RuPaul “Realness” Review

By Drew Barber
Music Reviewer

Artist: RuPaul
Album: Realness
Record Label: RuCo Inc.
Release Date: March 2, 2015

San Diego native RuPaul takes his new album, Realness, back to the 90’s, which is when his career really started taking off. Ru’s first big break was as a background dancer for The B-52’s music video “Love Shack”, then began performing in the New York club scene. In 1993, he released his most popular song “Supermodel of the World”, which launched him into stardom. Throughout the years RuPaul has played roles in many television shows and films, such as both Brady Bunch movies, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and But I’m a Cheerleader.

In 2009, RuPaul aired his reality television game show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, which is on it’s 7th season this year. The show is basically America’s Next Top Model, but for drag queens. After it’s success of the first season, Ru made a point to make a new album every few seasons and feature his top 3 queens on a music video each season.

This year will definitely be a different one seeing that Ru has changed his sound and has moved back to more techno and 90’s club beats for this album. His producer for his last 3 albums, Lucian Piane, did not produce this new album Realness, but rather his old producer, Eric Kupper, who helped create the smash hit “Supermodel of the World”. You can definitely tell that they used many 90’s dance hit elements to produce this album, yet not too many songs caught my ear. I’m not one for listening to dance music all the time, yet Ru always had many songs that I really loved in all of his albums like “Tranny Chaser” and “Peanut Butter featuring Big Freedia”. Most songs in Realness don’t have too many lyrics in them, and a lot of it is mainly just club music.

One song that stuck out for me was “LGBT”, which sounds more like a song RuPaul would sing in the present. Sometimes it’s really great to go back to your roots and bring back your old sound, yet I think RuPaul has just evolved so much that it’s not really his sound anymore. If I had to judge Ru’s album on his runway on RuPaul’s Drag Race it would get a “sashay away” from me, while his song “LGBT” gets a “shantay, you stay.”