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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