What It Feels Like to Be Kendall Jenner

I genuinely like Kendall Jenner. That’s not an ironic statement. She carries the whole circus—the cameras, the Kardashian gravitational field, the people who devote real emotional energy to wanting her to fail—with a kind of steady, unbothered cool that most people can’t manufacture even when nobody’s watching. Whatever she has, it reads as real.

Her appearance in Lil Dicky’s Freaky Friday video confirms this. The song’s premise is body-swap—everyone wakes up in someone else’s skin—and the video runs with it through a cast that includes Ed Sheeran, DJ Khaled, and Chris Brown, who famously put Rihanna in the hospital some years ago and then, in a creative choice that still baffles me, had her face tattooed on his neck. The lineup alone tells you what kind of video this is.

Then there’s Kendall. Clearly piloting her body with someone else’s consciousness behind the wheel, she sings: I’m Kendall Jenner! I have a vagina! I’m gonna explore it! The expression on her face is this perfect blend of performative wonder and barely-suppressed laughter. She grabs herself. She looks genuinely delighted by the whole absurd premise. It’s funnier and hotter than it has any right to be, and if you watch the rest of the video, the discovery arc starts to make its own kind of sense.

The body-swap framing lets everyone be ridiculous without consequence. That’s the whole joke. But Kendall commits harder than anyone else in the cast, and that commitment is exactly why I find her compelling in the first place. She knows how dumb this is, and she does it anyway, fully.