In 2017, forward of a star-making look on Season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the Chicago artist Shea Couleé wrote, directed, and starred in a lushly shot, intensely modern 10-minute brief movie referred to as Lipstick Metropolis. Couleé takes on two roles: Mrs. Couleé and Shea, unlikely allies who journey by a surreal, hedonistic membership underworld as a way to get Kill Invoice-style revenge on a dishonest husband.
Lipstick Metropolis established Couleé as a artistic drive and magnetic onscreen presence — abilities that turned legendary as she ascended to the highest 4 of her first season of Drag Race, then returned with eyes on the prize to win Drag Race All-Stars 5 in 2020. Her profile has been steadily rising since — she marched within the Las Vegas Pleasure parade with then-presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren in 2020, carried out at Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty Vogue Present the identical yr and, in 2022, got here again for the all-winners seventh version of All Stars, ending within the closing 4. She additionally confirmed that she had been solid in an as-yet-unspecified function for Marvel’s forthcoming Ironheart collection, making her one of many first non-binary actors within the MCU.
Extra instantly, Couleé has a musical mission to supply her followers, knowledgeable by the heady mixture of excessive trend, dance, and gritty nightlife that have been showcased in Lipstick Metropolis. The album, titled 8 (out Feb. 24), and her headlining Lipstick Ball Tour later this yr have been molded by her experiences developing within the Chicago scene.
“It truly is a metaphor for what I really feel prefer it’s like being a Black queer artistic, particularly in drag and gender non-conforming artwork. All the pieces we do is all the time underground,” Couleé, who makes use of she/her and so they/them pronouns, says on a latest Zoom name with Rolling Stone.
The story on the album is impressed by the Starvation Video games and takes place in a fictional world Couleé created referred to as Lipstick Metropolis, which she imagined as having a social divide of elite “diamonds” and underclass “dolls.” Each eight years, the Lipstick Ball is held to find out if a doll will get to rise into diamond territory. The album 8 looks like a visit by that underground, a spot each horny and just a little harmful.
“It’s a narrative of the have and have-nots,” Couleé explains. “The dolls, they’re the entertainers, the artists. They’re those who entertain and breathe life into Lipstick Metropolis. It’s the leisure that principally powers the town, and all of the diamonds simply inherit it.”
Couleé is aware of firsthand of the nightlife and its social strata, and likewise of its inexorable, seductive tug. She cites Chicago’s recurring get together “Queen!” at Smartbar, a subterranean dance membership, as being foundational for the way in which she approaches her drag and music. High-tier DJs like Michael Serafini, Honey Dijon, Blessed Madonna, and Derrick Carter have all spun for the various solid of revelers there.
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@studiomarchal / Nicolas Marchal*
“You descend into this darkish night time membership, however then whenever you get there it’s essentially the most fantastically dressed membership children, drag queens, trans ladies, circuit boys, and CEOs — everyone,” she says. “It’s this loopy mixture of all these completely different folks and their particular person experiences, and the one factor that actually unites them is the music and the dance flooring.”
To that finish, 8 doesn’t essentially require one to grasp its idea as a way to derive enjoyment from it. It was constructed with our bodies and motion in thoughts, gliding nimbly by silky R&B and traditional disco to soulful home and brash hip-hop. Working with collaborators like Mario Winans (an prolonged member of the Winans gospel household), manufacturing trio the Caesars, and Sam Sparro, Couleé delved deeper into songwriting than ever earlier than. The kind of fiery, biting rap she wrote for Drag Race is prolonged to full songs, nestled alongside swish, melodic hooks and harmonies that draw on her church-music upbringing.
“That was my first expertise ever with singing, in my youth choir at my church,” she says. “That’s in all probability the place I developed my ear and simply with the ability to hear harmonies and melodies.”
Although it’s not essentially overt, there’s a thread of gospel music that twists into elements of 8, because it does with a lot of home and disco. DJs immersed in each typically make the connections specific — the Lipstick Metropolis movie featured a Blessed Madonna monitor that was a flip of the Joubert Singers’ disco-funk traditional “Stand on the Phrase,” for instance — and Couleé recollects seeing a latest Honey Dijon set that felt like being transported heavenward.
