When it feels dreadful to lose faith in practically everything, I secretly maintain faith in music. In times of energy depletion, one discovers the fuel of pleasure in coffee and music together when it becomes physically impossible to bear the pressures of reality. The true objective of dissociating ourselves away from reality may not be the clutters of the world, but rather the fantasy devised in the process of yearning a quantum uncertainty, neither living nor dead, neither present nor past. The perfection of this fantasy makes it so difficult to snap back that we need music to rescue us from the dialectics of our own obsession with flaws, fears and the unknown.
I remember listening to Sade, Rihanna and Erykah Badou growing up as an effeminate gay boy imagining to live on a man’s tongue, building a home somewhere far. As a child, I suffocated inside the closet because I was too afraid to materialize these desires so I was left all alone while I collected plastic toys, stained love letters and broken dreams of a flamboyant inner child. Romantic longings were cut with pain. I was silly and animated, craving for attention from a group of students in school who claimed to be friends.
When you do too much of wishful thinking, the real person vanishes, as well as the entire world around that person. Bullies from the school demanded I stop acting like a “girl.” I used to run back to a gallery of cackling friends after morning assemblies, their laughter still echoing in the pages of my slam book. They sold me nightmares in exchange for dreams of love and friendship. My peers feared exclusion, assuming that staying too close to me might “infect” them to be “gay by association”, a term I borrow from Bernard Welt. I extended my arms from the closet, because, deep down, in their rejection of me, there was a capacity for an endless love; however, the hardest part was dissolving such a calcified border. Maybe that’s why I’ve always disliked conventional macho activities. The cult of masculinity is one of the tools used to perpetuate daily violence. I couldn’t engage in them—the sight of me looking at women as sex objects or deriving pleasure from watching cricket game was hilarious—so I was excluded from the start, and now all I do is pretend to walk away, laughing at the perversity of our social lives.
In our current humble-bragging world of filtered selfies, virtue signaling, and good optics, we find greater relaxation and meditative relief in clandestine catalogs of private reveries because outside is a world of terror, a place we definitely don’t belong. I have grown tired of cringey, profit driven connections and would rather sit comfortably with comedic reels or touch upon half-read long forgotten novels. You become tired of subjectivity, rejection, disputes. You poke holes everywhere until you become somewhat uglier; a recycled duplicitious self, preserving secret you never knew about yourself. Many times, music has rescued me from the turmoils of grief, loss, and vengeance. Music meekly carries a spirit of love, finding its way through a crowd of fastidious devotees of a material God and finally instills a frequency untouched by the noise of cement compressors and selfish political rallies.
Currently, I am in the shattered center of an inevitably collapsing planet, riding its faithless chaos spirits. Through this vessel, I want to speak about Kelela’s second studio album, Raven. I enjoy spending my evening listening to her while my Punjabi boyfriend squints his eyes, confused about whether I love him more or her. I am looking out for both of them demanding that I will play the album next time he comes to pick me up in his car. Kelela’s voice is too powerful and incantatory to withhold from this world. Her latest album, Raven, arrives after a five-year hiatus from her debut album Take Me Apart, a much-loved and acclaimed album about how Kelela navigates her relationships and the complexities that originate within them over an electronic/alternative R&B soundscape. Her music is revelatory and offers articulations of sexual desire and spiritual expansion so vast like the deep blues of the ocean. Her music works as a remedial tool-kit for those kinds of glib romantic love affairs that begins with a passion but descends into vengeance and feigned detachment. When the world needed her the most, she indeed showed up.
Washed Away serves as the album’s lead single. The thrum of metallic synths resonates throughout the music, accompanied by a faded sound mimicking a breeze from the ocean. The aquatic, wave-like synths remind me of that first sip of water on a hot summer day after hours without drinking. She introduces the key phrase “far away,” denoting distance as if we are ascending to a brighter nebula — all queer, wild and charmed by mishap of nature that is love. She isn’t here to garnish her listeners with the hope of experiencing love as if, “Oh, they make me dinner,” but love as in, “we are fighting bad, how can we communicate our needs at this moment?”
Part of the enchantment of a relationship is that you can’t control it, pinpoint it, or fix it. It exists in the tension. Any urgency to clamp on to righteousness and project the internal critic can destabilize territory. To be good at love (without turning bitter) means developing enough compassion for others to compensate for the pain we may sometimes inflict on those we love. Kelela’s Washed Away is a testimony to time swallowing us, giving us space to reflect on the turbulence of our interiority while worldly horizon pulls us, like thin crustaceans and spirulinas embracing us in a dream form, outweighing all fear of drowning in the unmeasurable depths of love, where life on our planet actually begins.
