This year, Ms. Boogie’s The Breakdown LP struck me like an unexpected downpour in the throes of a creative drought. By the numbers, it has never been harder for an independent artist to produce work outside of a major label system kowtowing mostly to Tiktok algorithms. The Breakdown arrives from the very pit of Brooklyn’s vogue and ballroom scene, bodaciously bridging a wide gap to the rap and drill world in a way no one else can do like Boogie.
It struck me, at first, with an image. Having followed the rapper on Instagram for years, never meeting her but knowing many of the same people in the community, I came across the album announcement with the artwork — a raw assortment of headshots on white depicting her in five distinctive looks, hair styles, accessories, but the same stone-faced expression forward. The spread read to me like any New York model’s selects, but also like forensic evidence of a life inhabited. The identities we have to assume to get by in the city. What would happen if we put them up against one another?
From the start, with the title track, Ms. Boogie plugs you right in to where she’s at. She raps with a breathy intimacy that allows you inside, and inhabits these chopped-up pieces of her lived experience. You feel every word, every synth, every pulse, but you will never quite grasp it completely. On “Clipped,” she spits, “I’m the plug and the drug/You can’t duplicate my love.” It reads like the thesis of a record that invites you so close you’re almost too close to see it — you can only feel.
The record flows from top to bottom with a steady breeze and a heavy softness that’s unlike anything else out there currently, but also vaguely reminiscent of something the culture had before. Ms. Boogie feels like an MC from a different era in some ways, but in others she exists in her own vacuum. Halfway through the track “Hustler,” she rescinds a mid-tempo glitchy beat to a bare piano riff along a sample of heels clacking towards you. Then comes a different arrangement altogether that carries the track to its close. It’s moments like these that push and pull you like a ride with no destination in mind. It’s just a vibe. It’s Brooklyn. M Jamison’s cinema score-like production work holds it steady throughout, making the whole thing so cohesive and melancholic in a way that feels fresh.
The mid-2020s might be the worst time for an independent artist to thrive against the noise, but Ms. Boogie doesn’t let that daunt her on The Breakdown. In many ways, she spits it all at the wall like no one is watching. In the same ways we don’t think anyone is putting together all of our selects, all our secret identities, side by side. The whole world just might be watching when we least expect it.
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