Supermodel of The World - Background

Background

RuPaul's success among the Manhattan demimonde led to a few brief record contracts for a single or two. But superstardom was what RuPaul had in mind. "Life is tough whether you choose to do nothing or climb Mount Everest so why not climb Mount Everest?" he once told People's Tim Allis. By 1992 Tommy Boy Records had recognized RuPaul's potential and signed him. He recorded an entire album of songs, then hit the road for an exhausting ground-level marketing approach. In the first months of 1993 incidentally, not long after Madonna had added "voguing" to the common vernacular and the first Democrat president had been elected to the White House in sixteen years, RuPaul undertook a slew of tour dates in nightclubs across the country. The goal was to create momentum for the album's first single, "Supermodel (You Better Work)", by getting it on club DJ playlists, and eventually, radio stations. A video for "Supermodel" also helped awaken interest, but still, Tommy Boy marketing people were slightly skeptical of the record selling in great numbers outside of the major markets like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where the drag-queen scene was well-established. Yet the catchy song caught on. "Tower Records and radio hotshots can't take full credit for RuPaul's success," one music retailer told Billboard's Flick. "It started in the clubs and in the gay community."

RuPaul's full-length Supermodel of the World album was released later in 1993, and included tracks like "A Shade Shady (Now Prance)", ""House of Love" (RuPaul song)", "Back to My Roots", and even a cover of the classic disco hit from Chic (band), "Everybody Dance". Fred Schneider from the B-52's made a guest appearance on the track "Stinky Dinky. " As a packaged whole, wrote Vince Aletti in the Village Voice, the record "conveys the fizzy, optimistic feel of late 1970s dance music without sounding a bit retro. " Aletti lauded the successful way in which RuPaul had blended camp and commerce into accessible pop. "Ru struts through all this froth with a lot less attitude and a lot more down-to-earth talent than you had any reason to expect," Aletti noted, and saved particular praise for the cut "Back to My Roots," a homage to elaborate African-American hairdos. "Who else could have turned an annotated mantra of black hair styles into an Afrocentric aria?" Aletti wondered.

Two other singles from Supermodel of the World also did well on the charts, and RuPaul's star rose. He was especially pleased that his personal beliefs were evident in the mix. "I feel a strong sense of responsibility to convey strong messages of self-love and hope in my songs," the singer told Billboards Flick. "Sometimes I feel like embodiment of the life plight and the embodiment of survival and victory. I derive so much energy from that. I'm going for it in life not just for myself, but to also show people that anything is possible. I'm living proof of that." Yet fame did have its downside, and the subtleties behind RuPaul's get-over-yourself approach weren't always fully grasped. At the MTV Video Music Awards in September of 1993, he went onstage with senior comic Milton Berle (who used to dress as a woman in the 1950s), but the pair hissed insults at one another on the air, and RuPaul was the recipient of a large amount of media reproach for his remarks. Later, RuPaul declared he got over the whole incident relatively quickly. "One thing I've learned about being in the spotlight is that things do change, and today's press is tomorrow's poopie litter," he told Flick in Billboard.