She seems to deliver a message with the second song, Happy Ending, which is a seductive party banger. It begins with an effect akin to sonar layered over a repetitive synth that is sensuously evocative and conceptually suggestive as she softly repeats “too far away.” The song feels like an angel in full femme mode, emitting a hypnotic tune to convey her distant lover a kiss that taste like tears. I believe it’s the wild balance between intimacy and disgust that drives romantic relationships insane and catastrophic. How did I end up in this situation with someone I can’t seem to get away from but don’t want to? Kelela repeats, “always knew we could’ve been something,” denoting that love makes the world a better place, but it also comes with fear, guilt, misery and even rejection. You might sing an entire song for your lover, and they may not reciprocate as you yearned for, leading you to something ‘deeper than fantasy,’ a secret place where you can hide and curl from the hurt of your longings.
Happy Ending is light-hearted and offers energetic snares to release tensions from our hips, freeing the body while we dance away. She knew this club banger would be appreciated in queer clubs, where dancing is fueled by the knowledge that this ‘explosive moment of rubbing each other’s bodies’ was fought for against adversity and has been successful across the country, despite the paradoxical glorification of Queer sexuality.
From Kelela’s online interviews, I learned that both her parents belonged to progressive Black political movements, which suggests she was thoroughly devoted to the project of love without any self restraint. Kelela’s music conveys intimacy so softly that it injects passion to the languished lover who is heartbroken. When we are heartbroken or rejected, the desire to wallow in the everlasting present is much more powerful than the temptation to linger in the past (what may have occurred) or fear the anxious future (what won’t be). Your life travels sideways to a parallel realm because it cannot proceed ahead. You fantasize sex fervently at odd hours or feel guilty for what you could have corrected. “Maybe that behavior of yours is the problem, maybe that annoying playlist is why they gave up on you”—we smudge our capacities to love. Your entire world centers on your lover’s absence. It isn’t hard to imagine that all of us had a needling infatuation with the long-gone sounds of our ghosted lovers.
Kelela’s Closure is rife with sensuous imagery and warm with libido for her lover who is nowhere near her. With a longing melisma, she demands, “if you front row, I’ll put on a show,” which resorts to a pleading tone that feels like an honest confession of resentment turning to seduction. This daring, sultry, mid-tempo track will resonate with those who do not fear life’s odd miracles, one of which is the absence of closure after a situationship. Stories have a form in progression: the development of situations toward a conclusion, characters/lovers pursuing their fate in the name of feelings and giving oneself the permission to comprehend. But unlike war and marriage, Kelela’s ghosted lover doesn’t leave any milestones to mark or rituals to observe. Rahrah Gabror, a Black Trans woman featured in this song, dominates the final chapters and asserts everything upfront: they won’t come back, might as well focus on yourself. The story stops there, but oddly it goes on. Desire can endure; sometimes it becomes stronger, even in the absence of any chance of return. The tragedy lies in what does not occur. Rahrah Gabror doesn’t instruct any unnecessary dogmas about what lovers should do after they separate. Instead of reveling in hopelessness, she dares to speak, “it’s been a minute since I let you come and stick me, you know I always leave the situation sticky,” admitting to the appeal of a single night of pleasure and calibrating the unruly feelings between them.
Kelela’s poetry in the form of lyrics contains tremendous intimacy, rendering it risky since it goes so far under and into the skin. Her lyrics can feel like daggers or frantic pleas for freedom. I remember one of my favorite tracks from the album, Sorbet, destabilizing me in the beginning, with the timbre slowly connecting to my inhibitions. Sorbet is about dangerous sex and love held in suspension, which I feel is foundational to desire. High-pitched synths resemble a cosmic spaceship drawing near towards the listener, while a simmering bass lingers in the background to produce a sexual charge between Kelela’s whisper and the listener’s raw, unfettered instincts. Kelela commands, “start with my hand on your skin…only a touch and we get into it,” cueing the stickiness that will ensue as the bodies converge. She is speaking about sex, but it’s also a story about oneself. It is a project that is more concerned with self-making than with the outside world or the intersubjectivity of relationships because Kelela has her life together in a way she didn’t before, and there’s power in that. She is aware that she is not invulnerable: “I don’t know where we are though.” Just listening to her is a revolutionary act.
People are no longer concerned with whether an act is right or wrong but rather how the actions make them feel about their own admissions to it. Many swallow their feelings and asphyxiate, but others patch out new silhouettes and wear them on their skin confidently. Sorbet is a spiritual journey mapped on a rough ground, starting from undone love to becoming human again. Inch by inch, we learn to be proud of our bruises, which mark a time when we were vulnerable for the possibility of connection. Kelela’s album holds us gently. The years-long development of her style, remixing with producers—even after bouts of self-doubt inside the industry—don’t change the fact that she has built a legacy untouched by commercial resonance. She outshines the material world.