“Requiem” Tests The Limits of keshi’s Power

Requiem was supposed to shoot keshi into superstardom. How far has it taken him?

keshi, Island Records

In the lead-up to his second album Requiem, keshi announced an ambitious North American arena tour. keshi, a Vietnamese American singer who has been releasing music since 2018, had long dreamed of playing arenas. The ambition is even underscored in the album’s opening track “Amen” where he deifies himself: “I don’t pray to God that’s a weakness/ I’ve been playing God in arenas.” 

In an interview with USA Today to promote the album, he highlighted the importance of the tour, particularly playing New York City’s legendary Madison Square Garden. “It's the kind of thing where it feels like I can actually die happy,” he said, “and if everything crashed and burned the next day after I played MSG, I'd be very OK. I'd be like, 'Yeah, that was a great run. Everything was worth it.'" 

Over the past three years, keshi has become a cult-like figure to Asian American audiences, even if he sometimes risks becoming a meme for his edgy style and sad boy lyrics. He regularly amasses around eight to nine million monthly listeners on Spotify and his last two tours, which brought him to clubs and theaters, sold out.

His debut album GABRIEL as a major label artist (keshi is signed to Island Records) positioned him as a musician unafraid to experiment with hip-hop, ballads and alt-rock. The album produced several of his biggest viral hits, including “UNDERSTAND”, which captured keshi’s classic confessional style, and the pulsating banger “GET IT”. GABRIEL was a bigger swing at the mainstream than his previous EPs and represented a pivot for the singer towards grander goals. 

His first EPs, like bandaids and The Reaper, featured the introspective music that made keshi into one of this generation’s most important Asian American musicians. But keshi never seemed like an artist interested in being confined to the underground. Whether or not he represented a new generation, keshi’s ambitions always seemed larger than him. His goal isn’t just to be the biggest Asian musician, but to be a superstar. 

Requiem, then, was supposed to build off of this momentum. “Say”, the serviceable lead single, is the most palatable keshi has ever sounded. If you want to know what major label gloss scrubbed over keshi’s wounds and angst sounds like, this is your song. But the track represented a friction: longtime fans who connected with keshi’s sad boy music found the single inauthentic while the general public never listened to it.  “Say”, and later Requiem, never charted on Billboard. The album produced no breakthrough singles, all of which would be crucial for him to sell an arena tour. 

When the arena tour was postponed the week after Requiem’s release, keshi offered no explanation. But fans on the subreddit keshiofficial noted several dates with poor ticket sales and speculated that as the cause. When dates were later re-announced, most had been re-routed to theaters. keshi kept Madison Square Garden.

This week, keshi re-released Requiem as a deluxe album that includes four new tracks, including fan-favorite “Kiss Me Right”. The deluxe album offers a new opportunity to engage with Requiem, particularly in hindsight of an era that ultimately might be remembered as a time when an artist swung hard again. But this time, he missed. 

In its meatiest moments, Requiem reflects keshi’s insatiable desire for stardom even when it leads to his own destruction. The central message of “Amen” is about keshi’s desire to be bigger than how we first met him when he was an emblem of emo destruction. 

“I was doing better till I wanted more,” he sings on the opening track. It is a line that proved to be prophetic but keshi seems unable to stop himself. As he sings the final line, his lithe voice turns into a plea, like a boy willing to make a deal with the devil. “All of the weight of the world on my shoulders, crashing down on me,” he then draws out the final verse into a howl as he insists: “But I want more.”

Three months after the release of Requiem, “Blue”, a single from the independent artist yung kai, began to pop off in the Philippines. The singer seemed to come out of nowhere with only a handful of songs available and no label behind him. But before long, yung kai had amassed over 20 million monthly listeners (more than double keshi’s current stats) and 200 million streams of “blue” on Spotify. This week he was announced on the lineup for 88Rising’s festival Head in the Clouds.

yung kai’s success signifies that a new generation of Asian American artists is beginning to emerge and that music is moving with them. While many artists like bixby and starfall have followed in keshi’s footsteps few have actively challenged his spot like yung kai has. (Compared to “blue’s” 200 million, at his peak, keshi has hit over 300 million streams for “LIMBO”.) 

