March 22, 2012
Once you get over the weirdness of men pretending to be women singing girls' songs, you realize that a LOT of thought went into this album. The arrangements are fresh, and even more important the style of the songs seems to match the lyrics. Did you know that most of these ABBA songs aren't very happy? You will now, because you can actually hear the lyrics.
The best cuts on this album are Yolanda's "Lay All Your Love on Me" (I had to go back to my ABBA Gold to hear the original 'cause this just sounded so right), and "Vouslez Vous". You be the judge. The only near miss on the album is the country-western version of "Dancing Queen", which is still very good, and a lot of fun, but I don't think they went far enough.
I will absolutely buy any other album these "showgirls" put out.
May 21, 2011
photo by Aaron Cobbitt
"I don't think there's anyone who isn't an ABBA fan; I just think there are people who aren't out about it," says Frank DeCaro at the opening of What's the Name of the Dame?, a film that is part documentary, part music video. The movie is the result of a years-long multimedia project that also saw the release of an all-drag ABBA tribute CD, ABBAlicious!, and a slew of stage shows around New York City.
"It's one of those projects that defines itself as you're making it, " says director and producer Allan Neuwirth, who got involved with the project through his friend Jack Chen, the creator of the tribute album. "It kept organically growing and blossoming into something bigger and bigger."
Neuwirth interviews a wide array of commentators, from drag historians Esther Newton and Joe Jeffreys to Joan Rivers and ABBA's own Benny Andersson. It's no surprise, then, that the documentary comes at the sensational Swedish group's legacy from some unexpected angles.
The performers each do a unique interpretation of their chosen song, including a country-western "Dancing Queen" by The Chixie Dicks (YOLANDA and Hedda Lettuce) and an R&B crooner take on "Knowing Me, Knowing You" by a queen named Sade.
Although the live aspects of the project had been packing New York clubs for months, the rights necessary to release the film were delayed by the enormous success of the film adaptation of the ABBA musical, Mamma Mia! After some frustration, however, the delay worked in the film's favour, giving it yet another lens to consider the group's legacy.
This change brought Mamma Mia! star Christine Baranski into the fold. When asked why the drag and LGBT communities might connect so strongly with ABBA's music, Baranski laughs, "Two words: Dancing. Queen."
Indeed, there is something natural about this connection, which was also prominent in the recent musical Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. "The emotions are wrought large in ABBA songs, and drag queens are bigger than life," says Wolff. "That's very attractive to the gay community. We love to be enveloped by the music."
Between celebrity interviews, outrageous musical interludes and a dash of history, What's the Name of the Dame? is barrels of fun. For those who haven't come out about their love for ABBA, this film's Canadian premiere at Inside Out is sure to tear off the closet door.
February 09, 2011
Homecoming Queen
As fabulous as ever, “Yolanda” is born again
By Dan Bolles [02.09.11]
Roger Anthony Yolanda Mapes
In the late 1990s, Roger Mapes was Burlington’s king of queens. As his glitzy alter ego, Yolanda, the burly singer was the city’s most prominent drag queen, the leader of seminal B-town band the Plastic Family and, with fellow drag queen Cherie Tartt, the cohost of a popular local cable-access program, “The Cherie and Yolanda Show.” The name Yolanda was virtually synonymous with Burlington’s burgeoning drag scene, until Mapes relocated to New York City in 2000. “It was the best time of my life, basically,” recalls Mapes in a recent phone interview.
This Saturday, he returns to the Queen City to perform at this year’s Winter Is a Drag Ball at Higher Ground. Mapes helped birth the drag extravaganza in 1995 as a benefit for Vermont CARES, an organization he would later work with when he discovered he was HIV positive.
But when he once again graces the Drag Ball stage, Mapes will do so not as Yolanda, or even a character at all. For the first time in Burlington, he will perform as a complete version of himself: Roger Anthony Yolanda Mapes.
The Yolanda persona was “born and raised” in Northfield, Vt. Mapes originally moved to Vermont in the early 1990s to live with the Radical Faeries, a loosely associated global network of drag queens, whose original Vermont chapter was based in the small central Vermont town. The Faeries have since relocated to Faerie Camp Destiny in Chester.
“Drag was very much a part of everyday life with the Radical Faeries,” Mapes says. “The kind of drag we’re all now accustomed to seeing. Gender-bending drag, guys with beards in dresses, things like that.”
