Normani: the only way is up

Taken from the spring 2023 issue of Dazed. You can buy a copy of our latest issue here.

Before we begin – before we get into Dopamine, the effervescent, years-in-the-making debut album by pop superstar Normani, and all she had to endure to get here – let’s get one thing straight. “Motivation”? That song that dropped in 2019 and felt, in some way, like a cultural reset? The track that, in all likelihood, has soundtracked many of your summers and still opens your running playlists? Normani thought it was mid when it came out. And she still thinks it’s kinda mid.

“I didn’t like that song, I’m gonna be honest. It just felt really easy – it felt like the right thing to do, but it didn’t necessarily feel authentic,” she says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, her mouth curling into a wry smile. The huge reception to the song – top 40 chart placements in the US and UK, ‘Best of 2019’ placements everywhere from Pitchfork to the Guardian – justified the decision to release it, but she never quite shook the feeling this wasn’t the right song for her first statement as a solo artist. “We knew that it would work, but even with me having that knowledge, I was still like, it’s just as important for me to feel represented. I legit was like, ‘OK, I guess if y’all are happy…’”

That Normani feels like she can really own her own work is crucial. The now-28-year-old singer, dancer and actress spent six years of her life – ages 16 to 22, arguably the most formative – in the girl group Fifth Harmony, an experience that saw her sell millions of records, perform to massive crowds and hit No 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 with the Ty Dolla $ign collab “Work From Home”. But it was also a period of Normani’s life in which she had no creative say and which saw her being shuttled between tour buses, amphitheatres and press ops when other girls her age were working out their own style, learning how to party and living with the kind of messy freedom you should be when you’re that age. If it feels like Dopamine has taken a long time to arrive – and it absolutely has, given that Normani’s first solo single, the Khalid collab “Love Lies”, dropped in 2018 – it’s because Normani has had lost time to make up for, in terms of life experience and creative identity.

“Coming out of the group, I didn’t necessarily know who or what Normani even sounded like,” she says. “I needed some time to have life experiences, challenge myself in the studio and not be afraid.”She knows that it “probably looks a little crazy” to roll out your album over a six-year period, but she doesn’t let the outside noise bother her. “I know what it’s like to put out music that I don’t necessarily believe in. It hurts when I don’t feel like I’m able to be fully represented or when I have to stand behind something I don’t believe in, and I did that for so long. So I made an oath to myself that, when I got the opportunity, I was gonna do things my way, and be unapologetic about that.”

‘Unapologetic’ might seem exactly like the kind of platitude a pop star might drop before releasing her safest record yet. Not so in the case of Dopamine: the set’s opening track, the playfully arrogant, southern rap-influenced “Big Boy”, telegraphs Normani’s ambition to move beyond her safe zones of pop and R&B. Over horns that nod to her Louisiana heritage and thick, shuddering bass, Normani raps about listening to Pimp C and Outkast as a kid, playfully ribbing a potential suitor: “Bling bling blow, he like, ‘What’s that on your wrist?’ / Bling bling blow, this all them platinum hits / Bling bling blow, this all that Billboard shit.”

Normani says “Big Boy” is the kind of track she wouldn’t have even considered making back in 2019 or 2020, when her debut album was first scheduled for release. “I feel like I’ve been humble, you know? I’m known to be kind of meek – I keep to myself,” she says. “I remember going to the studio with [co-writer] Starrah and [Dopamine executive producer] Tommy Brown and I was just like, ‘I want to talk my shit.’ It wasn’t easy, but I don’t think that, sonically, I would have ended up in the place I’m in now if I had put a project out a lot sooner.”

“I feel like [Dopamine] embodies everything I wanted to say – it feels dominant, strong, assertive – but on the flipside, there are so many layers to it. You get the highs, the lows, the thrill of it all. And it’s a little toxic, too” – Normani

Normani has been through a lot to get here. That trope is another staple of pop star profiles, but here it rings undeniably true. Born in Atlanta and raised in New Orleans, Normani went through the ungodly trauma of finding her family displaced due to Hurricane Katrina at the age of nine. It’s one of the many situations that she says taught her resilience from a young age. “I remember vividly that being one of the first times that I was terrified for my life, but also [feeling like] everything that I ever knew was literally taken away from me,” she recalls. Her family moved to Houston, Texas, and she remembers “not knowing if family members made it, not knowing if our friends were safe, and going through an extended period of time not talking to anybody”.

