normani - IS THE NAME

After bringing the world to a standstill with one music video, the 23-year-old breath of fresh air is ready to make what’s old new again—including the era of the bona fide pop princess.

- Clover Hope

“ What colours do you want to hear? ”

Normani must have asked this 10 times a day when she started vision boarding the video for “Motivation.” The “you” in question was...you, me, and the other 100 million (and counting) people who would soon stream her bop of the summer on repeat.

In case you took the entire season off from the internet, a quick refresher: Out of nowhere, former Fifth Harmony singer and casual A-list collaborator Normani Kordei Hamilton dropped her first solo single on August 15, and everyone with a screen—from Apple Watches and incognito YouTube windows hidden on work desktops to iPads and even those giant contraptions (“TVs”) some people insist on keeping at home—watched. The dance sequences were the perfect explosions of eye candy none of us knew we needed: full splits on concrete, synchronized twerking on a chain-link fence, elegant ballet pirouettes worthy of Misty Copeland. Not since Jennifer Lopez took jazz, house, and Latin dance breaks in the middle of 1999’s “If You Had My Love”—or since Britney Spears unleashed a sideways body roll, without moving her rib cage one centimeter, in “I’m a Slave 4 U”—had we felt such a collective burst of sheer exhilaration from pop music choreography by an artist not named Beyoncé.

Just like Normani planned, the final product was bursting with colour. Pink, graffitied on her cropped tee, to highlight what she says is the main message of “Motivation”: that women should own their sexuality. Dusky lilac, in the sky behind her during that pas de deux, suggesting some nighttime debauchery might be minutes away. Gold via rows of trumpets: the colour of hit records. And another colour, one Normani wanted to emphasize more than any other.