Kehlani - It Was Good Until It Wasn't (2020) Hi Res

By anyone’s standards, Kehlani Parrish has experienced a pretty tumultuous rise to fame. She pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of emerging from a TV talent show with her musical credibility intact. While still a teenager, her cover band PopLyfe reached the final of America’s Got Talent – on YouTube you can still see her belting out We Will Rock You for the edification of Piers Morgan – but when they failed to win, she quit the band, declined an offer from the show’s host Nick Cannon to join a rap group he was assembling and rescued herself from a life of penury by releasing her own mixtape.

Offering R&B that was pop-facing but lyrically tough, 2014’s Cloud 19 and its successor You Should Be Here snared her a major record deal, and from that point things appeared to go according to plan, at least commercially: guest spots with Eminem, Zayn Malik, Charlie Puth and Justin Bieber, a gold-selling debut album, a succession of platinum-selling singles. But there were also high-profile relationships, equally high-profile accusations of infidelity, questions about her mental health, a suicide attempt and an accusation from the ever-delightful Chris Brown that this was a sympathy ploy, and a three-month partnership with controversial rapper YG that ended when a video of him apparently cheating on her appeared on a gossip website (he denied it). All of it has played out, a little queasily, in the full glare of social media, Instagram shots from hospital beds and all.

There’s an argument that none of this has done Kehlani’s profile any harm. Certainly, she’s not above playing on the public’s prurient interest in her private life, as when she released a collaboration with YG, Konclusions, on Valentine’s Day, followed three days later by a solo track called Valentine’s Day (Shameful) that addressed the end of their relationship in no uncertain terms: “I hope you fuck around and have the son you wanted with the bitch.” Either way, concerns about her public image hang over her second album from its title down.

Its centrepiece is Everybody Business, an acoustic guitar-driven track that interpolates Pharrell Williams’s Frontin’ in order to protest against her reputation at length: “I can’t be fazed by what you mistake as going insane … I hear every word they talk and try not to care at all.” Elsewhere, while there’s nothing as explicitly personal as You Know Wassup, the single she released a fortnight after YG’s unscheduled appearance on the gossip sites, there’s still plenty of rumour-stoking stuff about make-up sex, getting back with people you know you shouldn’t, attempting to change the ways of bad boys and what one website calls “the fraught aspects of a toxic relationship”, which is one way of describing the lyrics of opener Toxic: “Surfing on your face while you eat that … you know that dick has always been problematic.”