Although sex does figure in his songs, Khalid is, in many ways, the anti-Weeknd: polite, partial to just a little weed, respectful of women, deep in his feelings, a purveyor of emo R&B. Tonight, you half expect him to update Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, such is the pastel Springsteen vibe of many of his songs. It was an extraordinary statistic, not least because Khalid is, at the very least, an untraditional R&B singer. Around the same time, a Khalid song held every single one of the top five spots on Billboard’s all-important R&B chart, not to mention eight of the top 10, and 16 of the top 25. In April, Khalid became the single most-streamed artist globally on Spotify – bigger, according to the site’s metrics, than Ariana Grande. There was, briefly, some confusion between this tall-haired, pointy-bearded, Arabic-named lover boy – whose debut, American Teen, radically rewrote the mainstream in 2017 – and DJ Khaled. He has one of those voices that genuinely could elevate the telephone directory to an Ivor Novello The video for Location included a guide to how to pronounce the noob’s name: Kuh-leed. By the time Khalid graduated from high school a couple of months later, Kylie Jenner had tweeted the track. “Send me your location,” it went, Khalid’s caramelised ache cracking in just the right places. Only now, it was about dropping a pin on to a virtual map. It was an instant classic of telecommunications-themed romance, in the vein of every love song previously featuring a telephone. In the spring of 2016, Khalid uploaded a yearning love song, Location, on to Soundcloud – partly in an attempt to shore up his social status before his prom. Even in an era increasingly given to out-of-nowhere successes, Khalid Donnel Robinson’s rise from El Paso teenager to international stadium-filler has been like greased lightning – to borrow a phrase from a distant teenaged past.
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