Kelela Mizanekristos Is America's Sweetheart

Kelela visited the Jezebel studio last Wednesday, at the very cusp of New York Fashion Week. In the days since, she has been FROWing at Adam Selman, Eckhaus Latta, and Dion Lee, and performing on the runway for her friend Telfar, the innovative New Yorker whose career has been built on reimagining iconic basics without gender assignations. It’s both fitting and delicious to see a musician of Kelela’s caliber consorting with some of the most interesting artists in a field parallel to hers; she has very carefully and studiously built a catalog that itself cannot be easily defined.

Her most recent album, Take Me Apart—easily my favorite and most-listened-to album of 2017—coagulated by the force of its futuristic, clubby sheen, revealed Kelela’s aptitude for flipping styles (poppy, jazzy, soulful R&B) and conjuring unexpected melodies that rest on minor thirds, a tic she told Jezebel she developed during her nascent years singing with her friend Tosin Abasi, the jazz-and-metal guitar master. “When I was first writing music and coming up with melodies,” she said, “I was jamming with him a lot—so much so that I think it actually is like imbued in my melodic framework. I’m definitely not a jazz musician but I also listen to a lot of jazz, and so the notes that are interesting to me are the ones that are blue or sort of pushing the harmony.”

That can be heard on “Enough,” which reads like a tone-poem to a breakup, and the healing harmonies of “Altadena.” Kelela communicates most acutely through sensuality—the aforementioned expressed desire as well as the tactile sound of words in her lyrics. Take 2015 single “Rewind,” in which she lets her breathy soprano linger in the pocket of a Kingdom-produced bass bop, while singing about a previously resistible love interest whom she now cannot resist. She does not sing so much as unfurl her vowels, softly in their lushness—“I’ll search anywhere for youuuuu”—and then comes in for the crack on the blunt-consonant chorus—“And I can’t rewind!” It’s more than a lyricist’s emphasis on syntax, but a seemingly inherent ability to convey emotional intent, the kind of instinct the best musicians know to cultivate.

“I’ve always explored that [sensuality], and that’s actually been central to my whole writing process,” Kelela told Jezebel last week. “Especially when it comes to the intersection of romance and like romantic feelings and sex and how the best of times and the most tumultuous of times are embodied in both of those.”

Particular to Kelela’s music is the central concept of club intimacy, the idea that emotional release can be most potent in more celebratory spaces, the way house music divas carried an entire generation through the AIDS crisis, or more contemporarily, how the concerts of sadboy Soundcloud rappers can often erupt into cathartic mosh pits. “It’s how entire communities have thrived, who have not really felt safe in other contexts,” she said. “I am acutely aware of that, and I’ve lived that and experienced that for myself.” It’s also conjured at Kelela’s shows—her fans tend to be of the passionately devoted sort—and she has made reference to some of those eras in her music (keep your eyes open for a little old-way voguing in her “Let Me Know” video).

What’s realest about Kelela’s music, and how that club intimacy works, is that what she’s putting forth is relatable and truly reflects the mindset of the inspiring new crop of determined, self-sufficient, millennial women soundtracking our daily lives and, maybe, helping us define how we think of ourselves. “I’ve just tried to be honest about what I feel and think,” Kelela said, “and it’s so cool that I could be a part of that [intimacy] in a meaningful way, I guess. Yeah—I love that. I love that so much about my, sort of, musical identity. Yeah. That makes me really happy and proud.” It makes me really happy and proud, too!