2005: Keyshia Cole, The Way It Is
By Nabila Lovelace
If the year is 2005 then the hair color is red, saucing Keyshia Cole’s right shoulder on her debut album coverThe Way It Is.
It was red that turned me from a ‘99 Youngin to a full blown 2000’s Gxrl when Kelis’ red-afro whirled across my TV yellin’ an aimed Hate in her single “Caught Out There”. She flipped a coffee table of contents with no regard for wood floors, brought records stacked toward the ceiling to their tumble, & gathered a rage of femmes into the street yelling I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW. & on the other side of this MTV window, stretched in my Grannies corduroy recliner, I felt alive in all my hinged muscles. From jaw to knees I absorbed her actualized fed-upness. Keyshia’s red took up the same Olympic flame in 2004 with lead single “I Changed My Mind” & every gxrl on the block circled learning declaration as refusal.
Despite a decade’s difference between us, Keyshia Cole’s plight of grown-love was the soundtrack to the angsty crush longings & “teen-true-loves” of my homegirls & I. Our youth did not shield us from knowing the textured heartache & love-lift she crafted into song. My Best-Friend Since the 3rd Grade, my sister, was the first to play me the whole CD on her boombox while plaiting my scalp with Iverson braids. Back to back we ran that album to the floor, only after she bootlegged me a copy first. We heard her lyrics because they were ours. Like many of the stories on tracks like “Should’ve Cheated”, “You Changed”, & “Guess What” we too had been lied to by boys who discarded our names, were in our beginnings of learning betrayal, learning how to be when we were harmed or harmed another, & were often approached or fucking with lovers closer to the age of the voice we parroted than our own.
Cole’s voice reminded me of choir. At my church were voices with rind & honey singing about the Lord like a man who could change the weather of their bones. & though the choir soloists had their own microphones, it was often hearing my neighbors or my mother next to me join voice with our church legends, that amplified the spirit. Singing every word these were their salvation songs, & they taught me that a choir is not just enrobed singers, but anyone willing to join their voice. Every voice lifted. “Love”, Keyshia Cole’s highest charting single from the album, became the default talent show vocal exhibition, & a standard for every singing show from American Idol to The Voice. A bridge between rift-masters and off key-ugly-cry singers. It became the song all my homies sang loud in front of the Kennedy Fried Chicken, annoyingly on A train platforms, & though I cannot listen to that song more than twice now, I remember when it was THE song that filled auditoriums with teenage belting.
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15 years from Cole’s debut & what I miss is the coven of the do-wrong. What it meant to sit the back of my head between my sisters knees as she prayed her hands down my scalp making rows of the fresh crop.
Sewing in red-thread as Keyshia Cole pummeled out the mouth of Funk Flex on Hot 97. To gather around the kindling of teenage-affairs, roasting every single dude who stepped incorrect/cheated/called us an ugly bitch after we wouldn’t give them our number, in my sisters bedroom we hit them all with the flame of Keyshia Cole’s red hair. Our laughter bigger than the room.
15 years later it is assertion & iteration that brings me back to the lead single off The Way It Is. In the first verse of “I Changed My Mind” Keyshia is talking to a younger lovestruck self, this girl she knows who’s so deep in love / do almost anything / to make him see she’s the one. Her use of third person gathers all her younger selves & our young selves at her feet. A cautionary tale of giving an all to an ain’t shit, inattentive, lover.
Bridge penned by John Legend. The final utterance from the narrator of the “she” operates almost as a colon, so she decides… Keyshia rounds the bend with the chorus. Her narrative turns toward self, finally invoking the first person she makes a choice: I changed my mind / (queue sample) i don’t love you no more.
15 years later, driving my Hyundai Accent I affectionately named Domino, it is this declaration that will lead me out the fog-muck of a newly jilted lover. When needing to reach for my own hand under grief’s sinkable tide, I heard Keyshia’s instructive voice belting me a way to float. A way out of the particular despair that is fresh heartache. As my brain spiraled around a lover that was no longer, Keyshia brought me back to “I”, to agency. That even if I didn’t believe it yet, the language itself is a buoy amongst water. Something new for the synapses; I CHANGED MY MIND. I can change my mind by simply stating that I have, that when I say it out loud waves still and I gather steam. What I can change my mind about is endless, but in the month of November 2019, 15 years from when the single first debuted, I needed Keyshia to remind me, specifically, that I could change my mind & decide myself out of a bad love. I join Keyshia word for word & in my car moving toward my place of employment we are a choir. Where our voices gather the ex-lover dissipates.
I don’t return to the album because I believe in the type of love Cole touts. Love where a person becomes the single orbit of a life. I return to red-haired Keyshia for the court & chorus of my girls. To hear us again, even as years spread our voices further from one another. At the end of I Changed My Mind she reminds the man she urged toward the exit that they’re both still local. That her position hasn’t changed, though who she’s with has. & just like Kelis, her closing video moments remind us these records are first built in the huddle-up of the homegirl. Keyshia Cole on the block with her chorus of ready to ride sisters. Bundles to her mid-back, her girls in the street.
Nabila Lovelace is a first-generation Queens born poet, her people hail from Trinidad & Nigeria. Sons Of Achilles, her debut book of poems, is out now through YesYes Books. You can currently find her kicking it in Tuscaloosa.