ehlani was born some 350
miles north of here in a
south Berkeley apartment.
Her mother was on the run
from the police at the time; Kehlani’s father talked her through
labor over the phone. Both were
addicts. Born premature and “like,
not breathing,” Kehlani was sent
to the hospital. Her mother was
sent back to jail, and Kehlani did
a brief stint in foster care before
her mother’s sister adopted her.
(Her father died when she was
“one or two.”)
be literally dragging me out of my
mom’s crib, holding-on-to-thewalls type shit. Screaming like,
‘Why am I the oldest and I can’t
be here? Don’t you think I’m the
most mature?’”
Growing up in north Oakland, Kehlani helped look after
her aunt’s two younger children.
“We lived in this little duplex
until everything started breaking,” Kehlani says. “It was getting
really cold, and the heater broke,
and then the sink broke, then the
washing machine stopped working.” Even as a child, she says she
aspired to find the bright side of
bad situations. “I’ve always been
a little light. Something bad would
happen, and I’d be like, ‘Well, this
is happening, but we’re lucky in
these other ways.’” But things
got more complicated when her
mother reentered her life—though
not as her guardian. “At that
point, my mom had two other
kids. I just couldn’t understand
why I was the only child who
couldn’t be around her. She would
be doing her shit, then get clean
for two months, but I was never allowed to stay with her, and
I couldn’t grasp why. They would
junior high, until, after an injury,
she switched her focus at Oakland’s School for the Arts to singing. “Everybody was gay as hell,”
she says of the school. “It was like
Glee in that bitch.” As a teenager, she had girlfriends and boyfriends. “I got my first girlfriend in
ninth grade. Then I told her I didn’t
know what I wanted and broke up
with her. I think I was always just,
like, you have to be gay or you
have to be straight—that those
were conflicting. I learned that
there’s really no wrong or right,
that it was cool to like everything.
But it was a lot for me.”
it,” she says. On TV, she’d been
chubbier, with her hair in a short
mohawk and gauges in her ears.
“Everyone was saying I looked like
a dyke,” she recalls. “I would watch
my episodes and be like, ‘Why do
I look like that?” At 17, Kehlani
lost her virginity, started drinking,
and went out a lot. Looking back,
she calls this her “glo up” period. “I
was literally sleeping on whoever’s
couch, and I got tattoos real fast,”
she says. “At first it was like, ‘This
is changing me into what I really want to be!’ I’d always wanted
tattoos, but I think I actually got
so many because I hated myself.”
Things went best when she
focused on music. At 14, she was
recruited as the vocalist of a
local cover band, PopLyfe. They
gigged aggressively and, in 2011,
successfully auditioned for the
competitive variety show America’s Got Talent. Finishing in fourth
place, they missed out on the
During her senior year, Kehlani left the Bay for Los Angeles,
trying to get back into music. Not
yet 18 and with no legal guardian,
she enrolled at Hollywood High
but was pulled from the building in handcuffs days later and
temporarily placed in a group
home. She returned to Oakland
YAUDIO Magazine
Issue 1
At school, Kehlani’s talents
were acknowledged. She danced
seriously from childhood through
prize money.
Watching the show brought
back old, negative feelings about
her body. As a kid, she hadn’t
felt feminine; an umbilical hernia
made a “lump” in her stomach and
she hated her naturally muscular
build. “My body wasn’t proportionate like a girl’s, so I never showed
“Everyone was saying I
looked like a dyke,”