The Black Madonna is The DJ Of The Year

Mixmag’s DJ of the year isn’t just a fantastic, eclectic selector, capable of lifting a dancefloor to a state of euphoria, she’s a force for positivity and change at a time when we need it more than ever

As far as birthday presents go, The Black Madonna’s haul isn’t looking bad. She’s hardly five minutes into her set at Liverpool’s Invisible Wind Factory – and barely an hour into her 39th year – and she’s chalked up a jacket (directed to the DJ booth with an adulatory zeal), a stage invader (same, pretty much), and a greetings card from two people down the front (‘All You Need Is Love’ reads the message, of course). You could say The Black Madonna’s fans are demonstrative types, but then so is she. Whether it’s turning pirouettes in the booth to bathhouse disco or plunging the crowd into a 5AM singalong to ‘Pump Up The Jam’, Marea Stamper can convert the most resigned 1AM agnostic into a believer by closing time. But while a danced-out Mixmag seeks replenishment from a backstage birthday cake, she knows her limits. “It’s the last year of my dirty thirties,” she reflects, sagely, declining a celebratory bottle of bourbon. “You don’t have to end every birthday by barfing on your shoes.”

The Black Madonna: if there’s anyone who has stopped dance culture from barfing on its shoes, it’s her. At once ambassador, agitator and outsider-in-chief, she has risen from the brink of obscurity to become a powerful and positive force within electronic music in 2016. Triangulating the sweet spot between techno, disco and house, Marea draws from a font of 50 years of dance music – and its original messages of unity and radicalism – to create a tonic for the present. And we can’t get enough. This summer saw her conquer everywhere from Dekmantel to DC10, catapulting her to even huger audiences than the ones she’d established through her marathon Panorama Bar DJ sets, seismic Boiler Room outings and releases for Home Taping Is Killing Music, Stripped & Chewed and Argot. Now, as the dust settles on a victorious 2016, here’s one Eternal truth: dance music is better with her in it.

As we hitch a ride on the final weekend of a gruelling European tour, Mixmag is immediately struck by her warmth and sense of humour. But then it’s these very qualities that, she claims, have facilitated her success. “We were just coming out of the age of steely, emotionless techno guy,” she smiles, over a restorative pot of Earl Grey the day after her birthday celebrations. “Then I come in and I’m like, ‘Hey, what’s up you guys! Love yooooou!” Less heart-hands, more hand on heart, Marea is the inverse of emotionless techno guy: excitable, articulate... maternal? “You know, there’s a little mom thing in it too. Totally. Totally!” But if she’s dance music’s mom, she’s a rad, weird and decidedly cool mom. Dressed in a black vest, her prominent tattoos and short, freshly bleached undercut marks her out against the formally dressed group that drifts into the hotel lobby: a zine writer, perhaps, lost at an estate agent’s away day. She’s also a voracious reader and a practicing, if progressive, Catholic – her alias refers to some of the oldest European icons which depict Mary with dark features, made of dark wood or stone or darkened over time by candle smoke: a charged symbol of spirituality and femininity.

However, that this Black Madonna sitting in front of us should be an icon of quite another stripe doesn’t sit so well. “I’m not sure what the tipping point was, but all of a sudden the cameraphones were everywhere,” she says, of her visible and growing fanbase. “That’s a very surreal and difficult thing to adjust to. I imagine it’s the sort of thing that happens to people who look like Marcel Dettmann.” We ask her to elaborate, and her eyes pop behind her thick, black frames: “I’m a 40-year-old woman who looks like a 40-year-old woman!” she says.

Still, if she makes a somewhat unconventional underground star, she’s used to standing out. Born in a small town in rural Kentucky, her mother was a librarian, her father a blues musician. Marea’s accent, though, is too faint for this Brit to detect other than the way she sometimes reworks ‘girls’ into ‘gals’. They were a poor but intellectual family, and it’s her grandfather in particular, a philosophy professor, minister and contemporary of CS Lewis, who Marea looked up to.

“He was one of the greatest readers of all time; I read a lot of things that he did. Just about everything that Thomas Merton’s ever written, a lot of religious stuff, aesthetics, too.” Inevitably, she was a precocious kid and – also inevitably – bullies made her life hell. “I used to take a bus to middle school,” she begins; her demeanour crumples, incredulous at the memory. “There weren’t enough seats for everyone to have their own. I can remember people refusing to let me sit down with them. When the bus would come I would just pray that someone was sick so there’d be an empty row, so I wouldn’t have to just stand there.”