When she started school in Texas, essentially required to rebuild her childhood from scratch, things didn’t get any easier. “School was really, really tough for me – being the new kid isn’t fun,” says Normani. She went to five different schools before she finally found her footing, and in sixth grade her parents pulled her out to be home-schooled; she had been dancing and participating in beauty pageants since she was three, and home-schooling allowed Normani and her mother to travel to LA for auditions.

The years of hard work finally paid off in 2012, when Normani auditioned for the second season of The X Factor US. She didn’t make it through as a solo artist; instead, she was matched with four other prospective singers – Ally Brooke, Dinah Jane, Lauren Jauregui and Camila Cabello – to form a girl group. They finished third on the show, but their success and celebrity quickly eclipsed that of the season’s winner, country singer Tate Stevens. Normani had, in many ways, been training her whole life for a career in performance, but joining a girl group at 16 brought unique challenges. “I was the only Black girl, the only one that looked like me, which was a totally different experience from the other girls – and that’s not to take away from their experience, because I know what we went through collectively,” she says. “We really did do the best with what was given to us under very unrealistic circumstances, but being the only Black girl in a very successful mainstream pop girl group, I definitely felt like a token. I don’t know if I was able to articulate that at the time.”

It was her first taste of a music industry that, to this day, doesn’t really know how to treat female artists, and Black female artists in particular. She sees it as a “great responsibility” to be a Black woman of her position in the industry, “because I know that women like me don’t often get the opportunity – I don’t take it lightly”. People in the pop industry, she says, “assume that they have us figured out to be a specific way”, and are constantly looking for reasons to withhold the scant opportunities that Black women are afforded. If she’s frustrated, or exhausted, she doesn’t let it come across in our interview; every word sounds totally careful and considered, perhaps a mark of her pageant training as a kid and pop star training as a teen. “I do everything in my power not to mess that up or take away from that, which isn’t fair. I didn’t ask for that, necessarily – I feel like we just don’t get the same grace that everybody else would, and we can’t mess up as many times as women who don’t look like us are allowed to.”

“The things I used to be afraid of don’t scare me as much any more, because I know what it’s like to be afraid” – Normani

It’s not just the industry: Normani has experienced firsthand the kind of racist vitriol fans can heap on artists. In 2016, during a Fifth Harmony interview, she was asked to describe each of her bandmates in one word; fans deemed her descriptor for Cabello – “very quirky, cute” – insufficiently gushing, and proceeded to barrage her with horrific abuse, Photoshopping her face onto a picture of a lynched slave and calling her the n-word. (Anyone who’s incurred the wrath of a stan army knows that pop fans, although disproportionately young, queer and non-male, can still seethe and vilify as well as your average right-wing conspiracy nut.) Her bandmates, and the people around her, just didn’t know how to properly handle it.

It’s the kind of incident that so many music industry figures condemned, and promised to stamp out, during 2020’s Black Lives Matter reckoning. Normani isn’t sure that those statements have really led to meaningful change for artists like herself. “I think sometimes what happens is things are acknowledged, and then somewhere along the way, the cycle continues the way it has [done],” she says, careful to maintain her visage of equanimity. “I definitely feel like we have a very long way to go – I’m not going to sit here and pretend [racism] doesn’t exist or isn’t a reality, but I think we’ve made strides.”

She says it was disheartening to see systemic racism in the industry be acknowledged only for things to go back to business as usual, which is why she was so excited to hear about the inspiration behind Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album, made in response to the backlash she received after performing at the Country Music Awards in 2016. “This country album for Beyoncé is so important. People can say what they want to but, like, why look at a Black artist and be quick to label?” says Normani, her voice rising. She sounds equal parts frustrated and energised, and maybe a little perplexed that a star like Beyoncé could face the same kind of othering that she did. “That’s what I set out to do as well – like, there’s so much power in me. In the group, I didn’t recognise it – but now that I’m out of it, I recognise that it was my superpower, me in my Blackness.”

