Kehlani just dropped a music video for “RPG” with 6LACK today. The new mother returns only a month after welcoming daughter Adeya Nomi with guitarist Javie Young-White. The song comes from her February mixtape, While We Wait, which hit No. 9 on the Billboard 200.
The singer told Beats 1 that the title “RPG” refers to role-playing games, in which players take on the roles of fictional characters during gameplay, and the lyrics are filled with wordplay that connects games to relationship turmoil:
Don’t you think that we’re too old to play your game?
And we ain’t go through all of this to stay the same
But you can pick a player just so I can get my way (Way, way)
And I think you do this ‘cause you realise I won’t wait (Wait, wait)
6LACK plays her love interest on the track, providing the “he said” to her “she said”:
I don’t wanna make you think
That I’m sayin' things ‘cause you prompted me
Been working with a lag, a fucked up past
I want you to be proud of me
His verse pushes back against the lyrics suggesting he’s playing a role to fit her needs.
The music video was inspired by Kehlani’s “favorite Netflix show,” The OA. It’s set in a plant-filled glass enclosure, a replica of the prisons shown in the Netflix series. The singer also revealed that she was nearly nine-months pregnant during the shoot.
Her daughter partly inspired her next album. “My next official album is a story. I’m telling stories I’ve never told,” she told Zane Lowe on Beats 1 in January. “It’s my parents’ story articulated into mine, articulated into a gift for my daughter, so she knows where she comes from.”
Watch the music video above and catch up on all of Kehlani’s lyrics on Genius now.
