The Blessed Madonna: “Dance music flourishes in times of difficulty”

“There were just a lot of real­ly ten­der moments, real­ly spe­cial things that could only hap­pen in Chica­go,” Marea Stam­per, bet­ter known to the world as The Blessed Madon­na, is sit­ting in a hotel room on Zoom. She’s fresh off the back of play­ing a sold out home­com­ing show at the city’s world famous smart­bar night­club to cel­e­brate the upcom­ing release of her first album God­speed. ​“It was great, you know, watch­ing my par­ents meet [house music pio­neer] Jamie Prin­ci­ple, it was so rammed and busy, it was real­ly special.”

Stam­per has been a res­i­dent at the icon­ic venue since 2012, and in 2015 helped co-found the Daphne fes­ti­val – a month-long show­case cel­e­brat­ing female and non-bina­ry elec­tron­ic artists. ​“When we got there they were hav­ing a show in Metro, which is the con­cert venue on top of smart­bar. The green rooms were full, so we just went up to my old office from when I worked there, looked around to see what had changed, who’s messed with my stuff [laughs], but it was real­ly sweet and so good to see everyone.”

The 400-capac­i­ty venue was packed out with an array of guest spots includ­ing DJ E‑clyps, A‑Trak and more – ​“It was beau­ti­ful chaos that I think was pos­i­tive and sur­pris­ing for many peo­ple.” The build­ing – in use as a dance venue since the ear­ly 80s – is just across the street from the city’s Wrigley Field sta­di­um, home to Major League Base­ball team Chica­go Cubs. By Stam­per’s own admis­sion it is ​“its own lit­tle uni­verse”.

​“Sun­day nights are our biggest night – our queer night called Queen! – but every­thing there and the things that hap­pen in that room are just incred­i­bly spe­cial. It’s kind of built to be an under­play and no mat­ter who you put in there, for the most part, they’re mak­ing more mon­ey play­ing big­ger shows some­where else and they make the con­scious deci­sion to be there.”

It is per­haps the only place that the world renowned DJ could have launched her debut record. Stam­per has lived a life. After leav­ing home at 16, she dropped out of high school, sold bootlegs and immersed her­self in the under­ground rave scene in Ken­tucky. She even­tu­al­ly went to col­lege, where she learnt how to DJ while in charge of the col­lege radio sta­tion – ​“I would say eas­i­ly that’s the most impor­tant thing that I learned in col­lege.” Stam­per even­tu­al­ly land­ed in Chica­go – the epi­cen­tre of house music – where she would become The Black Madonna.

Fol­low­ing con­tro­ver­sy around her name, which had been a ref­er­ence to her Catholic upbring­ing, she changed it to The Blessed Madon­na. Stam­per acknowl­edged that ​“I should have lis­tened hard­er to oth­er per­spec­tives” on the name, and added: ​“My artist name has been a point of con­tro­ver­sy, con­fu­sion, pain and frus­tra­tion that dis­tracts from things that are a thou­sand times more impor­tant than any sin­gle word in that name … we all have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to try and affect pos­i­tive change in any way we can.”

“I remem­ber when I start­ed going to par­ties, my dad was like, ​‘You think this is so impor­tant now but it’s not gonna be impor­tant lat­er.’ And boy was he wrong!” A fraught and dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ship, Stam­per did not speak to her musi­cian father for years. ​“We even­tu­al­ly rec­on­ciled, but my dad was the one that was fucked up. And it was my friends that pulled me through it and held me togeth­er when he went off the deep end. Even now, all of those girls that I ran around with when I was 16, they’re all at the show. Those rela­tion­ships have with­stood the chal­lenges of time and the rav­ages of adult­hood in ways that those with some fam­i­ly mem­bers haven’t.”

“The whole album itself is me try­ing to reck­on with what it means to be where I am now, after a life­time spent in this thing.” The 24-track record ric­o­chets around col­labs with genre defin­ing icons includ­ing Kylie Minogue(!), ten­der inter­ludes, tran­scen­den­tal crescen­dos and gut­tur­al beats. It feels like Stam­per has squeezed the sweat from a hun­dred dif­fer­ent nights – lit­tle sliv­ers of hazy mem­o­ries laid on top of and next to one anoth­er. An ode to a life lived amongst the lasers, of breaths caught, looks giv­en, laughs had in the spaces between the beats. The tumult of what it means to exist as a queer per­son, seen through the ten­der embrace of sweaty base­ments.

For those of us who have found solace on the dance floor– con­nec­tion, mean­ing and escape in the qui­et uni­ty of the beat – it will feel like a famil­iar tale. I ask whether, as well as telling the sto­ry of tens of thou­sands of us, part of the inten­tion of the album was to cre­ate space for peo­ple to expe­ri­ence those moments of hope and peace them­selves? She takes a deep breath and sighs before answer­ing, ​“Yes for sure, those moments, I real­ly miss them!” 

