Advertisement

Music

Vogue party

ZEBRA KATZ & NJENA REDD FOXX with DJs MIKEQ and BLACKCAT at Black Box Theatre (1087 Queen West), Saturday (June 16), 10 pm. $12.50/$15. TW, RT, SS, PDR. See listing


After a heyday in the early ‘90s, vogue culture is back on the music press’ radar and its sound and references are seeping into dance music and, to a lesser extent, hip-hop. Acts such Blood Orange, Kim Ann Foxman, Beth Ditto, Diplo and Azealia Banks, have all dropped ballroom references or sounds into recent work.[briefbeak]

On Saturday, new school vogue DJ MikeQ and MCs Zebra Katz and Njena Redd Foxx – the duo behind the break-out runway anthemIma Read – will join Toronto’s DJ Blackcat for a party at the Black Box Theatre, a new venue below The Great Hall.

Voguing originates in a mostly gay black underground scene in New York and New Jersey in the 1970s. It evolved from the drag queen tradition of “throwing shade,” or insulting one another, into elaborate balls where queens go head-to-head in runway competitions and dance battles.

The scene migrated to downtown clubs where Madonna picked up on it and cut the hit single Vogue in 1990. The style enjoyed mainstream attention for a few years after that and eventually returned to the underground. In Toronto, the ballroom scene has grown over the past five years thanks to crews such as the House of Monroe and the Toronto Kiki Ballroom Alliance.

“If I’m not DJing on a day that I usually would, I feel empty,” says MikeQ over the phone from his home in New Jersey. “I’m so used to doing it all the time it’s like I have to do it every night now. I wasn’t working last night so I did a Ustream from my house.”

The 26-year-old has weekly parties lined up almost every night of the week, including his Vogue Knights Tuesday party at the Escuelita club in Times Square and a similar one the following night in New Jersey at The Globe, the club that introduced him to the ballroom scene in 2003.

As the founder of New Jersey-based Qween Beat productions, a collective of DJs, dancers, producers and MCs, MikeQ is one the ballroom world’s rising talents. His aggressive, jagged beats are specifically tailored to competitive voguing, the form of dance that rose to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was the subject of the 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning.

The first vogue anthems were Philly soul and disco classics such as MFSB’s seminal Love Is The Message and Salsoul Orchestra’s Love Break (Ooh, I Love It). As dance music changed, the feel-good sounds gave way to dark and minimal house tunes like Armand Van Heldan’s Witch Dokter and Masters At Work’s The Ha Dance, samples of which form the basis for many of today’s ballroom tracks.

The music’s evolution was recently chronicled in the Soul Jazz compilation Voguging: Voguing And The House Ballroom Scene Of New York City 1976-96 and on MikeQ’s more extensive 2009 bootleg, The Ballroom Trilogy.

His introduction to ballroom was at age 18 when he heard a song called Make These Bitches Gag by ball DJ Vjuan Allure – his mentor and one of the genre’s innovators – at the Globe in Newark.

“The music itself was real different from anything I’ve ever heard. The dancing was crazy – especially when they do the dips and drop down to the ground – it totally blew me away,” he says. “I wanted to see more of that and hear more.”

Although the sound is ever-evolving, it’s safe to say today’s’ ballroom tracks are not exactly conducive to juggling your gin and tonic while doing the two-step. The beats are hard, bass-y and fast (around 130 bpm) and recall the grimy aggression of Baltimore and Jersey club music. Recent club tracks that have crossed over into the ballroom world include Major Lazer’s thundering Pon De Floor and Larry Tee and Roxy Cottontail’s Let’s Make Nasty (Bounce Little Kitty).

In addition to the Ballroom Trilogy, MikeQ’s recent releases include a mix for online UK magazine FACT and the EP Let It All Out for DJ Kingdom’s Fade To Mind imprint. He’s currently working on an EP for Diplo’s Mad Decent label and another for Fade To Mind.

“I have the objective to make [music] strictly for the battles, which is people one-on-one on the floor battling each other. Those have to have a certain kind of up-tempo beats,” he explains. “First, I’ll just go in and chop different parts of the original song out that I want to sample and then it’s just about placing samples and sounds in different places. I picture people voguing to help as a guideline.”

MikeQ and Zebra Katz have popped up in articles in Pitchfork and The Guardian connecting them to a so-called new wave of queer hip-hop acts that are influenced by freestyle ballroom MC-ing, but both artists say their scenes have yet to cross-pollinate in a significant way.

“I think the involvement is just starting,” says Ojay Morgan, a.k.a. Zebra Katz. “I’m more of a performance artist. I really haven’t made my official introduction into the ballroom scene. I’ve been to balls but I haven’t really participated. That’s pretty much my only connection aside from the fact that my music makes reference to the ball scene.”

Zebra Katz was born of Morgan’s performance art thesis project at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. The vengeful Ima Read, which also features MC Njena Redd Foxx, was inspired by queer black culture and Paris Is Burning. Diplo’s Jeffree label released it earlier this year and it went viral.

The fashion designer Rick Owens used it during his Paris runway presentation and Morgan landed an opening slot on Lana del Rey’s North American tour. He quit his job as manager of a catering company in Brooklyn to focus on making music full-time.

Morgan is thankful for the attention but is a bit weary of articles associating him with hip-hop this early in his career. It’s a genre that has assimilated so many musical influences and yet remains fixated on specific conventions. Artists that veer too far into pop, dance or even R&B have become the subject of ridicule, as when Hot 97 morning show host Peter Rosenberg derided Nicki Minaj’s single Starships as not “real hip-hop” during a rant on stage at the radio station’s annual Summer Jam concert. (In response, Minaj cancelled her headlining set.)

While the music press has been quick to pin the hip-hop tag on Zebra Katz, Morgan says the mainstream music world hasn’t paid him much attention. “A lot of the media doesn’t really deal with identity and sex,” he says. “It leaves it really vague and unidentifiable when it comes to picking out a gender and a side or viewpoint for sexuality to be discussed.”

He adds: “It’s funny that people automatically assume Ima Read is hip-hop. I guess it’s more rap but I do a lot of dark electro dub and experimental vocals so I don’t know if all my music is going to fit directly in hip-hop. Genres are what I’m trying to reinvestigate and explore and see what works well together. If ballroom and hip-hop work so well together, what else will work?”

He predicts a future where personal style supersedes genre. In his case, a deeper foray into ballroom music and culture may play a part in that.

“The terminology is what’s going to change,” he says. “Jeffree did a huge favour for me by calling Ima Read ‘future music’ as opposed to hip-hop or rap or vogue or ballroom. It lends itself to something that has yet to be determined or defined clearly. It’s just out there.”

@NOWTorontoMusic

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted