RuPaul's Electronic Drag Music
RuPaul is a gifted musician whose work gets overlooked by critics partially because of his considerable television presence hosting The RuPaul Show and RuPaul’s Drag Race, partially because of his exclusive appeal to a specialized niche market.
One of those hissing, pitch-ascending vacuum-cleaner crescendos that have become so fashionable in modern electronic dance music squeals to life, we hear a little vocal blip, and the beat kicks in, a drum machine imbued with the skittering superfast precision that only drum machines can muster, backed by a single repeated keyboard note playing against the rhythm. After a few bars a vocoded munchkin starts muttering a short nonverbal melodic phrase. This could be the start to any garden-variety EDM record, any anonymous DJ pumping up the crowd before rolling out the big hooks. It could be Calvin Harris or Martin Garrix or anybody, take your pick. Then we hear: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome at this time…,” the big hooks are subsequently rolled out, and thus begins Realness, RuPaul’s smashing new album.
RuPaul is a gifted musician whose work gets overlooked by critics partially because of his considerable television presence hosting The RuPaul Show and RuPaul’s Drag Race, partially because of his exclusive appeal to a specialized niche market. (I’m referring to the world’s most famous drag queen as “he” because that’s what the Wikipedia article does; the queen himself claims indifference toward personal pronouns.) Ever since the mid-’90s, RuPaul has been consistently producing a style of sweet, inspirational dance music all his own. He’s not a great singer, often talking his way through the bouncier material, and he has a weakness for Hollywood schlock that can undercut his electromomentum. Riding said momentum, however, his achievement is unique — an astonishing ability to construct a dance album so that the musical whole builds over time, gradually gaining the heat and flash it would in a live club, yet eschewing the monolithic dullness such strategies typically accrue when translated to record, with each song remaining discrete and distinct. This applies to other drag queen music as well, some of which is worth looking into (check out Alaska Thunderfuck’s joyfully obscene Anus; avoid the cheap parody of Willam’s Shartistry in Motion). But RuPaul’s genius for hooks is something else entirely. Realness, out since March, will embed itself permanently in your pleasure center after two and a half plays, making you grin with every digital squiggle, every heavy click of the drum machine.
Despite an omnipresent knack for a kind of frivolous synthesizer figure that always circles around and chomps back on itself, RuPaul’s musical career easily splits into two phases: his disco period, during which he melded the slick keyboards and ostinato strings popularized by artists like Sylvester and Gloria Gaynor into a campy take on the mechanical house music fashionable in the mid-’90s, and his more recent embrace of EDM, whereby he polishes and streamlines the simultaneously glimmering and abrasive megahooks that nowadays can turn sappy ballads into arena anthems and dance clubs into wrestling matches. The disco stuff is smoother, glossier, more elegant, and he sings more, plus it was on “Supermodel (You Better Work),” his first big hit, that he invented his immortal mantra “Sashay! Shantay!” (or perhaps the French imperative sachez chanter). But while albums like 2009’s Champion and 2011’s Glamazon are considerably spottier than 1993’s Supermodel of the World and 1996’s Foxy Lady, with the former two incorporating earnest piano laments and the like, which only detract from the glorious pop whole, I prefer the EDM period — the beats are just that much hotter, the drums that much spikier, the electronic sound effects that much sillier. Unlike such singing drag queens as the aforementioned Alaska Thunderfuck, RuPaul doesn’t put on a flamboyant display of his sexuality, nor do his lyrics particularly matter. He values dance music for its universality, its potential for anonymity, its scientifically engineered fit with human bodily rhythms, for the spiritualsexualemotionalpersonal release inherent in its agility and speed. To my ears, Realness realizes this end like none other of his albums. Whether thanks to the specific array of guest producers or just pure magic happenstance, we have here a scintillating, irresistible dance record that holds together from sneaky beginning to ecstatic end.
Except for a remix of last year’s “Born Naked,” whose additional helping of molten glitz accelerates faster than the norm, and the guitar-heavy “LGBT,” the songs on Realness all fit the same template. Over nonstop hyped-up drum machines, strong, simple keyboard hooks both blocky and rubbery parade by like miniature firecrackers spinning out of control, fizz fizz crackle crackle. The overall construction feels slicker and more graceful than most electrofests of this caliber, yet there’s an immediacy to it, a sort of aggression totally foreign to the disco where such slick graceful craft was born; the result heightens the sound of the EDM synthesizer, expanding all that crunchy metallic spark into an efficient stream of confidence and poise. RuPaul and occasional guest singers chant catchy slogans about liberation and oblivion on the dancefloor as the beats propel them airborne. “The Realness” (produced by mastermixer Eric Kupper, who also contributed to Supermodel of the World) spirals around and around on its bouncy axis, bearing down on a zigzag groove that jolts back and forth askew, with RuPaul archly inciting you to catch and touch the “realness” all drag queens play on. After a long, tension-building intro, “I Blame You” counterpoints two intertwining synthesizers against each other, the higher of which keeps jumping octaves and letting off steam. “Color Me Love” skids over electric rails as its synthetic bassline suddenly morphs into a full keyboard melody and back again, and pitch-altered songbirds repeatedly squeal the word “party.” But it’s all subsumed into the grand sweep, all fed by the same kinetic energy, all unified by the same sprung, chintzy, plastic, elastic, stretchy, bubbly, chirpy, chunky sound. So glossy it could slip from your fingers, Realness cruises and flies through the air with expertly stylized motion.
Then the closing “LGBT” switches up the musical flow, sacrificing the breakneck drum machines of the preceding nine songs for a staunch four-four and, underneath the pulsating keyboards, a guitar playing power chords. Were the preceding “Step It Up” chosen to conclude the record, it would have ended in an elegant but indefinite mood; instead, RuPaul goes out with a massive, triumphant rock anthem/tantrum. “LGBT/You be who you wanna be!” he and a group of friends chant in unison, thus contextualizing the whole record. Perhaps it would be willful to claim the dancefloor catharsis on Realness as a corrective response to social oppression, the anonymity of dance music as an answer to identity crisis, the way ostensibly apolitical lyric poetry calls into question the political realm. But if any music can provide such release, never a given, here’s the album for you. It’s blissful.
Realness and Supermodel of the World are available from Amazon and other online retailers.