“I don’t think any­one has ever been more acci­den­tal­ly pop­u­lar than me, so when I go to clubs now I don’t ever get to have those moments of anonymi­ty. I think most­ly that time has passed and I have just had to make my peace with that.”

​“I remem­ber one time at [Glas­ton­bury Fes­ti­val​’s] Block9, I ran into Dua Lipa there and she had some hal­loween shake and go pink fuck ass bob wig on, so no one would recog­nise her. Of course it was imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous it was her. It was very sweet, and not that I’m any­where near that kind of life but you know, I do want that moment of [joy­ful solace] for oth­er people.”

What, I won­der, would the 16 year old ver­sion of her­self think of this album?

​“When I was 16, albums, like album albums, were so impor­tant to me. Around that time I loaned my Walk­man to some­body and she left Com­put­er World by Kraftwerk in it, which is a very whole album with a through line. You know exact­ly what’s going on when you lis­ten to it – you under­stand, over time, that things they’re work­ing through on Com­put­er World are ques­tions that even now we’re all still tus­sling with. So I would hope that the 16-year-old me would see the through line of this – that this space, this life is a wor­thy place to live and a wor­thy way to be. And that music is just as impor­tant as you feel like it is and the peo­ple who feel that are wor­thy also.”

The album, which drops on Octo­ber 18, wres­tles with joy and grief. With eupho­ria and exclu­sion. Themes of reli­gion, rave, recov­ery and resilience. It comes as Stamper’s native Amer­i­ca stands on the precipice of anoth­er era-defin­ing elec­tion. I ask if the release date is by design or sim­ply serendip­i­tous.

​“Dance music is fas­ci­nat­ing because it flour­ish­es in times of dif­fi­cul­ty,” she says. ​“I think there is a response to oppres­sion that is often con­duct­ed bod­i­ly in a way that you’re not even con­scious of” 

Stam­per talks warm­ly of house music pio­neer Jamie Prin­ci­ple, who is fea­tured on Track 12] ​‘We Still Believe’. The artist and pro­duc­er record­ed the vocals for the track, singing the line, ​“We have to resist this racist fas­cist shit.”

“You know Jamie start­ed mak­ing music at a time that was not that dif­fer­ent – Ronald Rea­gan was pres­i­dent, the AIDS cri­sis was bloom­ing, and all of that is hap­pen­ing in clubs around him so in that sense [with this album] we’re right on time because this is the sto­ry of dance music. Y’know funk explodes on the scene at the same time as the rise of the Black Pow­er move­ment. Dis­co ris­es in tan­dem with gay liberation.”

We talk at length about the revi­sion­ist his­to­ry of house music. Of this mot­tled and erro­neous notion that its gen­e­sis was formed of some queer utopia. ​“For every great first gen­er­a­tion gay pro­duc­er in house or dis­co – many of whom died of AIDS – there is a straight coun­ter­part who is equal­ly impor­tant, who was an absolute piece of shit.” That sto­ried tra­di­tion con­tin­ues to this day. Stam­per, who has nev­er shied away from being vocal in her pol­i­tics on LGBTQ rights, or sup­port of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple, talks about nav­i­gat­ing ​“pieces of shit” she has to work with in the indus­try. About striv­ing to stand up for whats right, even if it means ​“fuck­ing up the bag”.

“I don’t want to wake up on the wrong side of his­to­ry – peo­ple do, and it hap­pens faster than you think. You know, there’s a lot of peo­ple who were like, ​‘I can’t bring myself to vote for Hillary Clin­ton, I’m just going to sit this one out in Ohio and then you get fuck­ing Trump in,” she says, vis­i­bly angry. ​“It’s like, what do you think you did here? Do you think that a vote is like a spir­i­tu­al act? The vote is decid­ing what kind of ground you’re going to fight on – you elect these peo­ple and then you haunt their dreams once they’re in.”

She labels Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee Vice Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris a ​“neo-lib­er­al freak” but adds she is ​“not going to acci­den­tal­ly launch nukes at fuck­ing North Korea on the toi­let or throw bot­tles of ketchup on the wall in the oval office”. We talk just ahead of the first pres­i­den­tial debate between Har­ris and Trump, where the lat­ter – I think it would be fair to say – lost the run of him­self in quite spec­tac­u­lar fashion.

“[In this elec­tion] we are decid­ing what the fight­ing ter­rain looks like to make soci­ety more fair, and yes the sink [Har­ris] is leak­ing, but if the house is on fire [Trump], you don’t go fix the sink. You have got a big­ger prob­lem. I do think that that’s where we are right now, and so there is some of that in this album.”

God­speed is out Octo­ber 18 on FFRR.

This arti­cle fea­tures exclu­sive pho­tog­ra­phy by Erik Kom­mer.

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