The cycle of love: it pushes and pulls us. Who better to cut to the chase of love’s many ups and down than pop’s new princess Bebe Rexha? All Your Fault: Pt. 1, Bebe Rexha’s new six-track EP gives us something saccharine and sexy – what you’d expect from a pop star – but with a touch of wickedness. When I talk to Rexha over the phone, it is evident she has loved and lost yet feels better and braver. She waxes poetic on the virtues of loving yourself in order to be independently happy and indeed, in doing so, there is pain: “To feel happiness you have to feel some kind of pain; you need both. In that way, I think my music is inspired by love and heartbreak.” This is the nature of Rexha – wavering between hopelessly wanting love and rejecting it outright in the pursuit of individuality; her rollercoaster come-up both emotional and entrepreneurial.
Following in the footsteps of Sia and Lady Gaga, Rexha started out writing tracks for others including Selena Gomez and Rihanna. So, she knows how to make the Billboard Hot 100 and in doing so aims to be a household name, voracious in her efforts to crank out hits to her fans, whom she lovingly calls “Rexhars.” In the video for “In The Name of Love” with Martin Garrix she passionately belts out whilst holding her hands á la early Patti LuPone as Evita. This is fitting as Rexha is a coloratura soprano and believes in the bigness of her voice, literally and figuratively: “For me, it’s an inner thing that I’m constantly working on that inspires me. I think bettering myself as a human being and those things that go through my mind is what I put back into my work.”
AllYour Fault Pt. 1 features G-Eazy and Ty Dolla $ign alongside popular club banger “I Got You” promoting trust and confidence in love. “FFF,” which stands for Fuck Fake Friends, is emblematic of our times – a bouncy slow build attempt at preserving our youthful autonomy amidst paper chasing. When I ask about the difficulties in maintaining self-love in a culture of mudslinging she responds quickly: “You have to make yourself happy because you don’t want to die regretting anything and saying that you lived for others. That’s one thing I don’t do: I do not live for others.” That’s one hell of a stance. But, as the final track denotes, she is a bad bitch. Given her other big collaborations in the recent past (cough, Nicki Minaj, cough), we can only expect more goodies from our darling Rexha in Pt. II.
Wrapping up our call, she adds: “I was always in love with other people or trying to find love, or scrambling for it. I think getting my heart broken was an amazing thing because I was able to learn how to love myself; which is the most important thing.” But can one ever excommunicate their deep affinity to love and be loved in a testament of self-reliance? Bebe Rexha’s second EP might be one of the best attempts so far: moving through the feels from the drama of crushing, love, heartbreak, and conflictedness most present.
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Written by Audra Wist
Photographed by Max Montgomery
Styled by Martin Waitt
Hair: Yasu Nakamura for L’Atelier using Oribe Hair Care
Makeup: Yacine Diallo for Bridge Artists
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