. Global crisis or not, Kehlani is always extending herself for family, friends, lovers. It’s as natural to her as breathing.

Kehlani Ashley Parrish was born on April 24, 1995, in Berkeley, California. As she tells it, her mother was a drug addict and on the run from authorities. She delivered Kehlani prematurely in an apartment with the help of her father, who talked her through labor on the phone. Her mother went back to jail after giving birth. Kehlani went to the hospital and eventually into foster care. Soon after, her father, who also had a drug addiction, passed away. It was Kehlani’s aunt who dropped out of school, took her out of the system, and raised her as her own.

A couple of months ago, this same aunt, whom she affectionately calls “mom,” was given enough support from Kehlani to retire. Lately, she regularly calls Kehlani to tell her she’s grateful. Kehlani tells her to enjoy it. “It [is] epic because I kind of carried that … not that weight, but the knowledge of everything she sacrificed.”

Kehlani has the spirit of a young woman but the mentality of someone who’s seen and experienced a lot in a short amount of time. She attributes this maturity to growing up in a once ethnically diverse Oakland, being of the social media generation, and starting her career early. Kehlani attended Oakland School for the Arts for singing. Comparing the school to Glee, she says this is where she developed her love of music, explored her sexuality in dating boys and girls, and was eventually recruited as the vocalist in a group called PopLyfe. At the height of their fame they were on America’s Got Talent but came in fourth place.

That’s when Kehlani’s story took off: After relocating between L.A. and Oakland a few times, she graduated high school. Then Nick Cannon reentered her life. The story is told like a fairy tale, as if the former America’s Got Talent host swept in to save Kehlani. But in actuality, he was impressed by her talent and wanted to invest in her. The work would all be in Kehlani’s hands. Cannon would set her up with producers and a place to live, including a stay in New York.

While in New York, Kehlani forged relationships with other artists and producers on the East Coast. She had autonomy, and for the first time in life felt free to create and build her career. She recalls this as “some of the happiest and most joyous times I’ve ever had.” This period would serve as the catalyst for making deeply personal projects reflective of love and loss.

In 2014, Kehlani dropped her first mixtape, Cloud 19. It placed her into the gaze of music aficionados. She toured off the project, signed to Atlantic Records, and Cannon got a return on his investment. Over the next five years she would put out two studio albums, three mixtapes, tour globally, headline 2018’s L.A. Pride Festival, be nominated for two Grammys, and do countless features for artists like Cardi B, Calvin Harris, Justin Bieber, and Chance the Rapper.

Her singing voice is angelic and controlled. She writes all of her music; it’s been said she can write six songs in one studio session. She is a consummate professional, but doesn’t play when it comes to her image and doesn’t mince words. Every line of every contract she reads.

Having come from a traumatizing business situation with PopLyfe, her trust for the business side of music wasn’t there. She was painfully unaware of how negotiations worked. Like many artists, her passion was music, not the bureaucracy of how it’s put out into the world. “I’m dyslexic, first of all. So y’all want to talk about things that I can’t even really comprehend and you sit this stack of papers in my face and want me to go over it with you and I’m already like, ‘I hate it here. Take me back to the studio,’” she says of her early business meetings.

Then she’d be on music video sets or at performance venues and realize certain things she wanted weren’t available. Frustration built, so she rolled up her sleeves and got her hands dirty, forcing herself to learn everything she needed to be comfortable and protect her work. “I’m [now] on every phone call, every group chat, cc’d in every email, making sure that I have all the numbers of everybody that’s associated with my business and my brand.” Adding, “I can advocate for myself and I think that’s important for young artists everywhere to know: You need to be involved with your business and your brand so you can advocate for yourself.”

The darker side of the business hasn’t just presented itself in bad deals. Within the last 18 months, Kehlani lost three friends from drug use. The day Mac Miller passed they were supposed to grab lunch. Then Lexii Alijai, who passed in January and whom Kehlani intended to sign and tour with this year — the last track on IWGUIW is Lexii rapping. And most recently, her good friend Chynna Rogers. “Chynna, I had brought her out at my shows. She slept in my house all the time in Brooklyn and we would talk about how we can do this,” Kehlani says soberly.

When asked what she believes the underlying theme is, she links back to social media. “Fans put so much pressure on artists, sometimes more than the industry.” She says, “I’ve never been compared more in my life than last year and this year, and now it seems like every day I see a ‘SZA, Kehlani, H.E.R., or Summer Walker — one of them has to go.’”

Instead of pitting artists against one another or creating fictional worlds where more than one can’t exist, Kehlani would like to see boundless love. Less “cancel culture” and more understanding for artists who make mistakes and need space to evolve. “We have to start appreciating multiple people at the same time,” she says, going back to her fallen friends. “I’m sure if they felt a little bit more successful, a little bit more loved, things might have gone a little different. Life might have been in a better place.”

