Reality TV made it easier to root for Cole, whose upbringing inevitably shaped her views on love. That attitude and weariness allowed her to emote from a deeper, agonized place on The Way It Is. Over mutinous horn stabs on opener “(I Just Want It) To Be Over,” produced by Krucial Keys, she describes a cycle of frustration and rapture with the wrong guy. On records like “Thought You Had My Back,” a classic ballad of resentment where she’s in conflict with two confounding ideas (men and love), she sounds equally youthful and hardened.
The Way It Is was less emotionally expansive and more redemptive than an album like My Life, where Blige bravely spirals into the depths of depression. Cole’s debut is missing the contours of grief that could’ve helped her transcend into a more progressive R&B lane. Still, the record is a worthy entry in the canon of breakup albums, a category too often trivialized because the music appeals largely to young women who believe they’ve failed at finding a lasting romance.
Underneath its series of kiss-offs, The Way It Is is also deeply sensitive. The stringy ballad “Love” has the voice-cracking melodrama of a girl who thinks singing with all her heart might bring back the love she’s lost. “You’ve Changed” flips the weeping Just Blaze beat on Jay-Z’s lovesick manthem “Song Cry.” In response to Jay’s reluctant pathos, Cole interprets the dissolution from her perspective, suggesting that maybe money made him treat a woman differently. Cole’s songwriting is too cosmetic elsewhere, oversimplifying drama. The mid-tempo “Situations” is about being caught in a predictably tempting triangle. On “We Could Be,” she courts a crush with bare-minimum wooing, singing plainly: “If we could be friends, baby, it’d be all I need.” Lines like these connect only when you’re in the most impressionable stage of adolescence, aggrieved but still forming language around amateur feelings.
Cole’s debut is a bridge between unconventional old-soul singers like Blige and Erykah Badu and a new school of SZAs and Summer Walkers, whose generation is even more artfully ruthless in the dating arena. “I’m so mature, I got me a therapist,” SZA sings on her latest album, SOS, while fantasizing about killing an ex. Cole once explained this emotional logic on the premiere of her now-defunct talk show in 2019 (fittingly, her first guest was a boyfriend who’s now an ex). She argued that women today have turned reckless out of a sense of hopelessness, and after reaching a boiling point, she said, “We decided to just be a savage.”
An episode of Keyshia Cole: The Way It Is, which aired for three seasons, features Cole in a studio session with Diddy. While recording the hook to his Press Play single “Last Night,” he coaches the singer to put more stank on her vocals—aka “that conversational shit that you specialize in,” Diddy says, later telling Cole she’s “one of the greatest vocalists I’ve ever worked with.” It’s true that her voice is uniquely tuned to convey a pain rooted in years of adversity. The Way It Is showcased that she can go to those deeper places when she wants to. She just has to feel it.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan
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