In his memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, former Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley tells a narrative about Naomi Campbell. “[She] referred to as me, from some overseas metropolis,” he writes, “on one among 10 ubiquitous cell telephones she retains in a Hefty zip-lock bag (a cellular phone for every nation is thrown in her carry-on, in addition to a contemporary bottle of Tabasco sauce).” This, to me, is the head of glamor: when the hustle, the grind, that births an icon turns into a part of her legend.
Amaarae needs you to see her sweat. On her pan-Atlantic 2020 debut, The Angel You Don’t Know, the Accra, Atlanta, and New Jersey-raised singer twerked within the mirror and fantasized about shopping for her mother a Bentley. Fountain Child took issues world, blowing up her sound in order that it’d embody a Japanese koto on one monitor and a pattern of Clipse’s “Wamp Wamp (What It Do)” the following. “Angels in Tibet” had Amaarae eyeing up a woman on the membership, attempting to tell apart diamonds from droplets; now, she’s on the heart of the rave, strobe-sliced into sluggish movement, stress-testing her physique and flows in opposition to abrasive Eurodance and catwalk techno. Black Star is the file you make when you may lastly afford the most effective medicine and the suite with a view, lavish them on a lover (or a number of), and start to ask your self: Is that this all there may be?
Following the discharge of Fountain Child, Amaarae visited the nightlife scenes of Miami, Los Angeles, and São Paulo, studied up on Chicago home and Detroit ghettotech, and dove deeper into Ghana’s regional microgenres. Unbeholden to anybody place, Black Star carves out its personal sovereign territory on the dancefloor; name it “CzechSlovakAtlanta,” as declared by Bree Runway amid the laser-pistol crossfire of “Starkilla.” Amaarae’s ambition—a survey of the Black diaspora that uniformly bangs—aligns with and perhaps even surpasses that of Beyoncé’s Renaissance, however her method is way much less didactic. Laid out over Jersey club-meets-highlife single “Girlie-Pop!,” “switching genres until we make it pop” is the album’s solely credo.
To that finish, Black Star is sort of radically populist. DJ Starkillers, a staple of the circuit-party scene, and Charlie Wilson, who fronted R&B radio standbys the Hole Band for many years, quantity among the many visitors. “Fineshyt,” the skeletal echo of a peak-era Pitbull track, cribs from Nightcrawlers’ “Push the Feeling On (The Dub of Doom)” and Swedish Home Mafia. “She’s my new attractive machine/My attractive intercourse machine,” Amaarae croons, making a powerful declare to the Ms. Worldwide title. To acquire the best hooks, she is aware of, requires a little bit of grand larceny. PinkPantheress duet “Kiss Me Via the Telephone pt 2” samples “The Thong Music,” positioning itself as a religious sequel to Soulja Boy’s ever extra prescient OG; “Starkilla” interpolates Kelis’ “Milkshake”; and on the El Guincho coproduction “She Is My Drug,” Amaarae ponders her religion in “love off the medicine”—to the tune of Cher’s “Consider.”