When Mapes began performing as Yolanda in Burlington, he displayed an over-the-top style similar to that which he’d developed with the Faeries. He then created new facets of her personality by exploring a variety of aesthetics.
“I experimented with different looks, which I still do,” Mapes explains. “I moved into shaving my body and being really glamorous, and then moved in and out of that.
“But at heart, Yolanda has always been a Radical Faerie,” he says.
Mapes notes that while he discovered a lot about himself through drag, the effect his performances had on others was equally profound.
“The drag-queen community has a sense of daring about it,” he says. “A sense of extraordinariness that a lot of people feel they can’t do in their lives, for whatever reason. Seeing guys all dressed up and acting in over-the-top ways is very liberating as a drag queen, but also for other people. It’s a way of projecting feelings onto someone else and living vicariously through them.”
Mapes says that over the years a number of people have told him they think drag queens are courageous; some found inspiration for coming out of the closet themselves.
Of course, “there are also other, not-so-nice things people say, too,” says Mapes with a chuckle. “But, for the most part, everybody gets that it’s about having a sense of humor and taking a lighter view of life and living large. That’s appealing.”
But Mapes discovered that living vicariously through alternate personalities can have unintended side effects — most notably, losing one’s true identity.
Last year, he released his latest album, House of Joy, as Roger Anthony Yolanda Mapes. The fusion of his given name with that of his more extravagant sobriquet represents a melding of his two personalities, born from a deeper understanding of the various facets that make up his larger whole.
When he moved to New York City, Mapes reformed the Plastic Family with new members. The band drew wide acclaim in GLBT circles — Mapes was named OutMusic.com’s OutMusician of the Year in 2003, and says he was recently inducted into both the Bear Hall of Fame and the GLBT Hall of Fame. But in 2004, he disbanded the group amid a flurry of life-altering personal changes that he now refers to as a “spiritual journey.”
“It led me to an understanding of what I call the ‘god-goddess within,’” Mapes says.
That year he also met his current partner, and the pair secluded themselves from the world. Mapes stopped performing for three years.
“I had never had this kind of relationship before, so it was a new discovery of love and self-realization,” he confides. And he became reacquainted with Roger Mapes.
“My goal in drag was never to impersonate a woman,” he says. “In my mind it was always about discovering something unique about myself. I was now understanding the masculine side of myself in a new way, and the feminine side of myself in a new way.”
It would be easy to mistake Mapes’ newfound identity as duality, or a reconciling of seemingly disparate personalities. That’s not how he sees it.
Mapes explains that he had become so outwardly identified as Yolanda that he lost sight of the reason he started doing drag in the first place.
“I was so identified as … ‘she’ that it cut me out of an experience that I wanted to have, of being a gay man,” he says. “This is about fusing everything together as all of that which I am.”
The record also represents another sort of rediscovery for Mapes. Inspired in equal measures by Lynyrd Skynyrd and Divine, House of Joy marks a return to his Southern roots: Mapes grew up in Muscle Shoals, Ala.
“At the heart of what I wanted to do was this deep longing to express this love for Southern culture and Southern music,” he reveals. On his website, Mapes describes his new aesthetic as the “alien love child of Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Louise Hay and John Waters.” That’s just about right.
“For many years I was ashamed of being Southern,” he admits. “As I’ve grown older I’ve come to embrace that part of myself, too, and what my life was about when I lived in the South. Really, it was about music.”
Mapes’ father was a radio and television broadcaster in Muscle Shoals, which, in the 1960s, was an unlikely rock-and-roll hotbed.
“It was the hit recording capital of the world in the ’60s and ’70s,” says Mapes, recalling the flood of artists who came through the small town: the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, to name a few.
“It was quite an experience. And I wanted to reconnect with that,” Mapes says. “I am a whole person. I am both male and female. I am Southern and Northern. I am everything, because what I really am is spirit,” he says. “This whole progression has been about pulling everything together and fusing it into one entity: Roger Anthony Yolanda Mapes.”
But we can still call him Yolanda, right?
“Oh, sure!” he exclaims. “It’s much easier that way.”
