A new wave of media-savvy drag artists are trying to move beyond a queer subculture and into the charts – but the mainstream may not be ready to accept them

‘One small step for woman; one giant leap for womankind.” This prologue opens NASA, the second track on Ariana Grande’s latest album Thank U, Next, and its mysterious, sandpapery delivery belongs to Shangela Laquifa Wadley.

If you don’t recognise her voice, perhaps her face will ring a bell – she played the drag club MC when Jackson Maine discovers Ally in A Star Is Born. Shangela is a drag queen, an alumnus of popular reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race; her co-star in that A Star is Born scene is another fellow Racer, Willam.

Drag queens and popstars are becoming increasingly intimate bedfellows. In Pepsi’s Superbowl commercial this January, Cardi B exchanged playful tongue trills with Monét X Change, joint winner of Drag Race All Stars Season 3; it’s since been rumoured that Monét is set to star in a Madonna video. In 2015, Miley Cyrus marched out a host of RuPaul’s queens for her VMA performance; in 2011, Rihanna’s S&M video featured Willam and Detox Icunt, though blink and you’d have missed the bondaged pair.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shangela Laquifa Wadley at the 2019 Oscars. Photograph: Andrew H Walker/BEI/REX/Shutterstock

But queens aren’t merely on the arms of the world’s biggest pop stars – they’re making pop themselves. Not only does Drag Race host chart behemoths as its guest judges on a weekly basis (everyone from Lady Gaga to Kacey Musgraves), but competing queens have been releasing their own original tracks for years. It’s become customary for contestants to drop a single the day after their elimination from the show – for a lucky few, the accompanying videos can rack up impressive numbers. Go Fish by Manila Luzon was released upon her dismissal from All Stars 3 scarcely a fortnight ago – at time of writing it stands at more than one million views.

That drag artists are becoming pop stars in their own right is both surprising and inevitable. The art of drag has historically been bound up with the ritualistic practice of lip-syncing, where queens mouth the words to songs by well-known female artists on stage. The simulation aspect – the fact that the songs were not original, but copies of those sung by cisgender women – was essential.

“Lip-syncing was a way to parody gender,” explains Dr Michael Bronski, professor of gender and sexuality studies at Harvard University. “Performers would choose women singers – Garland, Streisand, Aretha – because they were already exaggerations of emotional states of femininity. Judith Butler wrote about the drag queen lip-syncing ‘You make me feel like a natural woman’, because it brings up the question: what is a natural woman? Butler argues that gender is a simulacrum – a copy of a copy – that has no original.”

The lip-syncing was a key prism through which the drag queen, the figurehead of gay male oppositional culture, was able to refract gender and highlight its absurdities – the simulation was itself the radical act. The idea of drag queen as a conventional pop star, then, immediately jars – original music is divorced from drag’s historic function.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trailblazer ... Sylvester. Photograph: Anthony Barboza/Getty Images

In the 70s, however, someone came along who moved the goalposts. Sylvester was one of a kind, a pioneer of the musician-stroke-drag queen business model, and the first to score a crossover hit with Mighty Real, which flew into the UK Top 10 in 1978. He performed with outrageous drag troupes in the early years, but consistently, consciously bid for mainstream success. His rise through the glass ceiling inspired drag artists such as Divine to release albums through the 80s – her You Think You’re a Man peaked at number 16 in the UK singles chart, with the help of wunderkind producers Stock Aitken Waterman. Then came the force that has shaped the future of drag-pop ever since: RuPaul.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest RuPaul holds the baby with with Dave Grohl, left, and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc

With Supermodel in 1992, RuPaul was the third queen to take a serious swipe at pop. Its No 45 US chart position might have been so-so, but MTV couldn’t get enough of the draggy video. The song was not esoteric or buried in queer vernacular – the lyrics referenced Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell – and Kurt Cobain cited the song as one of his favourites of 1993, leading to that iconic photo of Ru holding Frances Bean Cobain backstage at the 1993 VMA awards (Shangela and Ariana, eat your heart out).

It’s impossible to overstate the influence that RuPaul has had on drag-pop since then. When he created the format for RuPaul’s Drag Race, a show that debuted in the late 00s, he built the weekly challenges around the obstacles in his own career; creating original music and appearing in videos became essential skills for the candidates to master. He’s also used the show as a vehicle to plug his own continuing music career – the recent festive episode released on Netflix was panned for being an extended advert for his Christmas album.

RuPaul’s emphasis on original songs (though an anomaly in the long tradition of drag) suddenly became par for the course in the career of a drag artist – the show spawned a new generation of world-famous queens who could tour the globe and sell thousands of live tickets.

As drag becomes more and more commercial, it moves further from its roots in gender parody, but as Bronski points out, this doesn’t necessarily mean it is no longer a critique of gender. “It uses drag in a different way,” he says of original music. “They are no longer hiding behind the drag – a copy of a copy – but rather embracing the idea of [fluid] gender. It is neither better nor worse, but profoundly different.”

