Voguing—at the very least, the fashion now referred to as “outdated means”—was popularized via performances by homosexual males, like these immortalized in Madonna’s 1990 video. Vogue fem, the fashion predominant at present, may solely have been created by trans girls (often called “fem queens” in ballroom, the primarily Black and Latino scene the place voguing emerged). This fashion of dance blends fastidiously female gestures with dramatic storytelling and daring, athletic feats. Ms. Boogie, an Afro-Latina rapper from Brooklyn who got here up within the ballroom scene, equally fuses softness with drama on The Breakdown, wielding the unflinching honesty of Brooklyn drill to depict a life that’s uniquely her personal, but intimately acquainted to different trans girls.
Ms. Boogie carried out for years beneath a unique title, releasing a debut album in 2014 and rising from the U.S. warehouse circuit to European excursions. After publicly asserting her transition in 2018, she started overtly breaking down her new actuality on 2020 single “Fem Queen” that includes Trannilish (“Niggas love chicks with a dick/DMs simply to show it”) and rapping concerning the medicinal energy of getting railed on 2021’s “Dickscipline.” Since then, she’s leveled up her operation—the brand new album launched with a slickly choreographed video—whereas the themes of her work have grown extra complicated. On The Breakdown, she meditates on success with a mix of pleasure and ambivalence, backed by moody, muted manufacturing that lets her storytelling shine.
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Most Brooklyn drill rappers are males, usually recounting tales about dope dealing and violence. Ms. Boogie as a substitute divulges the oft-unseen realities of intercourse work and relationship DL (“down-low”) trans-attracted males. “I’m the plug and the drug,” she raps. “Streets is watching,” so she sends her man a black automobile and asks him to signal an NDA. Such tight-lipped enterprise leaves little room for play: “I don’t want new buddies/It’s a chilly world, I want new Timbs,” go the bars on “Come Once more,” a music whose braggadocious hook (like early-aughts Eve filtered via a codeine blunt) makes one lengthy for extra such catchy moments. However Ms. Boogie’s story requires a unique sound.
Many of the album was produced by Minneapolis’s Boo Boo, aka M Jamison, who leverages her expertise scoring movies. The Breakdown’s melancholy synths and dreamy strings sound like rolling via darkish metropolis streets within the rain, someplace between Blade Runner and the symphonic grit of Mos Def’s “Auditorium.” Producer El Joven leaves metallic fingerprints on “H20” and “Construct Me Up,” whose funky beats echo the confrontational sound of New York’s queer underground. Ahya Simone’s harp weaves ethereal grace all through the album, most gloriously on the closing monitor. (Jamison and Simone are additionally Black trans girls; practically each hand that touched the report, together with its mixing engineer, belongs to a queer or trans particular person of shade.)