The 2010s File Feature
Faking It
Faking It: Calvin Harris, Kehlani, Lil Yachty, and the Architecture of Emotional Distance "Faking It," released by Calvin Harris featuring Kehlani and Lil Ya…
01 The Story
Faking It: Calvin Harris, Kehlani, Lil Yachty, and the Architecture of Emotional Distance
"Faking It," released by Calvin Harris featuring Kehlani and Lil Yachty, charted on the Billboard Hot 100 beginning December 9, 2017, entering at position 100 before climbing to its peak of number 94 the following week. The track appeared for a total of four weeks on the chart, a modest run that nonetheless represented solid mainstream visibility for a track from Harris's ambitious 2017 project Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1, one of the more unusual albums in recent electronic pop history. The song's pairing of rising R&B star Kehlani with the Atlanta rapper Lil Yachty, under Calvin Harris's production umbrella, exemplified the album's genre-blending philosophy and its willingness to make unexpected combinations work through sheer production craft.
Adam Richard Wiles, known professionally as Calvin Harris, was born on January 17, 1984, in Dumfries, Scotland, and had established himself by 2017 as one of the most commercially successful producers and DJs in the world. His run of number-one singles spanning multiple years, collaborations with Rihanna, Ellie Goulding, Sam Smith, and others, had made him a reliable commercial force who could consistently produce mainstream radio hits. Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 represented a deliberate departure from that commercial formula, drawing on the influence of 1970s and 1980s funk and soul while maintaining the pop accessibility that had defined his career.
The album was recorded primarily in Los Angeles and featured an extensive list of guest artists from across the pop, R&B, and hip-hop worlds. Harris organized the project around a specific Californian funk aesthetic, characterized by warm basslines, bright synthesizers, and the kind of feel-good atmosphere that the title explicitly referenced. "Faking It" occupied a more emotionally nuanced space within the album than some of its more overtly joyful tracks, introducing themes of emotional disconnection and performed happiness that sat interestingly against the record's sunny production values.
Kehlani Ashley Parrish, born August 24, 1995, in Oakland, California, had emerged as one of R&B's most promising voices in the mid-2010s, with mixtapes including You Should Be Here earning critical praise and Grammy consideration. Her voice, which combined technical proficiency with a confessional emotional directness, made her a sought-after collaborator across genres. Her contribution to "Faking It" placed her vocal performance at the song's emotional center, as the track's themes of performed emotional states aligned naturally with the introspective mode that characterized much of her solo work.
Miles McCollum, performing as Lil Yachty, was born August 23, 1997, in Mableton, Georgia, and had become one of rap's most divisive and intriguing figures in 2016 and 2017. His candy-colored visual aesthetic, melodic approach to rap, and explicitly pop-friendly sensibility had generated enormous controversy within hip-hop circles even as it attracted massive streaming numbers and commercial attention. His presence on "Faking It" alongside Kehlani was somewhat unexpected, placing his more playful aesthetic in conversation with her more introspective R&B approach. The pairing worked largely because Harris's production created common ground that could accommodate both artists' sensibilities.
The production on "Faking It" exemplifies the Funk Wav Bounces aesthetic in its more reflective mode. Where some album tracks were unambiguously celebratory in their funk-influenced grooves, "Faking It" introduced layered synthesizer textures and a slightly more melancholy chord progression that gave the song emotional depth beyond straightforward dance-floor appeal. Harris's production choices throughout the album demonstrated that the funk revival aesthetic could carry complex emotional content alongside its more obviously pleasurable dimensions.
The album as a whole received broadly positive critical reception. Rolling Stone called it "the summer's best feel-good record," and other major publications praised Harris's ability to assemble such a diverse roster of guests into a coherent artistic statement. "Faking It" was frequently cited in reviews as one of the album's more nuanced moments, a track where the thematic content added an interesting layer to the otherwise predominantly upbeat collection. The contrast between the production's warmth and the lyrical content's emotional ambivalence was seen by critics as one of the album's more sophisticated creative choices.
The Hot 100 chart performance, modest by the standards of Calvin Harris's biggest hits, reflected the song's position as an album deep cut that attracted attention through streaming rather than through the radio promotion that had powered his larger commercial successes. Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 was conceived more as an artistic statement than as a machine for generating individual hit singles, and "Faking It" was one of several tracks that found Hot 100 visibility without being primary commercial focuses of the album's release strategy.
The song accumulated an estimated 46 million YouTube views, consistent with the steady streaming presence that characterized the album's performance over the months following its release. The video production reflected the album's aesthetic sensibility, California-influenced visuals that combined the warmth of its production with the more complicated emotional content of this particular track's subject matter.
For Kehlani, the collaboration contributed to a period of growing mainstream visibility that would eventually lead to her debut studio album SweetSexySavage receiving significant commercial attention. For Lil Yachty, the collaboration was one of several high-profile features that demonstrated his appeal across genre contexts beyond his primary hip-hop positioning. For Harris, "Faking It" was a demonstration that his producer instincts could match artists with material in ways that revealed new dimensions of those artists' capabilities.
