The 22-year-old Baltimore producer DJ Blaqstarr has carved out a weird little space for himself. In his hometown, he's something of a pop phenom, but he's totally unknown outside it. Blaqstarr (no relation to Mos Def or Talib Kweli) makes Baltimore club music, the frenetically physical hybridized form of black dance music that's thrived for nearly two decades in the 410 area code but which has only started to make inroads outside it. And even as club tracks find their way into the record crates of out-of-town hipster DJs, the music's producers have yet to taste anything resembling national fame. Blaqstarr's club-rap tracks for local MCs like Young Leek ("Jiggle It") and D.O.G. ("Ryda Girl") have helped his clients secure major-label contracts, and he's also produced his own apocalyptic local club anthems like "Hands Up Thumbs Down" and "You Keep on Fuckin' Around". But Blaqstarr himself has only recently signed his first national record deal, and it's with a small start-up rather than with a hegemonic major; he's now the second signee to Diplo's Mad Decent label, following the rabble-rousing baile funk trio Bonde Do Role. As Baltimore rap blogger and former Pitchfork contributor Al Shipley recently pointed out to me, there's a pretty good chance that all of Blaqstarr's Mad Decent 12"s combined won't sell as much as one of the mix CDs he sells exclusively at the local Baltimore shoestore chain Downtown Locker Room.
So maybe it makes sense for Blaqstarr to try out his weirdest sounds on the Supastarr EP, his first national release. Club is generally a fairly utilitarian form of dance music; most tracks loop a couple of identifiable drum-breaks and slather them with instant-recognition samples. Most of the track's on Supastarr stick with club's relentless BPM-levels, but they're emptier and spacier, leaning hard on echo-effects and awkwardly lurching beat constructions. More than most club producers, Blaqstarr layers his productions, adding and subtracting different elements throughout their running times. On a few tracks, he also sings in weightlessly airy falsetto-rasp. The title track repeats a single phrase over and over like a mantra ("I like the way you move, I love the way you are/ I love your sexy ways, girl, cause you're my superstar"), giving the song a sort of hypnotic beauty that rarely finds room to surface in a genre as dense and hectic as this one. On another song, "Rockstarrz", he multitracks his voice into a ghostly Boyz II Men chorus, ominously cooing over a loop of fluttering strings and muted horn-stabs. "Tote It" uses gunshot sound-effects as percussion. "Check Me Out Like" phases its ravey synth-beeps back and forth and sounds best when the drums drop out completely. "Shake It to the Ground" has a guest-spot from the 16-year-old female rapper Rye Rye that would sound like garden-variety kiddie-rap if not for Rye Rye's eerie deadpan delivery and for the disorienting layers of echo that Blaqstarr piles on, both of which turn it into something bizarrely ominous and otherworldly.
For all its showy production tricks, though, the EP feels something like a work in progress, a young producer playing around with different sounds to figure out what suits him best. Most of the tracks don't have the fiery immediacy of something like "Hands Up Thumbs Down", and not all of the ideas work. And for anyone used to hearing club on radio mixshows or mix CDs, it'll always be a bit weird to hear a bunch of club tracks arranged as discrete individual songs, not given a chance to build on each other's momentum. But that's fine; this is a twelve-inch, after all, and it almost certainly works better as a DJ tool than as a stand-alone release. And it's still club music; even at its most complicated and counterintuitive, it's still funky and insistent as all hell. But it's also something more than that; when those chilly layers of vocal samples and stripped-down drum-loops work, they add up to something really exciting. If anyone is going to push club music outside Baltimore's city limits and turn it into the bizarre pop subgenre it could be, Blaqstarr could be the one.
