Chloe Bailey has long established herself as a versatile talent.

However, with such artistic range comes the challenges of forced categorization.

Indeed, it’s well-documented the hurdles many acts – particularly acts of color – face when releasing music.

Bailey learned this anew recently when she released her Pop-kissed single ‘Boy Bye.’

And in a new interview with Nylon, ahead of her incoming album ‘Trouble in Paradise,’ she addresses the discourse.

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Reacting to the calls for her to “go back to R&B” and her penchant for experimentation more broadly, Bailey candidly responded to the critique by saying:

“Any music I do will easily and quickly be categorized as R&B because I’m a Black woman,” Chlöe says, sounding unbothered. “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.”

Expanding, she drew on the similarly-flavored backlash Whitney Houston faced in her early career:

“Early on in [Whitney’s] 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. 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. 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.”

With that, what are…

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