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halid robinson is
zigzagging through
galleries at the Los
Angeles County
Museum of Art
when a disturbing canvas stops
him in his tracks. It depicts a naked
man with a vertical gash in his
torso, through which a second
naked man, covered in blood,
drifts outward. The painting, by
the surrealist Victor Brauner, is
titled “Suicide at Dawn”. “It’s from
1930!” Khalid says incredulously,
scanning the wall text. “That’s
crazy to me, to think about how
long people have been making art
about pain, about love – about all
the things we’re still making art
about.” He lingers a moment, then
starts moving again. “I’ve written
songs about friends who dealt
with suicidal thoughts,” he says,
following a train of thought. “I’ve
never felt that way myself, exactly,
but I’ve felt close. Like, I’ve wanted
to disappear.”
Khalid is a 19-year-old pop
prodigy with a lovely, leathery
voice and a knack for big, breezy
singsongs. His debut album,
American Teen, came out a few
months ago, and although it
pulses with euphoric dance
beats, Eighties synths and tales
of marijuana- and booze-fuelled
high school raging, melancholy is
never far away, either. The album
is full of fragile relationships –
friends having a blast only to grow
apart; lovers yearning for one
another only to get caught up in
passive-aggressive mind games.
Technology references – cellphone
photo albums, ride-share apps,
GPS pins – pop up constantly,
sometimes enabling connections,
sometimes crippling them.
American Teen debuted at Number
Nine in the U.S. and is already
certified gold. Khalid has appeared