It was that self-discovery, and that surge of empowerment, that kept Normani and her family going during some of the hardest years of their lives. During the pandemic, Normani’s mother’s breast cancer, which had been in remission for 19 years, returned. A year later, her father was diagnosed with cancer too. It made all the calls for her to release an album feel frustrating and totally trivial. “It was hard feeling misunderstood because of the lack of knowledge people had for my circumstances in real-time,” she says. “I don’t even know if I had the energy to explain – my emotional, spiritual and mental endurance was really tested. When my parents got sick, I didn’t have the mental capacity to even try to be creative, but I pushed myself anyway. If it weren’t for them, I probably wouldn’t have, but I know it’s what got them through such a tough time – they needed to see me persevere and push through and continue to move forward.”

“There’s so much power in me. In the group, I didn’t recognise it – but now that I’m out of it, I recognise that it was my superpower, me in my Blackness” – Normani

It was a different experience than when Normani’s mother was first diagnosed, when Normani was five; this time around, she “was old enough to grasp the severity”. Having two ill parents inverted the parent- child dynamic; Normani started taking trips home to accompany her parents to doctors’ appointments and surgeries, and took on the duty of reaffirming her parents when they were struggling emotionally. “[My mother’s] confidence was shot – everything that society says makes us feminine and a woman was taken from her, so it was a lot of me reminding her of how beautiful she is, and that those things don’t define her or make her any less of a woman,” she says. “And my dad, I’m so grateful for him – he has always helped me, as a young Black girl, to see the beauty in me in spite of what society might portray as beautiful.”

During that period, Normani moved deeper into her faith, even when it was tested; a devout Christian, she often found herself asking “Why me?” – a question that eventually shifted to “What is it that you want me to take from this?” She says her parents’ ordeal has made her feel even closer to God. “I have more peace more consistently these days,” she reflects. “Not to say that every day isn’t a challenge, but I don’t know – I just feel a lot more grounded.”

She got new perspective from her parents’ sickness, too; the fear of releasing music she once had is greatly diminished. “If I was able to endure this very traumatic experience not only once but three times with my family, then what is putting a song out? What is putting this body of work out?” she says. She is still, of course, “a little terrified”, but for the most part that terror doesn’t feel totalising. “That doesn’t take away how much I care – I feel like that’s a misconception that just kind of bothers me. But even outside of music, the things I used to be afraid of don’t scare me as much any more, because I know what it’s like to be afraid.”

All this new strength, all the new perspective, is contained in the album’s title, Dopamine. After trying out a few different names, it was just the one that stuck; she wanted the record to feel nostalgic, “reminiscent of when Rihanna had Rated R” – idiosyncratic, bold stars like Madonna and Janet Jackson were on the moodboard too. Dopamine captured that confidence and style. “I feel like it embodies everything I wanted to say – it feels dominant, strong, assertive – but on the flipside, there are so many layers to what dopamine is. You get the highs, the lows, the thrill of it all. And it’s a little toxic, too,” she says, grinning. After years of working on the record, she feels totally unburdened now, worrying less about it “not being Black enough or not being pop enough” like she once was.

“There’s a sense of freedom I have that I’ve been waiting for, a weight lifted – me just being able to be Normani, before I’m anything else,” she says. The album is nostalgic, nodding to her girl-group years in a way that’s elevated and sleek. “I’ve grown so much in my tastes, the things that I like are very different than the things I liked before, but I think it’s a perfect hybrid of past and present.” In other words: as far from mid as can be.

Hair ASHANTI LATION at OPUS BEAUTY, make-up JAMAL SCOTT at JULIAN WATSON AGENCY, nails DAWN STERLING at E.D.M.A., set design COLIN DONAHUE at OWL AND THE ELEPHANT, lighting SINCLAIR JASPARD MANDY, photographic assistants EGON DETTHOFF, COLIN SMITH, AMANDA ROSE, styling assistants ALEXA LEVINE, RUBY BRAVO, ASHLYNE TEIXEIRA, KITA LEWIS, LEA ZÖLLER, tailoring TAGOUI KHATCHATRIAN, make-up assistants ANNA KATO, set design assistant ROBERT ‘BAWB’ MASON, stunt coordination RUSSELL DRAEGER, digital operators MAGNUS BERGQVIST, EMILIAN JENRICH, production SAMUEL ABERG at DAY INTL, production assistants HUNTER BEARD, DEVEN HERNANDEZ, TREY BUTLER, ALEX SCHMIDT