June 04, 2011
January 15, 2011
CONGRATS TO THE ARTISTS WITH THE TOP TEN SONGS OF 2010 ~From the *GLBT Outvoice Top Ten Songs for 2010
*#1 Sugarbeach #2 Shawn Thomas #3 Roger Anthony Yolanda Mapes #4 Norine Braun #5 Levi Kreis #6 Toni Vere #7 Terry Christopher #8 Tret Fure #9 Tom Goss #10 Dan Manjovi
Listen to the show on Rainbow World Radio!!
February 27, 2011
Congratulations on reaching the #1 position on the Top 40 cd charts for Feb 2011 for your cd House of Joy! Your fans are showing you love. All the best,
Len Rogers
November 03, 2009
NOW HEAR THIS! ROGER ANTHONY YOLANDA MAPES:
"House of Joy" CD Review by Jed Ryan
"Don't you know that the South will rise again?!" Roger Anthony Yolanda Mapes declares with unyielding conviction on "Muscle Shoals", the tribute to the singer/songwriter's Bible Belt hometown. Through the years, the same can be said of Mapes himself. Here's a performer who has fought to make his mark as a truly self-styled, one-of-a-kind artist... with a fair share of both struggle and critical acclaim along the way. Voted "OUTmusician of the Year 2003", Mapes has undergone many changes in his persona through his years of performing. As one-name wonder "Yolanda", Mapes used to do "high" drag (Think evening gowns, wigs, high heels, and makeup..) before switching to a more androgynous, gender-fucking image (think beard, combat boots, and makeup...), and then seemingly making peace with his Y chromosome. But what's remained constant is Roger Mapes' strong, powerhouse voice. This singer knows how to belt! "House of Joy", Mapes' new CD, features ten full-blooded original songs, plus an impressive reworking of Bobbie Gentry's 1967 hit "Ode to Billy Joe".
Robert Urban ("OUTmusician of the Year 2006", and-- to restate the obvious-- an acclaimed performer in his own right) produced and arranged the CD, as well as contributing background vocals, guitar, and a variety of other instruments. The bluesy, raw, Southern-style rock on "House of Joy" is a great match for Mapes' take-no-prisoners voice, and the artist's lyrics pay homage to his Southern roots while exploring provocative themes about gender and self-expression.
"I Wanna Know" features an unrelenting serpentine rhythm and superb guitar work courtesy of Mapes and Robert Urban. The song breaks into an intense, high-energy climax that leaves the listener spent. For "Muscle Shoals" we're again treated to some superb guitar work as Mapes sings about Muscle Shoals, Alabama, "the hit recording capital of the world". On "We are Angels", Mapes adopts an ethereal, almost otherworldly vocals style-- well-suited to the song's title and its lyrics. "Freedom", a song about Brandon Teena (the transgendered man who was murdered in 1993), doesn't dwell on the tragic aspects of Brandon's life; but rather, it's a celebration of the late trans man's decision to live life as he saw fit. It's a grand, triumphant highlight of the CD, as is the quietly beautiful "Control Queen". "The Greatest Love of My Life" is a truly sweet--as-molasses love song. With the bonus track "Intimacy", Mapes gives us a taste of his sound when he was known only as "Yolanda" with his band The Plastic Family. It's, as you'll hear, a very different musical style from the rest of the CD.
More than just strong music, "House of Joy" emerges as a portrait of an singer/songwriter/performer who's got a lot to say, and who's not afraid to break "the rules" to say it. For "Nice Girl", a song where Roger Anthony Yolanda Mapes gets to display a whole range of his vocal talents, the artist declares, "It doesn't pay to be a nice girl, I'm telling you; It doesn't pay to be a nice girl, so here's what you do..." It's good advice for all of us, whether you're a boy, a girl, or a boy who's not afraid of putting on a little makeup.
Visit www.RogerAnthonyMapes.com for more!
Posted by Jed Ryan at 9:08 AM
Labels: music review
February 23, 2005
Yolanda (Outmusic's "Outmusician of the Year" 2003) goes solo with "Lay All Your Love on Me". The stripped-down, raw feel of the track-- featuring only Yolanda's hard-hitting, strong, Southern-twanged voice with guitar by her friend Robert Urban-- packs a wallop: Yolanda unleashes no less than 20 different emotions with that song.... Jed Ryan (commenting on Yolanda's cover of the ABBA classic "Lay All Your Love On Me" from the cd ABBALICIOUS)
March 22, 2011
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