Boyfriend Reinvents Herself for "Sugar and Spice"

Boyfriend, by Rebma

Ten years into her career, Boyfriend released her “debut” album, debuting a new look, a similar sound, and the same concerns.

Boyfriend acknowledges that for online purposes, she picked a terrible name. There’s a K-pop Boyfriend whose videos get tens of millions of views for starters, as well as songs titled “Boyfriend” by Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Dove Cameron, to name a few. Boyfriends and girlfriends are a common topic of conversation on social media, so a simple #boyfriend is no guarantee that you’ll find out that New Orleans’ Boyfriend has a new album, Sugar & Spice, out now.

For a few years, she dealt with it by taking on the #rapcabaret brand, but she has let that go in favor of #xoboyfriend as her social media handle. #rapcabaret came with serious limitations because you had to know she was using it to search for it, even though it was the perfect descriptor for her show for a year or so. She created a hybrid show that embodied the feminist critique of the lengths that men expected women to go to be considered beautiful, but putting on the extreme makeup, the lingerie, and the hair in rollers that became her signature inadvertently put her in the same time-consuming, uncomfortable bind that she set out to satirize.

“It was exhausting,” she says. Sugar & Spice and #xoboyfriend are truer representations of where she is now.

A conversation about Boyfriend’s online presence may seem like a precious place to start, but her career has followed the the Internet’s contours. One prosaic reason for changing her social media handles is that she had different ones on different platforms. Switching everything to #xoboyfriend wasn’t simply easier. “In order to get verified on social media, you have to have the same handle across platforms,” she says. The blue check mark that accompanies her name now gives her greater online clout and additional algorithmic muscle.

Boyfriend made her mark at first by shooting videos with an eye on virality as a way to get her music and vision into the world. She recorded an album’s worth of material early on but released it as two EPs to get more mileage out of them. She has a side hustle as a songwriter, and when other artists passed on songs she believed in, Boyfriend decided to release those too. “Algorithmically, you’re encouraged to release music on a rolling basis,” she says, so she released a song a month in 2019.

While she put her music in the world in web-friendly ways, she admits, “I’m an album consumer.” Her preference is to hear an album and plug into the artist’s vision. If she’s checking in mid-career, she likes to start with the first album and listen chronologically to get the story as the artist presented it. The irony that she’s finally releasing her music in her preferred format 10 years into her career isn’t lost on her. “I feel like this album is very representative of my actual taste, which is so nice because that hasn’t always been the case with Boyfriend,” she says.

Officially, Sugar & Spice is her debut album, and that came with another caveat. What does “debut” mean at this point? And if this is some kind of introduction, what did she want it to? She thinks of the album as a reinvention, but in typical Boyfriend fashion, even “reinvention” comes with a qualifier. As career-focused as she can be, she’s also clearly in the game for the experience. A Pusha T remix next to a track with Preservation Hall Jazz Band next to one with Galactic makes it hard for some in the industry to be sure what she’s about, but those are the kinds of musical experiences that musicians open to adventure don’t say no to. The Boyfriend look became iconic enough to be on the front of a Mardi Gras float, and while music industry types saw the same thing, they found the variety in her catalogue confusing. For her, these experiences were worth being stubborn about. “I was like, I can do songs that sound like this, I can do songs that sound like that. Why wouldn’t I?”

Boyfriend thinks of Sugar & Spice as her capitulation to that desire to see a more focused presentation, though it doesn’t automatically seem that way. She has had a pretty good feel for the cutting edge, and her versions of hip-hop and electronic dance music were credible while sufficiently rooted in indie music that she never seemed to be riding someone else’s culture or subculture. She’s not arguing when people talk about Sugar & Spice as hyperpop, but she’s in no hurry to grab that label either. “I shy away from any of that label stuff because I’m not sure I have the best understanding of it,” she says.

If it isn’t hyperpop, Boyfriend’s new music sounds like the music you’d associate with the word. Every sound including her voice is electronically treated for extra texture, all acting like kids in a grocery store checkout line trying to convince mom to buy them candy. Clear, direct, well-constructed songs feature arrangements that invite you to come closer then kick to make sure you don’t get too close. Those sounds come with uncertain overtones, and that destabilizing effect is consistent with the lyrics. When she covers No Doubt’s “Just a Girl,” the title phrase plays as a wisecrack, a threat, and a rationale and a joke. Songs are multivalenced, so when she raps, “I’ll be your boyfriend” in “Soulmate,” she’s using the same words to say different things to the object of her affection and the listener.

Sugar & Spice is also well-positioned conceptually. Features are a staple of the contemporary pop ecosystem, and Boyfriend has a number of them including ones by Big Freedia, Pussy Riot, Death Valley Girls, Pyra, and Bailey Flores. In them, she chose disruptive performers who challenge gender norms and by doing so further situated her into the community of disruptors. It’s tempting to think of that as calculated, but it would only be partially right. The personal and professional merge in Boyfriend’s work, and if recording with interesting artists to talk about subject matter that’s important to her is also good for business, Boyfriend won’t say no.

The last call for the rollers came when she had the opportunity to walk the red carpet for the opening for the movie Space Jam 2. She co-wrote a song with Big Freedia that appeared on the soundtrack, and that occasion gave her a moment to rethink her look. She wasn’t afraid, she says, “but it felt like I might be boxing myself in and becoming a caricature.” Giving it up wasn’t without costs, though. The look had power on stage and made her visually interesting before she did a thing. “Once the rollers were in and the crayon eyebrows were on, I wasn’t in charge anymore,” she says. “Boyfriend was, and it was nice. I could disappear into that.”

Now she works without any makeup and her hair down. “This is the masculine side of Boyfriend. I’m pretty tomboy, pretty butch” she says. Still, Boyfriend 2022 comes with a look, albeit a very different one. Instead of modifying her shape with foundation garments into an idealized female, photographer Rebma shot a series of portraits and manipulated them to distort Boyfriend’s body until it was barely human. One photo elongated her legs far beyond their normal length, while another moved her eyes to the edge of her face. In one, she’s a head and bulky male torso, and another features her body in an indeterminate knot as if she’s dislocating something while trying to get out of a straitjacket. They’re all unsettling and defining in their way, rendering the female body as floppy, stumpy, snaky, and lumpy, making it memorable and problematic. Is a bare-chested woman sexy if the torso is a man’s with no legs attached? Is there an erotic tingle attached to a woman showing you the splits if her feet are 10 yards apart?

One image was going to be the cover for Sugar & Spice, but it had to be pulled. The planned cover art featured Boyfriend’s nipples extended until they were perhaps a foot or so long, long enough to shape the S in “Sugar” and “Spice.” Apple Music wouldn’t accept it, and others were concerned by the bare nipples, even if they were distorted beyond possibility. It’s blatant censorship, she says. “As long as it has some meat behind it that they can assign as feminine,” she says. The tour poster art has received criticism, and the art accompanying the release of “Decepticon” from the album was flagged in places as well.

“I keep not learning lessons about marketing,” Boyfriend says, though considering her disruptive brand, she learns some of them very well.

Part of the story of Sugar & Spice is the way Boyfriend has made the musical project easier to live with in the long haul. She has made choices based on the way the market for her music works, but the constant activity is tiring. She released a song a month, she released EPs, and now she has an album and is going on a tour that will return to New Orleans on October 21 to play The Rabbit Hole. If she had her way, she’d adopt a pre-Internet professional life—work on an album for a year and tour it for two. Rinse and repeat. “That sounds nice. That’s how I develop as a person,” she says. Give her two to three years and Boyfriend would have new perspectives, new music, and a new way to present it. That’s not realistic in the current new music ecosystem, so—naturally—she has found ways to adapt.

“I’ve used my birthday show that way,” she says. “Okay, here’s the thesis statement for the year. Here’s what I’ve been working on.”