Music became her means of self-preservation. “I don’t think I can over-emphasise what a big role bullying played in driving me to completely dissolve into music,” she says. She tells me she would sneak to the toilet just to listen to her Walkman, and it was there, amid the municipal porcelain, that she nurtured a vivid fantasy world populated by Madonna and Deee-Lite’s Lady Miss Kier. These two early musical obsessions were analogues for freedom. And when an older friend snuck her into her an illegal rave aged just 14, she’d found her own piece of it.

“It was wonderful, it was everything high school wasn’t. It was just total freedom to be who I was,” she recalls of that first party. Against a backdrop of Belgian hardcore, Pucci leggings and fellow social outcasts, she found herself – and there was no going back. Two years later she had dropped out of school to make a living selling mixtapes at illegal parties. As she and her friends travelled from rave to rave, hawking wares that, she concedes, leaned heavily on the University of Kentucky print lab, she become enmeshed in the Midwestern rave scene. It would have a lasting and indelible affect on her DJing style: “There’s always a part of me that’s trying to reconcile the 19-year-old junglist with the house-head,” she confesses, before going on to describe a typical 90s event. “You’d be at a party and be like, here’s Jeff Mills and right before him, here’s Paul Johnson and then after it’s going to be Aphex Twin.” Whatever she learned became entrenched within her muscle memory. Few DJs can get away with pulling the silken threads between Michael Zager Band’s ‘Let’s All Chant’, Green Velvet’s ‘Flash’ and the cocaine-glazed ‘It Looks Like Love’ by Goody Goody. Fewer still can make ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood something akin to a spiritual experience, as she does at The Warehouse Project on Saturday night.

In 1997 she taught herself to DJ. A couple of years later, attending Louisville University as an English major, she began to channel her broad-band musical tastes into the college radio station, though her sights were firmly set on law school (“I did all my Latin,” she qualifies). Then, a call from an acquaintance from the mixtape world: Radoslaw ‘Radek’ Hawryszczuk was now a label owner and producer running Dust Traxx label out of Chicago, and he was offering her a job digitising the catalogue. Unable to resist the pull of the city that had so deeply informed the midwest scene that she’d come up in, she relocated: “Oh, I was chasing all my heroes, definitely,” she says of her decision. “By the time I got to Chicago, Paul Johnson was my favourite DJ. I was very aware of the constellations within that city – I loved Derrick Carter, I loved DJ Heather, I loved Boo Williams, Terry Mullan… those were the people I grew up trying to emulate in Kentucky”. Working at Dust Traxx and putting in shifts at Radek’s family bakery, she tried to follow in her heroes’ footsteps. And tried. And tried.

“I’d hesitate to call it even a first run. It was one long, extended attempt. Years of DJing a lot of fifty-dollar parties. Or no-money parties.” Going by a variety of aliases, including Lady Foursquare, Marea attempted to carve out a name for herself. Playing the kind of events where the banger ruled all, her productions – which up until then were written collaboratively – struggled to bite down on a sound that was her own. It stayed that way until she made a definitive break with the rave world, and turning in on herself she found liberation in her sense of failure. “It’s a cliché, but once I disconnected from what other people expected of me and poured my own experiences and heartbreaks into the songs, that’s what people connected with.” But there was a drawback: “It came with a pretty decent portion of pain,” she recalls. “I can remember my roommates walking into my room and turning around and walking right out, advising the others that it was “dark up there.” What emerged was The Black Madonna.

And from darkness: light. 2012’s ‘Exodus’ became a huge deal among Chicago’s house DJs and was debuted by Derrick Carter. It was the B-
side to ‘Lady Of Sorrows’, though, that really put her on the international radar: ’A Jealous Heart Never Rests’ took Marea’s sense of isolation and brazened it out in a disco strut. While the track luxuriates in a kind of gilded sadness, the label boasts two hands, clasped in prayer. Of course it clicked. Booking agents came calling, including one offering her first invitation to play in Europe. The venue? Panoramabar.

