Chlöe Bailey is opening up about her music and why her songs are still categorized as R&B despite venturing into different genres.
Bailey shared in a new interview that no matter what type of music she makes, her songs will always be classified as R&B and not pop.
“Any music I do will easily and quickly be categorized as R&B because I’m a Black woman,” Bailey said in an interview with Nylon. “If someone who didn’t have my skin tone made the same music, it would be in the pop categories. That’s just the way it’s always been in life.”
Bailey says that Whitney Houston is one of her idols and takes cues from the path she paved.
“Early on in her career, when she was doing the big pop records, she got a lot of flak for that: being told she wasn’t Black enough and wasn’t catering to the base that made her,” Bailey says of Houston. “To see how she persevered and has become one of the most iconic, legendary artists that we’ve ever seen, shows that music has no race, it has no genre, it has none of that. It’s just a feeling and it’s a vibration.”
Bailey says that she is “really proud” of Beyoncé for her country album Cowboy Carter as it shows “that possibilities are endless.”
The singer says her upcoming second solo album, Trouble in Paradise, is “a coming-of-age celebration of being a woman and having fun, not taking life too seriously.”