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.