With all this talk of love and support, one can’t help but think about Kehlani’s highly publicized love life. As a queer woman, she’s been linked to a variety of people, but her most talked-about relationships have been with famous men. A simple Google search of Kehlani with the word boyfriend will bring up pages of past loves that have ended publicly, and at one point almost fatally. From her most recent relationship with rapper YG, Kehlani reveals that while it took several breakups to stick, she ultimately walked away with a huge lesson on boundaries.

“Oh man, let’s unpack,” she humorously says. Immediately we’re in a therapy season. “With the boundaries, I think that it’s a lot of how I had to grow up. I went to my first wedding a couple days before Lexii Alijai’s funeral. That was f*cked up, you know what I’m saying? I experienced one of the most heightened emotional times and one of the most low emotional times in the same week of my life. I had never been to one [wedding]. I have one married couple in my family and it’s my grandpa and his wife, and it’s still kind of a relationship that … still feels far away to me.”

“I’m used to single moms. I’m used to baby daddies not being around. I’m used to arguments and fights and people not talking to each other and people having mass secrets. I’m not used to positive love. So it took me a long time to learn what positive love is.”

Adeya, whom she co-parents with guitarist Javaughn Young-White, is Kehlani’s bundle of joy. She attributes her daughter to being more grateful and less partial to manufactured drama. But Kehlani also knows her romantic relationships need to serve as an example to her child. She wants someone who will align with her core values, someone who is additive, not emotionally draining. “I tend to be like, ‘I feel like they can change.’ But then you kind of have to realize that at some point, do you want that to be your responsibility?”

On IWGUIW, “Toxic” and “Serial Lover” unpack her outlook on love, loyalty, and agency. In “Bad News,” she sings an emotional ballad about her partner giving up a perilous life for love; she’s candid about how the Los Angeles–bred lyricist she dated had “demons” that put her in unsafe situations. “I felt like I had to clean up a mess,” she reveals. “There were multiple breakups in that relationship. There were so many times I walked away for reasons that I got cheered on at the house. Like, ‘You go, girl.’ Even before a big, giant incident, there were little things that I feel like I did make a lot of progress in my last relationship compared to my others.”

She notes, “Love doesn’t have to be difficult and it doesn’t have to hurt to measure how much and how good and how deep it is. We grew up getting taught the ride-or-die mentality.”

Blogs and Twitter threads may paint her love life as a tumultuous mess, but she maintains that it’s all a part of the journey. “Each relationship I went through, I feel like I took a brick from it and put it into my house,” she says. “If I did not learn those lessons, no matter how hard they were, I wouldn’t be the person that I am right now.”

If Kehlani had to name one place as her safe space, it’d be her aunt’s couch in Oakland. She finds comfort in what’s still familiar about the ever-evolving city that’s quickly become an overflow hub for tech yuppies and venture capitalists. “It’s hard to go home,” she admits.

As someone from the Town, Kehlani’s outlook on identity and politics are all attributed to her being from the birthplace of the Black Panthers. When she does a show back home or donates to causes based in Oakland, she’s hyper-particular about who’s benefiting from her contributions. “It makes you more conscious about support because half the people there now are rich and white.” 

Kehlani doesn’t consider herself incredibly political but is more concerned with grassroots organizing than what’s going on at the White House. She’s excited about opportunities like her clothing label TSNMI (pronounced tsunami) but wants to directly contribute to the community that raised her.

“What’s kept me going is knowing that if I do music and make as much money as I can, then I can open childcare centers. I can make a difference in the foster care system. I can open art centers and summer programs for underprivileged kids,” she says.

Kehlani is constantly thinking about ways to give back. But I needed to know one thing before we part ways: Who supports her?

“Recently I had this moment where I realized as much as I cheer, I don’t get cheered for,” the talent admits. “I’ve noticed that a lot but then I had to check myself and realize, is that my ego that wants that?”

She hopes after a decade in the game with countless fans and friends in the industry, the love will be reciprocated. “I feel like when I drop [IWGUIW], I might not see my peers’ [support]. But I go so hard for them. Then I check myself like, ‘That’s not what I do it for.’”

She takes a deep breath and puts it into perspective — as she does with everything else in her ever-changing world. “My cheerleaders are my friends and my auntie and my family. They see me coming home and waking up at 5 a.m. with my daughter and then getting no sleep and getting right to work.”

“Them knowing how much I’m proud of that, them acknowledging [the work], that part means the most to me.”

CREDITS:

Photographer: Emman Montalvan

Art Director: Emily Zirimis

Stylist: Michelle Li and Scot Louie 

Photo Assistant 1: Patrick Molina

Photo Assistant 2: Maria Noble

Production: Hyperion LA

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue