Creativity Quote by Chaka Khan

The image Chaka Khan reaches for is deliberately unglamorous: not a crown, not a steering wheel, just one rein, and only some of the time. It’s an artist’s way of refusing the tidy redemption arc our culture loves to staple onto women’s careers - especially Black women’s careers. A rein implies a powerful animal underneath you, momentum already in motion. You’re not inventing the ride; you’re negotiating it. That’s a sly, lived-in metaphor for adulthood when fame, money, family, addiction, industry demands, and plain biology all pull in different directions.

The “thirties” detail matters. Pop mythology treats your twenties as chaos and your thirties as mastery. Khan punctures that. She’s describing partial agency: the dawning ability to intervene, to correct course, to stop being purely dragged by circumstance - without pretending control is total or permanent. “Some of the time” is the key phrase: honest, unvarnished, and quietly feminist. It rejects the expectation that competence should look smooth.

In the context of a music industry that has historically profited from consuming artists while selling the illusion of their effortless confidence, this line reads as a small act of reclamation. It’s also a nod to how success can shrink your autonomy: as your platform grows, so does the machinery around you. Khan’s intent isn’t self-pity; it’s calibration. She’s telling you what adulthood actually feels like from inside the spotlight: not control, but leverage.