What does this mean for Requiem then? keshi has never wanted to be confined to success with just Asian Americans. If anything, his reluctance to discuss his ethnicity has been a strategic move to not box himself in. Like Joji, a Japanese Australian artist who blew up with “Glimpse Of Us”, keshi has attempted to rise above racial categorizations in music. But Asian America’s embrace of keshi has been a significant factor in his stardom. There are so few Asian men who display his level of vulnerability and transgressiveness in style that even with the newfound success of yung kai, no one has been able to duplicate keshi’s singularity. Even with yung kai’s success, “blue” can’t match the self-hatred and anxieties keshi bluntly writes about in his music. 

Yet for all of the specificity in his earlier work, on Requiem, keshi operates under a veil of vagueness that obscures him. He would benefit from more precision in the anger and sadness he alludes to on the album. Take the single “Texas” as an example, where keshi writes abstractly about how he misses home. “Take me back to Texas, take me back to seventeen/ Let me race the train tracks just to smell the gasoline/ When we sipped on Moonshine and the sun was third-degree/ When I had a lifetime waiting right in front of me.” 

At its core, “Texas” is about a star who lost his way. “I think I missed the exit,” he muses in the chorus. Yet the details are so thin that it’s impossible to know just how keshi landed in this spot or what he misses about who he used to be. Listeners are then left to fill in the gaps with other songs; to surmise that in his quest for stardom, keshi lost himself and all that mattered to him. Yet without keshi willing to give us a clear narrative, the journey feels flaccid. The emotional knockout “Texas” goes for feels unearned and slight.  

Perhaps this is my biggest problem with Requiem: It aims to say so much about stardom and loneliness but instead falls into generic tropes about excess. When keshi isn’t writing about his craving for fame, he’s writing about women: how he idealizes those from his past (“Dreams”) or how he needs one to feel secure (“Bodies”). On tracks that look at existential themes, he obliquely writes about losing himself but never offers concrete examples of how he fell apart. 

There are certainly angles keshi could take shots at: How he’s become a meme or punching bag for Asian Americans who feel he misrepresents them or the pressures of being the first Asian American to scale such large heights. These are experiences that so few artists can speak about because keshi largely stands alone at his level of fame. He could also write about how fame has tested his relationships with family or his fiance. He could examine, in “Texas”, who he used to be and how that changed in an effort to win stardom. 

I want to hear keshi take me back to the rolling sugar lands of Texas, and to the wide-eyed boy who tested the limits of his potential to reach a success far greater than his forerunners. I want to hear keshi not just allude to the messiness of stardom but to describe it, in vivid detail. 

Yet by wrestling with these ideas keshi would also have to challenge himself; to look at his success not just through the lens of singularity but also identity. The most interesting question for keshi to ask himself is why he could fail. To do this he would have to not just probe his anxieties but those of the culture he’s part of that wonders if there is space for an Asian American like him in music.

Near the end of Requiem, though, keshi does begin to engage with this question on “Just To Die”. Upon it’s release in September, the b-side was largely overlooked in favor of the track that followed it, the experimental song “Id”. But I find myself returning to the lyrics of “Just To Die” which achieves what I think keshi aims for with the entire project: to depict, in striking detail, the fears of what comes after his burst of stardom. “Time after time/ I keep rolling the dice/ It’s done in the blink of an eye,” he sings about how fast time is moving. 

What keshi seems to imply is that he only has one shot to make it. But he seems to not know what the biggest loss would be: to become a person he doesn’t recognize or to crash the momentum towards superstardom. By “Id”, the path becomes circuitous. keshi reprises the final lines of “Amen” and, again, obsererves “I was doing better till I wanted more.” Asian American musicians are often told to take what they can get and to be grateful for what they have. Is keshi egotistical for believing he deserves more?

keshi offers no easy answers here; just the transparency that he’s gambled everything he owns in hopes that someday, he’ll win.