Chlöe Bailey says her music would be considered pop if she wasn’t a Black woman

Black women have always been prevalent in pop music, from Diana Ross to Janet Jackson to Beyoncé, but often their contributions to music are often categorized as R&B, regardless of genre, because of their race.

That's something Chlöe Bailey is also very well aware of, though it doesn't seem to bother her that much. Probably because she's got a whole host of women who came before who navigated similar waters.

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“Any music I do will easily and quickly be categorized as R&B because I’m a Black woman,” Bailey recently told Nylon magazine. “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 is set to release her sophomore solo album, Trouble in Paradise, which will probably continue the spirit of experimentation and genre-bending from her previous effort, In Pieces. The singer-songwriter-producer then alludes to two other Black women who struggled with being defined by the limitations of genre, Whitney Houston and her own mentor, Beyoncé.

“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 said 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."

She added, "And that’s why I was really proud of Beyoncé doing Cowboy Carter, because Black people originated country music. It's just showing that possibilities are endless.”