For someone who has fought so hard to be heard, it isn’t surprising that Marea has used her platform to amplify the voices of women, people of colour and the LGBTQ community: voices central to club history, but frequently forced to the periphery, or silenced by the blunt, dumb forces of commercialism.

Much has been made of her influential role at legendary Chicago club Smartbar. She arrived as a resident in 2012 – right when The Black Madonna project was taking off – and went on to become the first talent buyer in the club’s 34-year history. She’s now creative director, and throughout her tenure has worked to assemble a diverse line-up of residents like Honey Soundsystem, Derrick Carter and DVS1 to help continue the legacy of North American house music, from all perspectives. But Marea has proved a keen agent of change beyond Chicago, too – most notably in her frequent criticism of the treatment of women in dance music. And while many have championed her boldness for speaking out, she sees it as basic; necessary. “It has been surprising to me that anyone is surprised,” she says, bluntly. “It goes to show how truly the world is held together by the silence of women. There’s no woman on earth who has not held together a relationship, a job, a community, a family, by their silence – our whole lives, every power structure, every scene, every dance club, everything is held together by the notion that women will not talk about certain things that have happened to them, because if we did, the shit would hit the fan so fucking hard and so fucking fast.”

So she talks. Loudly and often. Even if you’ve never seen her DJ, chances are you’ve seen her name on electronic music Twitter, her unvarnished opinions and correctives appearing like shards of gristle in the over-digested content churn. “I actually don’t think what I say is particularly special; it’s just that I’m saying it, period. But because I’m a lot more interested in solutions than problems, people have been willing to listen. Is there pushback against me being a loud and proud feminist in public? Sure, sometimes. But I am heartened by the number of people that want to change things, even if they aren’t exactly sure how.”

Of course, by attacking some pretty entrenched power structures she has experienced a backlash (she’s become pretty handy at using Twitter’s block button, she concedes). I ask her if she’s ever felt the desire to withdraw from the conversation, if she’s exhausted of being something of a spokesperson for these crucial issues: “I don’t think it’s possible to precisely withdraw from the conversation. I’ll wake up tomorrow and still be a woman working in a male-dominated industry,” she counters. “But, to the degree that the mic comes to me, I am interested in is passing it directly to those people who have important things to say that need to be heard. People need to hear Honey Dijon and they need to hear Discwoman. And they need to hear Peggy Gou. And they need to hear Wendy Carlos.”

Perhaps it isn’t so very surprising that, had she not received that fateful request to work in Chicago, she would have gone into politics. It’s a reveal that will surprise nobody who follows her politically engaged Twitter feed. “What I really wanted to do was join the Democratic Party,” she explains. “I would have liked to have been a speechwriter for a candidate I really cared about.” Later, at dinner, she draws a comparison between her insane touring schedule and the US election. “I don’t just want to win the election,” she declares, eyes sparkling. “I want a mandate!” She laughs her hearty laugh. Sometimes it seems she merely redirected, rather than abandoned, her political ambitions.

But if dance music, and society in general, is far from a utopia, to be at the front of a Black Madonna gig is to be transported somewhere far better. Buried among the sweaty, jubilant mass – there’s lots of girls, but guys too – it’s impossible not to feel The Black Madonna loving each and every one of us right back. Is it too broad a stroke to conflate her own sense of not belonging with her all-encompassing love for those who join her in unburdening themselves? She agrees completely. “For so much of my life I have felt like I was not supposed to be somewhere. Being able to relieve people of that feeling of being on the outside looking in – if I can take that from them and welcome them…”

It seems corny, but in an age of divisive politics, new conservatism and unremitting darkness, we need people like The Black Madonna. To help us, on the dancefloor, transform hurt into resolve, pain into release, tears into sweat... but also show us that the realities that we live in can be so much better, too. “Nobody falls into dance music; everybody’s there for a reason,” she says, her voice cracking with emotion. “However you found your way there, if you’re coming to house music you’re coming to be relieved. I don’t know each person’s story, but I do know what house does. People tend to over-romanticise dance music, but those moments of transformation, those moments are real.” Amen.

‘He Is The Voice I Hear’, the new single on The Black Madonna’s ‘We Still Believe’ imprint will be out early January 2017. A limited edition etched 12” is out now