In 2003, the rapper and entrepreneur Sean Combs—then operating under the nom de plume Diddy—launched the third iteration of “Making the Band,” a reality-competition series that had débuted in 2000. The show was predicated on the idea that it was possible to manufacture a musical group from parts, much as a person might, with time and focus, successfully assemble a sideboard from IKEA. The first season was hosted by Lou Pearlman, the talent impresario behind the Backstreet Boys and ’NSync. (In 2008, Pearlman was imprisoned for overseeing one of the longest-running Ponzi schemes in American history, and died in federal custody in 2016.) Diddy took over for “Making the Band 2,” relentlessly testing the mettle of Da Band, a hip-hop group he’d put together through an arduous audition process. Between rehearsals, Diddy, usually wearing a tracksuit and sunglasses, assigned the group members character-building tasks, one of which involved walking from Manhattan to Brooklyn to get him a wedge of cheesecake from Junior’s. The group released one successful album, “Too Hot for TV,” in 2003. Diddy, eternally unsatisfied, dissolved Da Band in 2004.
For “Making the Band 3,” he set out to create what he called an “international female supergroup,” selecting nineteen promising young women to live with one another in a sprawling apartment in New York City. In the first episode, the music manager Johnny Wright, the choreographer Laurieann Gibson, and the vocal coach Doc Holliday welcomed the contestants. “A lot of you guys are here by the skin of your teeth,” Wright announced. “Puff didn’t really like anybody.” The drama of the show was based on the (flimsy) notion that harsh criticism is a more effective motivator than praise. The women were evaluated on their ability to sing, to dance, and to look enticing while doing both. Each week, Gibson would bark “Boom-kat boom-boom-kat!” as the women gyrated in a mirrored dance studio, attempting to master new choreography. Gibson often seemed offended by the results, and reminded the contestants that they were nothing special: “No time to play! There’s a batch full of new kittens ready to lick that milk!” She demanded expertise, self-sacrifice, and modesty. “A star is someone who is humbled by the opportunity,” she told a singer who’d expressed too much confidence (and was later booted for it). Diddy sometimes arrived for judgment day in a helicopter with a team of scurrying porters wearing red jumpsuits, who hurriedly collected his Louis Vuitton luggage.
Ultimately, Diddy begrudgingly created Danity Kane, a five-piece R. & B. girl group featuring Dawn Richard, Aubrey O’Day, Aundrea Fimbres, Shannon Bex, and D. Woods. Richard, a singer, songwriter, and dancer from New Orleans, was an early favorite on the show. She was the group’s least peacocking member, bringing a measured elegance to the proceedings. Danity Kane got its name from a superhero character that Richard had invented and illustrated. (Richard has also worked as an animator and, in 2020, became the first Black artist to serve as a creative consultant for Adult Swim, a popular nighttime programming block on Cartoon Network.)
Danity Kane released its self-titled début LP in 2006. The first single, “Show Stopper,” reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song is a dated artifact, but it is a supremely shiny and pleasurable one. “We in the car / We drive slow / We doin’ things that the girls don’t do,” the women coo. They seemed primed for global success, hitting the road as an opening act for Christina Aguilera. But the band was plagued by internal conflict, and after a second album was released, in 2008, O’Day and Woods left the group, and were soon followed by Bex and Fimbres. Richard, with the singer Kalenna Harper, formed Dirty Money, a duo that frequently provided backing vocals for Diddy. In 2013, Danity Kane briefly got back together, but the reunion didn’t last. Various configurations of the band have popped up since: O’Day, Bex, and Richard; O’Day and Richard. Today, Danity Kane, as we once knew her, seems gone for good.
