If gold coins await at the end of a gleaming rainbow, then what’s sitting at the end of a busted one? Gold bars, apparently, and Brandie Blaze hits the lyrical jackpot on her new record, Broken Rainbows.
Since her 2017 debut album Spinster, the Boston rapper has boasted a cyclone-strong flow, tearing through tongue-twisters and third degree burns like second nature. Her Lil’-Kim-level sexploits are near legendary in the area’s hip-hop scene (“Need a squeegee” is the new “macaroni in a pot” in the Cakeswagg/Big Body Kweeng/J.A.B.S. collab “Die Mad”). She’s unflappable. Unfuckwithable. But as fans at tonight’s Union Tavern release show will witness, she’s just as human as the rest of us, and Broken Rainbows reveals what happens when the sky comes crashing down on her earth-shattering persona.
The album trailer paints the project as a deadly dance between two lovers that devolves into a funeral dirge, but don’t let the drama distract you from the deeper dynamics at play. As Blaze wriggles free from the grip of judgement, trauma, and abuse, other pairings shine on Broken Rainbows; namely, the friendship between Blaze and featured poet Amanda Shea, and the push-and-pull between Brandi, the woman, and Brandie-with-an-i-e, her rapping counterpart.
“Anger tends to be a response to trauma for me,” Blaze tells Vanyaland, speaking about the meaning of Brandie Blaze as a personage. “For a lot of my career, Brandie Blaze kind of represented anger and aggression, because that’s kind of the songs I got known for, and my stage performance is just really intense. If you don’t know me, and just by looking at me, it’s not something that you expect.”
She adds: “I used to be just really angry, all the time, because I was just hurt. And I had just been thorough so much, and I think especially in my late teens, I went through a lot within like, a year. It was really traumatic and hard. Brandie Blaze really became the outlet for that. I think that’s why for a long time it was hard for me to do different types of songs where I was more vulnerable. It was very hard, I always second-guessed it. I still second-guess it to this day — just like, ‘I don’t know if people want to hear that from me.'”
But Brandi needed Brandie to speak her truth, regardless of what listeners expect. Blaze fires at an abuser in “The Things That You Say.” Reveals a stretch of suicidal ideation in “7 Months.” Seeks numbness and destruction in “High.” As she dodges bullets, Amanda Shea walks with her in lockstep, providing chilling spoken word interludes, coaxing the plot of Broken Rainbows to unfold.
“The album is not the same without [Shea],” Blaze notes. “It doesn’t make any sense without her. She’s truly the narrator of the story, and that had always been the intention from the beginning. It hits a little different when it’s reality as opposed to a fiction story I had wanted to create. . . She witnessed a lot of the things that I was going through, unfortunately, and because of that I think she just had a different grasp of the album and what it was going to mean — even before I probably realized what was happening with it.”
Shea’s contributions — each aptly named after colors — pull listeners deeper into Blaze’s world, eventually bringing Brandi so close to Brandie that they overlap completely. As the negative forces surrounding Blaze crack and buckle, she suddenly wields the willpower of two women, determined to preserve herself and her sanity.
“I never saw [Brandie Blaze] as a part of me for a very long time,” Blaze explains. “She always just seemed like a separate entity from me, and maybe she was just a woman I aspired to be, and I wanted to be like her, because in my mind she’s a big, powerful force. Someone that big and that powerful — that’s not a person that can be hurt. That’s not a person that can be heartbroken or traumatized, but that’s not really true. I came to realize that Brandie Blaze is me. I am that, I am those things that I saw in her.”
If the rainbows above Brandie Blaze are broken, so be it. The foundation below her is more unbreakable than ever.
BRANDIE BLAZE ‘BROKEN RAINBOWS’ RELEASE SHOW :: Friday, April 21 at Union Tavern, 345 Somerville Ave. in Somerville, MA :: 7p.m., $20 to $25 :: Facebook event page :: Advance tickets