Can the World Let Dawn Richard Be an Artist?

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You used to be able to put a finger on who Dawn Richard was without much trouble. Of course, you likely didn’t know Richard in a literal sense. But she was part of Danity Kane, a group whose roots were in reality TV on Diddy’s Making The Band. You knew enough. She was a pop star; she was a reality TV pop star; she was an emblem of music and culture’s most superficial tendencies. Surely there couldn’t be that much left to the imagination.

She would like to correct that impression. Making the Band ended six years ago, it’s been three years since the demise of short-lived side project Diddy Dirty Money, and Danity Kane’s recent reunion concluded with a physical altercation and a passable album.

We met recently at SoHo’s Four Points Sheraton in New York, as Richard was getting ready to kick off her Black Era Live Tour in support of her album BlackHeart. Both are solo affairs, and both are a statement of intent: She’s gone from a pop artist with the emphasis on pop to a pop artist with the emphasis on artist. In 2008, Richard was the fourth member of a group that released two number one albums and two Top Ten singles your best friend’s little sister had on repeat at some point. In 2015, Richard is independent, critically acclaimed and has a sophomore album that hit number two on the Billboard Dance/Electronic charts. She’s gotten less easily classifiable. Trust me on the last point. She’ll let you know.

Richard, who looked pristine in her white sunhat and fur vest, and I had barely taken our seats next to the hotel’s bar when she gently raised her finger to interrupt my first question, instead asking me: “Now what makes you call it R&B?” There are many elements at play in BlackHeart, and their significance isn’t entirely sonic. So our talk started off with Richard pointedly talking about the way placing labels compartmentalizes rather than engages with art.

“I respect people’s thought process,” Richard said. “Because I find it interesting how people want so badly to classify something. It’s almost innate that they do it.”

It’s not just about how off-handed calling something “alternative R&B” has become. BlackHeart is too kaleidoscopic for such a heading: Its sound is big, but so are its ideas. It’s emotionally distressed. You just don’t come down after beginning an album by shouting “I’ve lost it all!” a cappella. Like most of Richard’s previous solo releases, BlackHeart carries a level of spectacle that seems to put it in the category of big-budget pop. But, also, how do you reconcile Richard’s on-record grandeur—almost a fictional drama—with the very real person? And who is that person anyway: a pop construct or the progressive post-Bad Boy auteur associated too closely with this “R&B” otherness?

In its one and a half minutes, BlackHeart opener “Noir (Intro)” continues with “I realize that tears will fall / From dark eyes that saw the lies they told,” then moves from solo balladry to an orchestral intermission to whizzing programmed drums and doo-dads that sound like an intro to some space opera. “Calypso,” the next track, is a constantly escalating dance freakout. A few tracks later is “Titans (Interlude),” a piece of club funk that’s the album’s most addicting tease at two minutes. Three tracks later, on “Castles,” Richard is belting over tropical sonics.

Gender politics are at play, too. “Billie Jean” finds Richard giving the slandered character a sense of sexual power absent from when Michael Jackson moonwalked. “Warriors” features a galvanizing hook with historical traces to Joan of Arc, the female knight. Then there is the Caleb Hahne-created album cover. Some have likened the male face to Barack Obama, but neither the male or female masks have a real life counterpart. The two figures’ gray coloring puts the focus on gender, and they’re intended to represent how Richard flips roles. She sometimes doesn’t even use roles throughout the album; the genderless “we” appears throughout.

Pop music is often dismissed as having less artistry than other genres (check out this popular but insulting meme that circulated this week after Beck beat out Beyoncé for the Album of the Year Grammy). Richard is an artist in control of her work, all of which is made by her and classically trained collaborator Scott Bruzenak (a.k.a. Noisecastle III), so she is particularly sensitive to this type of criticism.

