How Gabi Wilson Lost Her Identity & Discovered H.E.R.
H.E.R. just released her new video for "Focus" and she proves that you can lose your identity and still find yourself.
More than 10 years ago, a 10-year old Gabi Wilson sat in front of a piano rocking a pink feather vest and sang Alicia Keys' "If I Ain't Got You" on the Today Show like a grown ass woman. The young musician was labeled a child prodigy by 2008 and dropped her first major single, "Something to Prove" in 2014.
Wilson seemingly disappeared from the industry after the single released. Although her label and management will not confirm it, spywork done by Forbes suggests that Wilson is now H.E.R., which stands for Having Everything Revealed.
With the easy access of information available on the internet, it's hard to maintain the level of secrecy necessary to keep her identity confidential but she feels that the strategy will help her audience focus on what she stands for rather than who she is. She told Billboard:
"You have easy access to what everybody's doing 24/7 and [the mystery] was kinda my way of getting away from that,".
For the most part, the Bay-Area musician has achieved her goal of maintaining her anonymity. The 20-year-old is currently killing the R&B game, and she's doing it without showing her face. We live in time where image is everything, H.E.R. said that her image is to not have one at all.
"It's easier for people to judge what they don't like about someone when they know exactly what they're looking at. I just want it to be all about the music. Forget the clothes, the looks, the name, the backstory...you're here for the music," she said in an interview with Refinery29.
The truth is easier to tell when no one knows that it's your truth.
It's human nature to fear being ridiculed, so we bite our tongues and withhold our true feelings to fit in and be politically correct. H.E.R. said that her shift to anonymity was an attempt to free herself from the ideals and expectations that the public had for her music and to walk in her own truth, even if it's not what people expected or wanted to hear. She was recently chosen as iHeartRadio's On The Verge artist and said:
"It's easy to get attention and make music to please an audience instead of being honest. The real stuff is what people really want, though—the raw stuff. My sound is starting to shift, and I haven't been afraid to try new things because the people that love the music have bought into me and who I am."
The most important honesty is the kind that you have with yourself.
"I have the freedom to do whatever I want musically, and I'm super grateful for that. If you're always true to yourself, they're gonna love it."
H.E.R. is proof that when you starve your ego, you feed your soul, and only magic can come from that. We have to be able to detach from the tangible, material representations of ourselves to discover what we're really all about. What do you stand for? What do you believe in? What is your passion?
We get stuck living out other people's representations of ourselves so often that we forget to be honest about who we really are, and what we really want.
Your ego has the power to rob you of the peace that you deserve.
Materialism, pride, and complexity are all associated with your ego, meanwhile your soul is representative of your true self and just being. Your ego says things like, "I am not good unless I prove it," and your soul tells you that you a free to pursue and and everything that you love. We could all take a lesson from H.E.R. about starving our ego and unapologetically pursuing what we love.
Gabi Wilson had to lose her identity as a child prodigy to find a wildly successful career in R&B as H.E.R. Forget who you're supposed to be, be who you are. Do what you love and the rest will come.
If you walk in your truth Having Everything Revealed, you'll always run into purpose. Just do you, boo.
Watch H.E.R. "Focus" in her new visual below.
Taylor "Pretty" Honore is a spiritually centered and equally provocative rapper from Baton Rouge, Louisiana with a love for people and storytelling. You can probably find me planting herbs in your local community garden, blasting "Back That Thang Up" from my mini speaker. Let's get to know each other: @prettyhonore.
ItGirl 100 Honors Black Women Who Create Culture & Put On For Their Cities
As they say, create the change you want to see in this world, besties. That’s why xoNecole linked up with Hyundai for the inaugural ItGirl 100 List, a celebration of 100 Genzennial women who aren’t afraid to pull up their own seats to the table. Across regions and industries, these women embody the essence of discovering self-value through purpose, honey! They're fierce, they’re ultra-creative, and we know they make their cities proud.
VIEW THE FULL ITGIRL 100 LIST HERE.
Don’t forget to also check out the ItGirl Directory, featuring 50 Black-woman-owned marketing and branding agencies, photographers and videographers, publicists, and more.
THE ITGIRL MEMO
I. An ItGirl puts on for her city and masters her self-worth through purpose.
II. An ItGirl celebrates all the things that make her unique.
III. An ItGirl empowers others to become the best versions of themselves.
IV. An ItGirl leads by example, inspiring others through her actions and integrity.
V. An ItGirl paves the way for authenticity and diversity in all aspects of life.
VI. An ItGirl uses the power of her voice to advocate for positive change in the world.
Let’s make things inbox official! Sign up for the xoNecole newsletter for daily love, wellness, career, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
It’s been nearly twenty years since India.Arie’s crown anthem, “I am not my hair,” gave Black women an affirmation to live by. What followed was a natural hair revolution that birthed a new level of self-love and acceptance. Concerns around how to better care for our hair birthed an entire new generation of entrepreneurs who benefitted from the power of the Black dollar. Retailers made room for product lines made for us, by us, on their shelves, and we further affirmed that though our hair doesn’t define us, it is part of our unique self-expression.
