“The first time I met Kehlani was during her guest spot on Billboard’s The Juice podcast alongside BJ the Chicago Kid, in October 2015. Hours after our convo—about music and fame—she texted me, asking if I thought her tweets were “too emotional.” Doubt, whether instant or eternally buried, can be pretty damn real.”
I suddenly got caught in a flashback. It was 2008, and I was laying on the floor, spread out in my office at VIBE magazine. “He said, I was too emotional,” I vented to my friend and former co-worker Shanel, with wet cheeks. The guy I was dating at the time had told me I was “too much.” It took years—and a text from Kehlani—to realize he was wrong. It wasn’t that I was too much. It was that he wasn’t enough.
“No, absolutely not,” I told both Kehlani and my past self, who moved the anchor an inch enough to creep out from the abyss.
Kehlani Parrish, 20 years old, has a way of accessing those latent emotions. She sings sincerely of love, she’s admittedly clumsy in heels, and she gulps down harsh reality like a shot of whiskey. You can’t help seeing yourself in her, and be encouraged to own who you are because of it.
Her first mixtape, Cloud 19, had just dropped two months prior to her Billboard podcast appearance, and it was as if I was witnessing Kehlani shift, as the spotlight grew stronger and it began to sink in, for her, just how far her influence reached.
“I’m still very emotional via social media. But, as far as social media, I think I’ve learned to only say things that could possibly be transferable to other people in forms of lessons, rather than making it so personal to where people can’t relate,” she says.
