In his memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, former Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley tells a story about Naomi Campbell. “[She] called me, from some foreign city,” he writes, “on one of 10 ubiquitous cell phones she keeps in a Hefty zip-lock bag (a cell phone for each country is thrown in her carry-on, as well as a fresh bottle of Tabasco sauce).” This, to me, is the pinnacle of glamor: when the hustle, the grind, that births an icon becomes part of her legend.
Amaarae wants 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 in the mirror and fantasized about buying her mom a Bentley. Fountain Baby took things global, blowing up her sound so that it might encompass a Japanese koto on one track and a sample of Clipse’s “Wamp Wamp (What It Do)” the next. “Angels in Tibet” had Amaarae eyeing up a girl at the club, trying to distinguish diamonds from droplets; now, she’s at the center of the rave, strobe-sliced into slow motion, stress-testing her body and flows against abrasive Eurodance and catwalk techno. Black Star is the record you make when you can finally afford the best drugs and the suite with a view, lavish them on a lover (or several), and begin to ask yourself: Is this all there is?
Following the release of Fountain Baby, Amaarae visited the nightlife scenes of Miami, Los Angeles, and São Paulo, studied up on Chicago house and Detroit ghettotech, and dove deeper into Ghana’s regional microgenres. Unbeholden to any one place, Black Star carves out its own sovereign territory on the dancefloor; call 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 maybe even surpasses that of Beyoncé’s Renaissance, but her approach is far less didactic. Laid out over Jersey club-meets-highlife single “Girlie-Pop!,” “switching genres till we make it pop” is the album’s only credo.
To that end, Black Star is almost radically populist. DJ Starkillers, a staple of the circuit-party scene, and Charlie Wilson, who fronted R&B radio standbys the Gap Band for decades, number among the guests. “Fineshyt,” the skeletal echo of a peak-era Pitbull song, cribs from Nightcrawlers’ “Push the Feeling On (The Dub of Doom)” and Swedish House Mafia. “She’s my new sexy machine/My sexy sex machine,” Amaarae croons, making a strong claim to the Ms. Worldwide title. To obtain the finest hooks, she knows, requires a bit of grand larceny. PinkPantheress duet “Kiss Me Thru the Phone pt 2” samples “The Thong Song,” positioning itself as a spiritual sequel to Soulja Boy’s ever more prescient OG; “Starkilla” interpolates Kelis’ “Milkshake”; and on the El Guincho coproduction “She Is My Drug,” Amaarae ponders her faith in “love off the drugs”—to the tune of Cher’s “Believe.”
For every rave-up on Black Star—soaked in codeine and dark liquor, powder-dusted in ketamine, valium, and coke—a comedown. While “She Is My Drug” circles the drain, the mesmeric, mesopelagic deep house of “B2B” abruptly dissolves into feathery Spanish guitar and vaporous strings. Next to Fountain Baby’s splashy bombast, Amaarae’s embrace of tension and restraint is both audacious and inspired. Even the breakdowns on “Stuck Up,” “Kiss Me Thru the Phone,” and “100DRUM” can’t seem to break the tolerance threshold, fleeting highs to keep you upright until the next bump. These tracks yearn for 10-minute Richard X trance remixes, but ecstasy remains out of reach. The molly will just have to do.
Pursued by hangovers and hangers-on, Amaarae has never sounded quite so guarded. “This bitch likes me/And I like this bitch for now,” she jeers on album opener “Stuck Up,” an armored Escalade of Brazilian funk and trance synths. Only as the orchestral, drumless “Dream Scenario” swerves through the city on the way to a late-night rendezvous does Black Star’s sleek, lacquered surface begin to crack, revealing a glimpse of the fleshy thing at its center. Amaarae can’t help cutting her sincerity with a bar like “My bitch style like Edna Mode/Can’t put on no cape for her,” but then Charlie Wilson shows up, his buttery vocal runs like the first rays of sun beaming down on the rooftop afters.
It doesn’t take long for the paranoia to close back in. Black Star might be for Amaarae what Dirty Sprite 2 was for Future: a nihilistic, leaned-out, luxuriously appointed birdcage. All windows, no doors. Authenticity in the pop-industrial complex is a complex question, and Afrobeats still runs on the braintrust structure—crack teams of career songwriters and producers cranking out hits. Amaarae, though, is an auteur; we see her the way she wants us to. In the video for Black Star’s hot and heavy lead single “S.M.O.,” which draws on Ghanaian kpanlogo and zouk rhythms, she polishes Iveth Stunner’s voluptuous ass, paying homage to an infamous 2005 Steven Klein photoshoot starring Tom Ford. She’s the model pumping the runway, and the designer in the front row, and the music blasting over the speakers. We’re in CzechSlovakAtlanta now, baby, and Amaarae’s a superstar.