She recalled that she and co-Dirty Money member Kalenna Harper were dismissed as background singers on Dirty Money, the project she joined after Danity Kane originally disbanded in 2009, even though Richard has five songwriting credits on their album Last Train to Paris. She told critics that she was planning a trilogy long before GoldenHeart dropped but was dismissed with condescension: “That’s cute,” they’d imply. In 2011, Richard released The Prelude to A Tell Tale Heart, her first post-Bad Boy mixtape that doubled as a loud, “this is me” statement.

“I was fighting as a solo artist,” she said of establishing her credibility. “I had been through a lot, and I was adamant for people to see me beyond just a group member.”

As an independent artist now, she’s less bound by the narratives and roles of major label pop. When we met, she was visibly agitated that her lighting guy was missing a day before the show at Webster Hall’s Marlin Room, and she was animated as we moved on to subjects besides her own music. Her eyes widened as she spoke of her appreciation of manga and especially as she explained how Princess Ai—co-created by punk frontwoman Courtney Love—proved that the worlds of music and comics weren’t disparate.

“That kind of showed me there was a possibility for artists to join the world of manga,” she explained. Richard herself co-created a manga miniseries with Danity Kane’s namesake. She talked about loving Björk, specifically about the highly regarded “All Is Full of Love”: “That was something I wanted to do: To be that groundbreaking. Visually, sonically, and lyrically.”

That Richard would draw inspiration from people like Courtney Love and Björk—beloved, complex, female artists who are publicly perceived as far more multidimensional than most pop or R&B stars—is unsurprising. In fact, Björk’s work might be one of the best points of comparison for Richard’s, and not just for its electronic sound. The Icelandic singer, who just released her most personal work with Vulnicura, specializes in magnifying human emotions through creating massive, resonant sonic spaces. Richard has been using this trick through her “medieval” trilogy, which is named after three acts: The rise (GoldenHeart), the fall (BlackHeart), and the upcoming revival (RedemptionHeart).

The fall act comes after a rough year for Richard. In a short period, her grandmother passed away and her father Frank was diagnosed with cancer. In August, the Danity Kane reunion ended with Richard reportedly punching former co-member Aubrey O’Day during an in-studio altercation. BlackHeart is roughly a symbolic representation of that loss and conflict, even though it’s been in creation since the GoldenHeart era. It’s an epic, but it’s one that comes from a humane place.

“I just want to put my headphones in and know that if I turn on the record that I still feel my grandmother,” Richard said. “I still see her and she would love it. I want to know that if I put this on, my father would play it. These people could have that numbers bullshit and have that classification shit. I would be quite content in a garage.”

BlackHeart isn’t solely a personal climax, however. Richard explained that one of her focal points is making a movement: “few become many.” It’s a summary that’s well intentioned, albeit a bit nebulous. The gist of the movement is using artistry wrapped within genre-leaping and ambition to connect with people regardless of background.

“Pretty soon, it won’t matter what genre I’m in,” Richard said. “It won’t matter what I look like. It won't matter if I had fucking wings on my back. People would just want to come to hear that sound—like it’s a drug. That’s the point.”

The goal may seem a bit quixotic to some, but it’s not an absurd hope. At least it didn’t look that way during the Webster Hall performance. I never found out if she found the lighting guy, but the show did go well. As soon as she stepped into the purple spotlight—still in all white, but this time with a headdress and tights—attendees’ attention rarely wavered. She danced through the opening numbers, temporarily lost her headdress while cavorting to “Calypso,” and hit a feel-good high note with “Titans.” But the true triumph of the night was “The Deep.”

Richard, re-outfitted with her headdress and cape, stood center stage as she performed BlackHeart’s most fragile song and her father playing the keys beside her. She was moving on to the chorus when she momentarily paused for her fans, who filled the room, to complete her line: “I took it to the deep, to the deep.” She clutched her chest, as if taken back with emotion in a moment that wasn’t only cathartic, but also a point of connection between the artist and the audience. Classifications, distinctions, pop sounds, industry narratives—anything outside of art as a human, emotional experience—all of it, for a spell, was gone.

Brian Josephs writes, frolics, and cavorts in East Flatbush, New York. Follow him on Twitter.