This month, Richard, who is thirty-seven, will release “Second Line,” her sixth and best solo album. Richard’s solo career began in 2005, shortly before she joined Danity Kane, but it didn’t take off until 2013, when she was freed from her commitment to Diddy and started releasing idiosyncratic, genre-thwarting music. For “Second Line,” an electronic album, Richard signed with Merge Records, a storied independent label based in Durham, North Carolina. Merge was founded, in 1989, by Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, two members of the beloved indie-pop band Superchunk. The label has since released a number of critically adored rock records, including Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” Spoon’s “Kill the Moonlight,” and Arcade Fire’s “Funeral.” Merge’s aesthetic is scrappy but tuneful: its best-known acts write melodic yet spiritually rebellious songs that resist the Zeitgeist.
Richard was an unusual signing for Merge, which does not typically dabble in mainstream pop, electronic music, or R. & B. “We are always deliberative when it comes to taking on new artists, because we are a small label,” McCaughan told me recently. “Dawn’s New Orleans roots and musical story to this point had me interested even before we heard what she was working on. Once we got an early version of ‘Second Line’ to hear, I kept coming back to it.” He continued, “Artists like Dawn are what have always driven Merge from the beginning, regardless of the style or genre of the music.”
Richard has said that “Second Line” represents a “movement to bring pioneering Black women in electronic music to the forefront.” The record contains musical elements that are particular to Richard’s home town, including references to Creole culture and to New Orleans bounce, a hip-hop style that originated in the late nineteen-eighties and is marked by gleeful, sometimes hypersexualized call-and-response vocals, which borrow both rhythm and spirit from the centuries-old chants of Mardi Gras Indians. (The album takes its title from a style of musical parade that was inspired by processions held by enslaved West Africans in Louisiana and that is still used to commemorate weddings, funerals, and other significant events.) “Second Line” is also explicitly inspired by Afrofuturism, an aesthetic that combines cultural touchstones of the African diaspora with elements of science fiction. (Aspects of Afrofuturism are also present on records by Parliament-Funkadelic, Afrika Bambaataa, and Sun Ra, and in the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others.) The results of all this intermingling are rich. “I am the genre,” Richard announces on “King Creole (Intro),” the album’s opening track.
King Creole is Richard’s alter ego, another visionary Black artist from the South who has found herself at a spiritual crossroads and is scouring the horizon for a path forward. Several of the tracks on “Second Line” include snippets of Richard in conversation with her mother, Debbie, posing the sorts of questions that people sometimes ask when they’re trying to make sense of circumstances that seem fundamentally inscrutable. (“How many times have you been in love?”) My favorite track on the album, “Mornin / Streetlights,” sees Richard at her most vulnerable. It’s a slow, groove-oriented jam about how love transforms us, whether we want it to or not. Eventually, the song dissolves into a kind of spectral electro-fever. “Every time you wake up, I want you to know that I’m the only girl you need,” she sings. “You gon’ remember this in the morning.”
At the start of “Jacuzzi,” Richard samples her mother saying, “I’m a Creole girl.” The song—a cocksure celebration of sex—features silken synthesizers and fidgety electronic beats, which give the track a vaguely surreal feel. But Richard remains human in her expressions of desire. “Keep it right there / Keep pulling my hair,” she sings, her voice soft. In these moments, Richard appears certain of the validity and the release of pleasure. On “FiveOhFour (A Lude),” a half-spoken interstitial piece that Richard produced, she manipulates her voice, transforming it into something deep, nearly robotic. “You heauxs is frugazy / And my floss is too wavy / I’m every time / And you maybe,” she declares.
It’s perhaps too easy to compare Richard to stars such as Janelle Monáe and Beyoncé, yet all three have written or performed hugely palatable pop songs while maintaining their own sound, adroitly mixing the unexpected and the familiar. Richard’s voice is dynamic and pliable, and “Second Line” can be both jubilant and pleasingly dark. On the throbbing, shadowy dance single “Bussifame,” Richard is boastful and daring: “Hopscotchin’ on you hoes, trick the watch the feet / They tell me slow down, bitch never me.” Richard has her eye on something that looks like the future, and she’s too close to it to stop now. ♦