Today, that movement has turned into a wig uprising where Black women are able to experiment with colors, styles, and more without causing irreparable damage to our hair. It could even be said that we’ve arrived at a new level of acceptance: one that does not equate love of oneself to one’s willingness or lack thereof to wear her hair the way others deem acceptable. Not even other people who look like us.
However, as with Blackness itself, the issue of Black women’s hair is layered.
On the surface, it’s nothing more than a matter of personal preference. However, in a deeper dive, issues of texture, curl pattern, and of course, proximity to social acceptance, as well as other runoff streams from the waters of racism and patriarchy, rear their heads. The natural hair movement, though a wide-reaching and liberating community builder, also gave way to colorism and often upheld mainstream beauty standards.
Sometimes, favoring lighter-skinned influencers/creators with very specific hair textures, the white gaze leaked into our safe space and forced us to reckon with it. Accurate representations of natural hair in various states of being—undefined curls, kinks, and unlaid edges—are still absent from brand marketing. Protective styles, though intended to provide breaks from styling for our sensitive hair, have become a mask to help our hair be more palatable. A figurative straddle of the fence in order to appease the comfort of others in the face of our hair’s power.
And then there’s the issue of length.
Giphy
As a woman who has spent much of the last decade voluntarily wearing her hair in many variations of short hairstyles, from a pixie cut to a curly fro and a sleek bob, what I’ve gleaned throughout the years is that there is a glaring difference between how I am treated when wearing my hair short than when I opt for weaves, extensions or even grow it out slightly longer than my chin.
The differential treatment comes from women and men alike and spans professional and personal settings, including friends, coworkers, and industry peers.
What has become abundantly clear is that long hair is often conflated with beauty, softness, and any number of other words we relate to femininity in a way that short hair is not. That perceived marker of the essence of womanhood shows up in how I am received, communicated with, and complimented.
Even more so than texture, length has a way of deciding who among us is deserving of our attention, affection, and adoration. Whether naturally grown or proudly bought, the commentary around someone’s look or image greatly shifts when “inches” are present.
When it comes to long hair, we really, really do care.
In an effort to understand whether I had simply been misinterpreting the energy around my hair, I decided to take my findings to social media. I began with two side-by-side photos of myself. In both pictures, my hair is straightened; however, in one, I am wearing my signature pixie cut, and in the other, I am wearing extensions.
I posited that treatment based on hair length is a real thing, and what followed was confirmation that I was not alone in my feelings. “Long hair, like light skin, button noses, and being thin are all forms of social capital,” one user commented. “Some Black women enforce the status quo too, why wouldn’t we?”
Courtesy
This also brought to mind the many times celebrity women (like most recently Beyoncé's Cécred hair tutorial) have done big reveals of their own natural tresses in an attempt to silence any doubt that Black women are able to grow their hair beyond a certain length. Of course, we all know that to be true, so why do we still feel the need to prove it so?
The responses continued to pour in from women of all skin tones, who felt that hair length played a role in people’s treatment of them. “When I have short hair I always feel like people don’t treat me like a woman, they treat me like a kid,” another user commented. “When my hair is long I get a lot more respect for some reason.”
From revelations about feeling invisible to admitted shifts in their own perceived beauty, Black woman after Black woman poured out her experience as it relates to hair length. Though affirmed by their shared realities, knowing that reactions to something so trivial have become yet another hair battle for Black women to fight was disheartening. Though we continue to defy gravity and push the bounds of imagination and creativity by way of our strands, will it always be in response to the idea that we are, somehow, falling short?
Unlike more obvious instances of hair discrimination, the glorification of longer length is sneakier in its connection to Eurocentric beauty standards. Hair commercials, beauty ads, and even hip-hop music have long celebrated the idea of gloriously long tresses while holding onto the ignorant notion that it is inaccessible for Black women.
Even as we continue to fight to prove our hair professional, elegant, and worthy in its natural state to the world at large, we’ve also adopted harmful value markers of our own as a community. It’s evident in how we talk about who has the right to start a haircare line and which influencers we easily platform. It’s evident in the language we use to identify those with long hair versus short hair. And it’s painfully obvious in how we treat one another.
It makes me wonder if India.Arie’s brave rallying cry, almost two decades old in its existence, will ever actually hold true for us. Or will we just continue to invent new ways to uphold the harmful status quo?
Let’s make things inbox official! Sign up for the xoNecole newsletter for love, wellness, career, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
Feature image by Willie B. Thomas/ Getty Images