Rising ‘Black Star’ singer Amaarae Takes Center Stage

SOURCE: edition.cnn.com

There are three things Amaarae can’t tour without — and no, it isn’t coke, ketamine and molly, despite what her song “Starkilla” suggests. Think more along the lines of a sauna, daily stretch routine and a bathroom floor so clean she could eat off of it. “Because I’m a huge germaphobe,” she said over the phone from her home in LA. “The slightest thing will put me off, and if I can’t shower because the bathroom is not clean, bro, my whole day is ruined.”

These mindful measures are key, since, in reality, Amaarae is a self-described homebody. But listen to her new album “Black Star,” which she’s promoting with a tour across New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Toronto, and you wouldn’t know. Between lyrics about sex, drugs and spiking drinks, the Ghanaian-American’s public persona is built on being in the club. But the moment she is away from her natural habitat, “it just starts to mess with my mind.”

Now, the rising star may be on the cusp of something big.

Following her critically acclaimed sophomore album, “Fountain Baby” (2023), “Black Star” was breathlessly reviewed across the music press in August, with Rolling Stone calling it a “masterclass in controlled hedonism.” In the last two years, she has toured with Childish Gambino, the musical alter ego of Donald Glover, Kaytranada, and was personally requested by Sabrina Carpenter to open her viral Short N’ Sweet tour in September 2024. This summer she performed at Glastonbury, the UK’s largest music festival, for the first time, and made her Jimmy Kimmel Live debut earlier this fall. It was also the year Amaarae became the first solo Ghanaian female act to perform at Coachella — a lifelong dream, according to the artist. “It’s one thing to dream of something, then it’s another to be forever etched in history as the first person to achieve it from your country,” she said.

Born Ama Serwah Genfi, Amaarae grew up between New Jersey, Georgia and Ghana’s capital Accra. And while each of her hometowns has shaped her music in some way, it’s her West African roots that informed this record. Blending influences from bacardi, a form of South African dance music, and the fast percussion of the French Caribbean zouk scene with “ghetto tech” (a Detroit-style electronic mash-up of house, techno, bass and hiphop), Amaarae is recontextualizing African music, making it pop with high-pitch vocals, samples from Cher, and a guest feature from Naomi Campbell. And if you aren’t sonically adept enough to pick up on all this, the message is explicit in her album cover — the bold tricolor Ghanaian flag remade with Amaarae, dressed in a latex catsuit, as its black star.

It’s a sartorial vibe she intends to bring with her on-stage. “I think about how I want the show to feel. I want it to be really gritty, dirty drums, dirty guitars, just lots of bass. So when I think about clothes, I think about leather, latex. I think about having on dark shades. I think about skirts, mini skirts. I love boots,” she said. “That’s what it feels like to me, just holding that energy of what it means to just be f***ing black, head to toe.”

She opened her performance in New York wearing a sports jacket by Martine Rose and a tulle skirt by Simone Rocha — two cult favorite British designers only the truly fashion-forward would know of. When asked about designers she’d like to work with today, she nodded to Haider Ackermann’s recent collection for Tom Ford at Paris Fashion Week last month. “I think that was definitely the show of the year,” she said.

Breaking the pop star mold

While some may struggle to define Amaarae’s genre-bending music, she knows exactly who she is. “To me, I’m a pop star,” she said, though she is keenly aware that those higher up in the industry might not “put me in that category.”

“Let me choose my words carefully, because I was about to say something crazy,” she continued. “I think the term of what a pop star is has changed completely, and is almost exclusively reserved for White girls.” Missy Elliott, Janet Jackson, Tracy Chapman, Queen Latifah — these were the pop stars of her generation, at least to Amaarae. “We just don’t live in that world anymore,” she said. “Music is so fragmented now. There was a time where hip hop, alternative, RnB were all co-existing in one cauldron, and you were seeing collaborations directly with these artists.” It’s a complaint that has long plagued the pop genre. In 2021, the Filipino-American artist and the three-time Grammy Award winner Olivia Rodrigo made headlines when she told an interviewer she grew up believing pop stars could only be White. Normani voiced similar issues in a Harper’s Bazaar cover story in 2019, where she asked why pop music “had to be so White?”

To qualify now, in Amaarae’s eyes, stars must be “broadly appealing, but also a kick ass performer,” as well as having enviable musical ability. “It’s just not entirely based on talent,” she said. Besides herself, is there anyone she can think of that is deserving of this ever elusive label? “One of my recent favorite pop stars is Doechii,” she said. “Because she checks all those boxes and I respect that. I can see the effort and the work that has gone on over the various years.”

The job description has changed, too. Amaarae is clearly nostalgic for a pre-social media past that seemed to allow artists more creative freedom. She is no longer on the social media site X, after a poorly received Ozempic joke she posted got her called “all types of stupid” by people online. The internet, she said, is “out for blood.” The musician also resents the idea that “artists have to become content creators.” Her peers feel the same: Halsey, FKA Twigs, Florence Welch and Charli XCX have all spoken publicly about record labels pressuring musicians for viral TikToks since the app reached mainstream popularity during the pandemic. “It’s unfortunate,” lamented Amaarae, who thinks this type of overexposure “is the reason why we don’t have mega stars the way that we used to.”

For her current tour, she is eliminating the noise and putting herself center stage, with no backing dancers and no on-screen visuals. The show is just her. “I’m holding up the entire performance,” she said. “I’m really excited about that. It’s never just been me, lights and music.” To her, the experience is freeing. “This is my favorite kind of performance.”