KEHLANI GETS REAL ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA AND CELEBRITY CULTURE

Our cover star opens up about life under the spotlight.

- DANIELLE KWATENG-CLARK

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 exfriend. 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 came to an end 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’ll 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 scrutinised 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.