“It jogged my memory of when Mother could be bumping her gospel albums, cleansing the home. It simply felt so intrinsically protected and actual and linked,” she says. “Black queer folks, now we have plenty of these shared experiences, and there’s one thing so uniting and nice about home music. There are occasions the place Derrick Carter will spin the Clark Sisters and weave gospel into the set. We’re on the dance flooring, hitting poppers, praising God” — she laughs on the reminiscence — “that’s what goals are fabricated from!”
Although Couleé had been envisioning and dealing on 8 for a while, the mainstream revival of home and disco sounds from Beyoncé, Drake, and others in 2022 makes it really feel very a lot of the second.
“I used to be like, ‘I actually wish to get in there earlier than [house] actually, actually blows up so it doesn’t really feel like I’m following a pattern,’ nevertheless it does come from some place that’s actual and real,” she says. “I really feel like — whew — thank God, I’m getting in there proper in time … earlier than we return to dubstep or one thing.”
The album’s centerpiece is a three-song stretch encompassing “Let Go,” “Your Title,” and “Materials,” an arc from late-night romantic intrigue to assured glow-up. “Earlier than the night time is completed I wanna know/Will you’re taking me house?” she sings on “Your Title,” completely evoking that feeling of sexual power and prospects that permeates some queer areas within the wee hours.
“These three proper there are for me the pocket of what the album looks like,” Couleé explains. She’ll carry a portion of the album to life in March as she opens for dance-pop favourite Betty Who on the Large! Tour, which runs by April 1, however the full spectacle will happen at her headlining exhibits that kick off April 14 in Glasgow, Scotland. She’s been busily filming visuals for that trek, in addition to album-marketing functions. “I’m doing plenty of drag!” she says.
The artwork of drag is a hot-button concern of late for conservative leaders in the US, with proposed payments concentrating on drag efficiency (and who’s allowed to see it) in states together with Tennessee, Montana, Arizona, and Arkansas. Couleé says the notion that it’s harming kids is a fiction that distracts from the very actual concern of gun violence that has taken numerous kids’s lives on this nation. In the meantime, conservative leaders are obsessive about the concept that drag queens are out to commit some type of horrible sexual crime.
“They all the time assume it’s a sexual perversion,” she says. “And it’s like, ‘Child, there’s approach an excessive amount of couch cushion foam and tights to penetrate something. Ain’t no person havin’ intercourse! How? How?‘”
For Couleé, drag has been a pathway to success and alternatives she may have solely imagined when she was youthful. By means of her rise, she has steadily reiterated that she needs her drag to function a celebration of Black ladies — her appears to be like have typically riffed on Naomi Campbell, Grace Jones, and even her personal mom in a single memorable promenade costume problem from All Stars.
“I’ve spoken lots about my search to consistently really feel in contact with the divine, and I really feel like Black ladies are really divine creatures,” she says. “So many issues I really feel like about this world and society are constructed to not edify and defend them, so no matter I can do to assist replicate their magnificence, their grace, their power again on this planet and make them really feel seen, I’ll do.”
Little is at present recognized about Couleé’s function on the Marvel collection Ironheart, which was initially slated to premiere in late 2023 however could also be pushed to a later date. She admits she was nervous to step out of the drag world, however dove deep into making the movie. “I actually labored as laborious as I may on that set,” she says. “I introduced my greatest self each day and did precisely all the pieces I may to be the most effective that I may to dwell as much as the usual of being a part of such an enormous universe. It was actually nice. I cherished the method, the administrators, the solid. All people was superb.”
As one of the bodily gifted dancers and actors in Drag Race historical past, the chance means the world to Couleé and connects again to an earlier time in her life. “Even earlier than doing drag, as a child, I wished to exist in a superhero universe,” she says. “I wished to be a Energy Ranger so dangerous. I used to apply struggle choreography in my front room, in my yard. Once I informed my mother about getting solid within the collection, she was identical to, ‘Wow, all these years of flipping round in my front room paid off!’”
That realization of a childhood dream is gasoline for Couleé to proceed reaching for large issues. She’s already seen it repay together with her Drag Race experiences, and now she’s on the verge of ascending even increased. It’s just a little like her Lipstick Ball come to life.
“We solely get this one go at it, and all of us should really feel the happiness of aspiring in the direction of one thing actually giant that will really feel unattainable and watching it come true,” she says. “That’s to not say it doesn’t contain work and dedication and apply, nevertheless it’s a affirmation that you are able to do it.”
As she famously said on Drag Race, she’s Shea Couleé and he or she got here to slay. And, as her huge year-in-progress attests, she additionally got here to remain.