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“I’m like a dirty reveler. I used to throw illegal parties – not too long ago.
So said Our Lady one night via Zoom from her home in London — some 4,000 miles from the Chicago nightclub scene where she made her name, and equally far from her native Kentucky, where she was “poor as hell” and first immersed in it. She herself is in the scene. “Then when you’re talking to people working in an office about what they think of your music, and suddenly there’s actual money involved,” she continued, “it seems crazy.”
Just weeks away from the release of her debut album, Extremely fast46-year-old artist Marea Stamper is in the midst of this madness. After years of releasing remixes and singles on independent labels, including her own We Still Believe label, The Blessed Madonna signed with Major Recordings/Warner Records during the pandemic. The move puts an artist with subversive tendencies — who shares political views on social media and still regularly attends illegal parties — squarely within the industry.
“Someone has to get in,” she said. “If I’m going to be in this system that has all these levers of power, my job is to be a little shard of glass under someone’s feet.”
Released on October 18th, Extremely fast — 24 tracks long, culled from more than 100 hours of music — began during the pandemic. During this time, the Virgin Mary charted what she thought were perfect songs, breaking down Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run” into their basic elements for better understanding. Their power.
This self-taught music theory continued during what the producer calls “super-lockdown,” when she was confined to her London home with virus-induced asthma. During that time, she was tasked with revamping Dua Lipa’s 2020 album, future nostalgia,Enter Club Future Nostalgia “megamix” – a project in which she welcomes everyone from dance legend Moodyman to Madonna herself.
Unable to work with a studio engineer, The Blessed Madonna handled all the technical aspects of the big mix herself, poring over YouTube tutorials and getting instructions from friends over the phone. Then, unfortunately, in the midst of all this, her father died of COVID-19. She had to identify his body via email. “It was terrible,” she recalled. The ordeal not only sharpened her ability to “get the things I wanted to say out of my head,” but also reinforced her goal of making a dance record that was not only great, but personal.
exist Extremely fastVirgin Mary and a group of collaborators she calls the “God Squad” bring a fresh, soulful, often joyful, occasionally challenging style to club music. Kylie Minogue sings about being “six deep in a bathroom stall” in the piano-accompanied party song “Edge of Saturday Night.” (RAYE was originally slated to star, but had to drop out due to the failure of her own career.) Chicago mansion royalty Jamie Principle recounts nights spent in the city’s mysterious warehouses in “We Still Believe.” Her late father expressed how her success “filled my heart with joy” in an audio message on “Somebody’s Daughter.” During interludes, she and her collaborators giggle through impromptu giggles captured by hot microphones.
“I feel like most dance music records don’t have a producer in them,” says Madonna. “They’re kind of designed in a lab…but someone has to make the decision.”
So she decided to go against what she often heard while traveling the world as a frequently touring DJ. “There were songs I only heard in Uber, and I couldn’t tell them apart, and I had no idea who these girls were, and they were all auto-tuned to their fucking graves,” she said. “That’s bad for art, and bad art is bad for culture and thinking.”
Writing sessions took place in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, and at Imogen Heap’s home in Essex, England. There, the Virgin Mary and her husband, along with a group including electronic duo Joy (Anonymous), gathered during the 2021 holidays. The pair appeared in Take Me Higher.
She also became friends with Fred again. advertising billboard2022 Academy Award Nominated Hot Dance/Electronic Songs Charts and Final Scene Soundtracks triangle of sadness. Virgin Mary said that witnessing “Beatlemania erupting around Fred” (who she described as “so smart, so good at what he did, and so nice that it made you want to kill him”), Because it’s all true”) makes her question her goals. “I thought, ‘Should I want that?’ I was kind of devastated,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Is this record going to do what I want it to do? Am I reinforcing the status quo of dance music or am I going against it?
That said, with the dance music scene remaining noticeably quiet during the US election, I thought this scene’s de facto party line about dance as a place for escapism might feel like escapism during world events .
“This is not an escape, this is boring,” Our Lady said. “Rich people want to stay rich. People have secured their bags, but it’s not enough. I understand that. I’m from Kentucky. I grew up poor and deep down I always Worried that I was going to run out of money and food, that something was going to go wrong, I went to the Salvation Army daycare and the food bank came to us and gave us formula, Karo syrup, and pancake mix, and that was it. Growing up, the water in the toilets there froze, which was terrible.
“I’m worried about not being able to work all the time,” she continued, “because no matter how much security I have, I’ll never feel like it’s enough. Even if it’s enough for me, I still have friends in America. What if something goes wrong? What if we have to go find them? So I do understand the desire to not mess with your bag but the only thing that scares me more is being a giant shit.
“We should all get rich and go to Ibiza and stop caring about politics and stop saying things that make people upset,” she continued. But for a self-proclaimed “s-thead raver,” that fate is unlikely.
