Do we like H.E.R.?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record and a track record of speaking up, held back from the top end because I found little on her LGBTQ+ stance.
H.E.R. is Gabriella Wilson from Vallejo in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her dad is Black American and her mum is Filipina, and she signed with RCA as a kid. The stage name stands for “Having Everything Revealed”, and she kept her face and name out of it early on.
That mystery wasn't a marketing stunt, by her account. She told NME it was more about “the protection of who I am”. It makes sense of a teenage signing who wanted the music judged on its own.
Harm check first. I went looking for anything nasty, such as culture-war rants, conspiracy theories, anti-vax talk or dodgy collaborators, and came up empty. What turned up is the opposite: at the 2019 Grammys she said women should back other women, and that there's “a place for everybody's voice to be heard”.
She also wrote “I Can't Breathe”, which grew out of a chat with her co-writer about the George Floyd protests. She told NME she feels responsible because of her platform, and that “Hate is hate.” To be fair, I found nothing from her specifically on LGBTQ+ or trans rights, so that part of the record is thin rather than bad.
The legal record is tame. In 2021 a songwriter sued her, her co-writers and Sony over her song “Focus”, alleging it copied his composition. The case settled with terms undisclosed. In 2022 she sued her own label, MBK, alleging her contract ran beyond California's seven-year limit. I couldn't find how that one ended.
The recent news is a feel-good one. She voices Jo, a would-be artist, in DreamWorks' Forgotten Island, an animated adventure drawn from Filipino folklore, and AP called it “sort of a mess, in the best way”. For a Filipino-American kid from Vallejo, that's a nice full-circle moment.