Genre Convergence and the 2017 Pop Landscape
The song's existence at the intersection of electronic pop, R&B, and trap hip-hop reflected the breakdown of genre walls that had accelerated through the mid-2010s. By 2017, the notion that a Scottish EDM producer, an Oakland R&B singer, and a Georgia rapper could naturally share the same track without it feeling like a forced crossover stunt had become a realistic description of how pop music was actually operating. "Faking It" was in this respect a document of its precise cultural moment, a period when the old genre categories were dissolving into a more fluid mainstream pop ecosystem.
Calvin Harris's ability to navigate that ecosystem, to bring together artists who seemed to belong to different worlds and find the sonic common ground where their contributions could coexist and enhance each other, was on full display in "Faking It." The track stands as one of the more successful examples of the Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 collaborative philosophy, where the chemistry between artists was more important than any conventional logic of genre compatibility.
02 Song Meaning
Faking It: Performance, Emotional Authenticity, and the Distance Between Feeling and Display
"Faking It" explores the gap between how emotions are performed in social and romantic contexts and how they are actually experienced in private. The song's central theme, the maintenance of an emotional performance that does not correspond to genuine inner states, is one that resonates across a wide range of human experiences and is particularly legible in the context of relationships where one or both parties continue to present feelings that have shifted or disappeared. Kehlani's vocal contribution anchors this theme in the specific register of romantic disconnection, while Lil Yachty's verse adds a parallel perspective that complicates any simple reading of who is doing the faking and why.
The title phrase "faking it" is deliberately ambiguous about several things simultaneously: faking what, for whom, and to what end. In the romantic context the song primarily inhabits, it suggests the performance of emotional presence or desire that has departed, the maintenance of relationship behaviors and expressions that no longer correspond to authentic feeling. This experience is common enough to be immediately recognizable, but the song's interest lies in its willingness to examine it honestly rather than either condemning the performer or celebrating the deception.
Kehlani's vocal approach throughout the track brings a confessional quality that makes the song's themes feel genuinely rather than conventionally honest. Her voice carries the kind of emotional texture that signals lived experience rather than performed emotion, which creates an interesting resonance within a song explicitly about performed emotion. The sincerity of the performance is at odds with the described content, and that tension generates much of the song's emotional complexity. Calvin Harris's production surrounds this performance with warmth and light that similarly complicates the lyrical content, creating a sonic environment that feels more like comfort than distress even as the words describe something more ambivalent.
The production's relationship to the lyrical content is one of the song's more sophisticated aspects. The funk-influenced warmth of the beat, characteristic of the broader Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 aesthetic, could theoretically make the song feel incongruous, a troubling emotional admission set to music that would be more at home at a celebratory occasion. But the contrast works in the song's favor by mimicking the structure of the experience being described: putting on a pleasant exterior while carrying something more complicated inside. The track performs its own theme through the relationship between its sound and its subject.
Lil Yachty's contribution introduces the perspective of someone who may be a parallel participant in the performance, also faking a version of feeling for complicated reasons. His inclusion is significant because it shifts the song from a single-perspective confession into something more like a dialogue about mutual performance, raising questions about whether the faking is being done by one party or by both, and whether the relationship exists primarily as a shared performance rather than a genuine emotional exchange. This complication prevents the song from settling into a simple victim-and-perpetrator narrative and instead positions both parties as complex agents in an emotionally ambiguous situation.
The song's meaning within the context of 2017 popular music also reflects broader cultural conversations about authenticity and performance that were particularly prominent in the era of social media self-presentation. The concept of "faking it," performing a version of one's emotional life for an audience, had acquired additional layers of meaning in a context where presenting idealized versions of relationships and emotional states on platforms like Instagram had become normalized and even expected. "Faking It" speaks to both the intimate interpersonal version of this phenomenon and, implicitly, to its more public social media manifestation.
The California summer aesthetic that Harris imposed on the entire album adds a specific cultural dimension to this song's meaning. The idealized California lifestyle, sunshine, parties, beautiful people performing happiness, is itself one of the more elaborate cultural fakes in American popular mythology. Situating a song about emotional inauthenticity within that aesthetic is not accidental but rather a comment on the specific cultural context where performance of happiness and success has become particularly pervasive and where the gap between presentation and reality is correspondingly wide.
Ultimately, "Faking It" is most meaningful as an honest acknowledgment of a common but rarely directly addressed emotional experience. The willingness to name the performance, to acknowledge that one is going through emotional motions without the corresponding genuine feeling, is a form of authenticity that undermines the performance it describes. The song is at once a description of faking and an act of not faking, a paradox that gives it an emotional resonance beyond what its relatively conventional pop structure might initially suggest. That paradox, managed through the collaboration between Harris's production instincts, Kehlani's confessional vocal honesty, and Yachty's complicating perspective, is the track's most lasting creative achievement.
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