Kehlani emerges from a cocoon and transforms into a butterfly in her new video for “Butterfly.” Mirroring the song’s lyrics, which explore the need to open up and communicate in a relationship and likens it to the way a butterfly experiences a metamorphosis from its nascent form, the clip takes a literal approach to portraying the lyrics.
“I hope you take from this that it’ll make you no less of a man/To break your walls and simply grab my hand,” she encouragingly intimates at the end of the song. “Love shouldn’t be contraband/It shouldn’t trample on your confidence/Shouldn’t be seen as less than compliments.”
Continuing with the metamorphosis themes, Kehlani paid homage to her roots by tapping talent from her alma mater, Oakland School for the Arts in Oakland, California. She turned to her former dance and production design teachers to recruit talented students who then assisted in the set design and created the impressive choreography, which they completed in three days. The excellent featured young male dancers, Munir and Musa Omar, are also current students at the school. The set the students helped create adeptly emulates the themes in the song, as the pregnant, body-paint-adorned Kehlani is radiant as a transformed butterfly within the lush, vivid setting.
“Butterfly” appears on the singer’s While We Wait mixtape, which dropped last month, and follows her previously released video for “Nunya.”