Pop Culture Fix: Lesbians With Sleep Disorders, Listen Up! Kehlani Is Making a Lullaby Album

Kehlani and Jhené Aiko Are Teaming Up for an R&B Lullabies Project

Kehlani holding a microphone on stage

Steve Jennings / Contributor via Getty Images

Kehlani and Jhené Aiko will collaborate on a new album as part of Aiko’s Sleep Soul project, which seeks to make R&B-influenced lullaby music. Quite literally for babies! “Our goal is to create more variety and diversity in the baby sleep music space,” the Sleep Soul website reads. Diversity in the baby sleep music space! I really do genuinely love it. And as a queer mom, Kehlani is a perfect candidate to be tapped for this project.

The album will be the fourth release from Sleep Soul, and friends, as someone who used to experience acute insomnia and who does regularly rely on auditory experiences to chill the fuck out, I just streamed the hell out of some Sleep Soul and can verify: It’s not just for babies! It’s for sleepy but sleep-challenged dykes, too! It’s even just a vibe for working from home, but I recommend only trying that if you’re heavily caffeinated otherwise you WILL be nodding off at your desk.

Other lullabies are boring compared to this tbh, so if you want to have a cool baby 🍼😎, you gotta get them on the Sleep Soul train! I’m already hooked and can’t wait for what Kehlani brings to the table on February 22 when Sleep Soul Volume 4 comes out.


Other Queer Pop Culture Stories For Your Day:

+ Apparently, Parvati Shallow Didn’t Bring Enough Headbands to The Traitors. Are you caught up on our coverage of The Traitors? And speaking of:

+ ‘The Traitors’ Ushers in the Golden Age of Queer Villains.

+ Give it a listen: Ethel Cain Shares New Song “من النهر,” (“From The River”) For Palestine.

+ I’ll go ahead and spoil the answer to the question posited in this Refinery29 article — Is Karol G and Young Miko’s “Contigo” Music Video Queer Baiting? — by telling you it’s a resounding nope! The post does a good job of articulating a lot of the problems I have with people incorrectly lobbing accusations of queer baiting at artists. “Celebrities don’t need to come out to their queer fans, and coming out doesn’t make a queer person any more queer. Even more, demanding a formal ‘coming out’ might be old-fashioned in the queer-friendly society we aim to create. It assumes that everyone is straight by default. Also, there’s simply no denying this music video is queer AF.

+ The latest Kristen Stewart fashion moment? White tights.

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 885 articles for us.

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