It’s a sweltering June evening, and a gaggle of creatively hopeless adults have assembled to guzzle cheap wine and botch landscape paintings at Paint ’N Pour, which proudly urges patrons to “Paint like Picasso. Drink like Van Gogh.” Usually, the Lower East Side establishment serves as a no-judgment oasis for fine-art amateurs who’ve long accepted their talents lie elsewhere. But tonight, there’s an exception: Tinashe, the infuriatingly competent 31-year-old singer (plus producer, writer, actress, and Tae Kwon Do black belt) with the song of the summer and the drive to put everyone else to shame. Paintbrush pinned between her manicured fingers, she drops her gold “I LOVE MEN” handbag to the floor. “I’ve got big perfectionist tendencies,” she notifies me. “I’m going to be the best.”
Wearing white Prada sunglasses, knee-high lace-up boots, and a cropped sweatshirt, she’d dissolved any prospect of anonymity the instant she strode in, magnetizing attention. Her bedazzled sweat shorts, sheared in reverse-mullet fashion, are long in the front and ass-exposing in the back. Tinashe is in town to headline LadyLand, a sold-out, 8,500-person-capacity Pride festival uniting drag queens, high-fashion provocateurs, club sirens, and Madonna under the belly of a Brooklyn bridge. Tonight she’s taking it easy, for the most part. She doesn’t need to be asked twice about her order: “Pino greejz, pino greejz, pino greejz.”
For the next two hours, our cheerful, coddling instructor guides us step-by-step through painting a glowing red river at sunset, introducing basic color theory as if it is the basis of quantum mechanics. First challenge: mixing globs of blue with white and striping the sky color onto our canvases. Tinashe plays the A-plus student, piping up as if she’s being graded on participation. Her giggles well up like soda bubbles. “I’m the only one answering her questions!” she protests. Three colors in, and many of us have already managed to mess up our gradients; somehow, I’ve misplotted my sun so it’s buried in the ground. Tinashe, to no one’s surprise, excels.
Soon the wall-shaking hip-hop and R&B transitions to a familiar beat. It’s “Nasty,” her latest hit. “Don’t react,” she says with a sigh.
You have likely heard “Nasty,” a minimalist slut anthem powered by the irresistible call to action: “Is somebody going to match my freak?” Like Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” or City Girls’ “Act Up,” it is one of those ubiquitous hybrid song-memes designed to rouse one’s inner beast, getting the bad bitches to step up and show out. One of said bad bitches was TikTok user Nate Di Winer, effectively a glistening Carnival dancer trapped within a pale British boy’s body. In May, an X user set a pre-existing clip of Di Winer whining and grinding to “Nasty,” and the novelty of ass-shaking, finger-biting geek letting loose was enough to catapult the song to the Billboard charts. Tinashe had already gotten the sense that “Nasty” might blow up; on her BB/Ang3l tour in China, just a few weeks after its release, her fans parroted back its every line and music-video move. “I was walking down the streets of Shanghai one time and saw two girls just doing my choreography, filming whatever their version of TikTok is,” she says. Tinashe riffed on Di Winer’s version, and soon there were more memes, like of pop-culture icons who “matched each other’s freak”: Succession’s Tom and Shiv, Veep’s Dan and Amy. Janet Jackson remixed her own “Nasty” with Tinashe’s on her tour. Tinashe wants things to go further: “I want to hear it in the grocery store, the nail shop. That’s when it really sinks in.”
“Nasty” is a hard-won victory. It’s Tinashe’s first Billboard hit since 2014’s “2 On” (ft. Schoolboy Q), then an auspicious introduction to R&B’s next big thing and the first whiff of her smoky, hedonistic debut, Aquarius. A communal toast to getting drunk, faded, and turnt as fuck, with that devil-may-care ethos that defines every great party, “2 On” peaked at 25 on the Hot 100; one-time YOLO prince Drake even slid in after-hours with an unofficial Soundcloud remix. But Tinashe’s momentum sputtered not long after Aquarius, in large part due to confused direction from her label, RCA. Her follow-up, Joyride, remained in limbo for three years; the title track was poached by, then bought back from, Rihanna. Desperate, Tinashe leaked the single “Party Favors” ft. Young Thug and dropped the moody mixtape Nightride as a conciliatory measure for fans whose patience was wearing thin. Ultimately, Joyride landed as a compromised record with a few standout moments. In 2019, Tinashe finally left RCA to go independent.
When she boasts, on “Nasty,” “I’ve got stamina, they say I’m an athlete,” it’s not just an underappreciated flex but her career’s maxim. Across nearly three decades in entertainment, Tinashe has distinguished herself by her endurance, poise, and balletic agility. Contemporary K-pop idols are sculpted in her image; her photo was saved as the wallpaper on two BTS members’ digital devices. She’s the sporty-sexy blueprint for new-gen singer-dancers like Tate McRae. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, to a Black acting professor dad and a white physical-therapy professor mom, Tinashe began studying jazz, ballet, tap, and hip-hop at the age of 4. Her family moved to DeKalb, Illinois, then L.A. to support her career as a child actor; she appeared on shows such as Avatar: The Last Airbender and Two and a Half Men. A brief stint in the teenybopper girl group the Stunners with Hayley Kiyoko led her to tour with Justin Bieber. Then she launched her solo career in 2011.
Tinashe’s independent phase is a return to her blog-era days, when she taught herself production on YouTube and self-released three successful Soundcloud mixtapes. But while her renewed creative freedom has led to some of the best songs of her career, she’s had to contend with fewer resources and possibly less visibility. Much of the expenses for her tours come out of pocket — “my business manager has been on my ass because I lose so much money” — but she’s willing to pay the price for her art. “If I have only $10,000 in my bank account, and I need to spend that on a project, I’m gonna spend it,” she asserts.
While answering questions, Tinashe is still zoned in to her canvas, announcing her every maneuver like a sports commentator. “I’m getting salmon. I’m getting salmon,” she alerts no one in particular. She peeps the work of an oblivious competitor, the only other patron who’s actually managed to perfectly fade their sky: “I see it, and I’m like, ‘I need to be that good.’” Her voice is pinched, Urkel-like, playfully self-parodying. She works with acrylics at her Hollywood Hills bungalow, mostly painting strange faces. In her off time, she also nurtures 50-something plants, though not cannabis, even though she’s a stoner. (Her initial crop of homegrown weed fell victim to her delinquent Savannah cat, PJ, who couldn’t resist nibbling, so she sources the raw material for her Green T brand from organic farms in Illinois.) Sometimes her youngest brother, Kudzai, will come over to use her at-home studio. One day, she overheard the “hard-hitting, West Coast” beats produced by his friend Troy, or sdtroy, and brought him into the fold. “It’s cool to be able to work with people I have a vibe with,” she says. “It doesn’t need to be somebody who’s done it before.”
Tinashe isn’t afraid to take risks. “I think my duty —” she begins, then pauses, interrupted once again by her own voice on the playlist. “2 On” is blasting on the speakers. “— My responsibility is to challenge myself, which in turn challenges my audience.” The more intricate and confounding a beat is, the more she’s compelled to work with it, an instinct that’s led her toward protean electronic producers such as Machinedrum and Nosaj Thing, from trap beats to footwork, IDM, and drum and bass. RCA had pushed her toward big-name rappers and R&B stars for features as if she couldn’t survive without a male chaperone. (She has retrospectively addressed her songs with Chris Brown and R. Kelly as “embarrassing.”) Now, she recruits smaller, if-you-know-you-know collaborators. I was shocked to see the 20-year-old New Jersey artist Jane Remover, who got her start raising hell in Discord mosh pits with manic edits of Addison Rae, credited on Tinashe’s “Nasty” remix EP; she produced the EP’s best track, “Match My Tweak.” “A lot of my core community has been built online,” Tinashe notes. “It’s been really amazing seeing how that’s continued, keeping an open ear to the streets.”
Although a Grammy or No. 1 album would be “amazing,” Tinashe explains that she’s less interested in mainstream recognition than maintaining her creative standards. The lodestar for her upcoming album, Quantum Baby, is Janet Jackson’s “Empty,” and the result proves that she’s more focused on making her work interesting than digestible. She acknowledges the blessing of “Nasty”’s success. “It’s so much fun,” she says. “I’m aware of how rare a moment like this is.” But she’s not scrambling to ensure that she’ll go viral again. A month and a half after our paint session, she was snubbed by the VMAs; her fan base, long aggrieved by her “underrated” status, was outraged. “They ride for me, so I understand why they would be upset,” she replies nonplussed when we chat about it on the phone later. “I’ve never been nominated. I’ve been ten years in the game, so I don’t have those expectations. I’d just be disappointed, and that’s not fun.”
Tinashe has ample respect for her peers in music; as a bisexual woman, she’s been energized by the growing visibility of queer girls in pop, citing Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish. “There weren’t many at all when I first got into the game.” But her close confidantes are mostly outside the industry, which, she observes, is “not really a great place to make real friendships.” Her best friend is a private investment lawyer whom she met in second grade in the Girl Scouts. She visits her parents at their place near Glendale almost every opportunity she gets when she’s back home. They’re her biggest fans. Her dad once promoted her single in an email to his students; her mom’s Instagram handle is literally @TinasheMomma. “I feel like they empowered me. I have really positive experiences being a young person in the entertainment industry. I know that’s not the case for everyone,” she says. “I love my family so much.”
One day she’ll consider slowing down to start one of her own. She has been relating to Charli XCX’s song “i think about it all of the time,” in which Charli meditates on feeling left behind, excluded from some rarified realm of being because she doesn’t have children. “Whether or not it’s a discussion you’re having, it’s somehow in the back of your mind when you’re in your 30s,” Tinashe says. “I think about, What is the future?” As of now, though, she is happily single, and the thought of sacrificing her career for a partner is unappealing. She would be dissatisfied if she left artistry to rust.
We are now in the final stretch of class, shading in the river banks and stippling them with highlights for dimension. “Honestly, my favorite color we’ve painted with today is black,” Tinashe says, satisfied with her progress. “Because it’s like, it’s so definitive. It’s so certain.”
“Like neutralize that shit,” she continues, growling at the end of her sentence. “BLACK IS POWERFUL!!!”
She puts the finishing touches on her painting. The Paint ’N Pour staff, who had ushered the musician in with the dutiful, expectant hope of children who believe that their mother might let them stay up late if they clean their rooms, line up to take pictures. Gracious, she snaps photos with each of them and then poses in front of a wall of portraits of famous artists — Kendrick Lamar, Cardi B — for the studio’s Instagram. Seeing everyone fawn over her, I was reminded of earlier in the studio, when she shared the biggest lesson of her career. “Let that shit play out. Let it dry,” she said. “It’s not gonna happen in this time frame you think it will happen … but it’ll be way better if you let it marinate.”