Unlike Sylvester and RuPaul, who lunged at broad appeal, Drag Race alumni target themselves at the reality-show fandom. For many queens, the music is little more than sonic merchandise.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Monique Heart. Photograph: John Lamparski/Getty Images

When contestants leave the show, they must forge their own careers by tapping into as many simultaneous revenue streams as possible – live tickets, T-shirts, books and, naturally, music. Song lyrics allude to dramas that played out between personalities on Drag Race, and are built around references that only fans will recognise. The songs largely shoot for laughs and in-jokes over universalism. Bob the Drag Queen’s Purse First – “Girl, you think this Louboutin? / Nah, I got this from Groupon” – is written not so much for the pop charts as the comedy charts.

Indeed, that’s where many of the queens’ original music has found success. Billboard compiled a helpful listicle of queens’ performance on US charts, and the comedy chart is the most common denominator. “The Billboard list indicates that the bulk of queens’ activity is on small, niche charts where a few hundred copies is enough to get you on to the chart,” says Chris Molanphy, a US chart analyst and presenter of the podcast Hit Parade. “The flagship charts, ie the Hot 100 or the Billboard 200, are the ones that indicate penetration with wider audiences. Adore Delano’s Till Death Do Us Party seems to be one of the only drag albums that made it on the flagship charts – and still it fell off the very next week”, he explains. “Drag Race fans are impassioned enough to consume a queen’s output heavily when it first debuts – typically in the first week, if it is promoted right – but penetration beyond that fanbase is very limited”.

The queens share a small, closed network of producers and songwriters who crop up again and again on Racers’ albums: Mitch Ferrino produced Purse First, as well as songs for Aja and Monique Heart; Ashley Levy writes for Manila Luzon, Alaska, Adore Delano and Violet Chachki; Tomas Costanza is another name that’s littered throughout queens’ credits. Sonically, the songs are usually straight-to-dancefloor, bass-heavy bangers that don’t closely follow pop’s fickle trends (though they do borrow influences from EDM and trap).

Queens know that the Drag Race formula – get on the show, release a single, go on tour – is an unfailing one-way ticket to gay stardom

Can this new drag wave, a genre of music that is made and consumed within a queer sub-space, ever hope to match the mainstream ambitions of Sylvester, RuPaul, and the few outliers like Shangela who are cropping up in much more dominant culture? Queens know that the Drag Race formula – get on the show, release a single, go on tour – is an unfailing one-way ticket to gay stardom, and it’s understandable why so many queens are more than satisfied with this pathway. The burning need for daring independence that must have driven Sylvester is absent today, when just performing to the RuPaul fandom can make you a millionaire and, in the case of Bianca Del Rio, get your crowdfunded movie on Netflix.

Eventually, though, Drag Race will collapse. Despite getting an upcoming fillip in the UK from new presenters Graham Norton and Alan Carr, fatigue will inevitably set in – the show is already on its 11th season, not including All Stars seasons. Soon, queens may come to rely on music, not as bonus income, but as a serious vehicle for their artistry. Drag queens may have be embraced by Gaga, Grande and the rest, but will they be able to stand alone once Drag Race has gone?

As much as we think we’ve progressed, there is a lingering homophobic aversion to the sort of genderfuck that queens represent, and a significant percentage of pop consumers may not benignly embrace a drag persona the same way they did Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce or Katy Perry’s Kathy Beth Terry. The only moderate success of relatively unthreatening stars such as Troye Sivan and Olly Alexander suggests their image is still discomfiting to many; Ariana Grande’s upcoming Manchester Pride appearance suggests we don’t have enough major LGBT stars to fill headline slots. Fully fledged drag queens are likely too much of a shock to the system.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pabllo Vittar. Photograph: PR

But like Sylvester in the 70s, some of today’s queens are already not content with making “drag music” – they want to make pop. Pabllo Vittar, an independent Brazilian drag queen completely unaffiliated with the Race, has achieved a platinum-selling album in his home country, as well as collaborations with Charli XCX and Major Lazer. Aja, one former DR contestant, has stated publicly that they’re not interested in being seen as a “drag musician”, because they don’t make the sort of music that is specifically marketed to one fanbase. “I don’t do parodies … I’m not rapping about lipgloss and lace fronts,” they told Billboard. Their lyrics and references are more diverse, dealing in video games and ethnic identity – potential, perhaps, for broad appeal.

To doubt the potential of drag queens as legitimate forces in music would be naive. Some queens are already able to pull in big-name collaborators: Violet Chachki’s Bettie was co-written by Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee and Monét X Change enlisted songwriter Eritza Laues (of Michael Jackson and Macklemore fame) for Soak It Up. And let’s not forget the Eurovision and Australian Idol success of Conchita Wurst and Courtney Act, respectively, who won the hearts of the public in full drag.

Music is a vehicle drag queens can use to insert themselves into mainstream culture as standalone artists with marketable personalities and unique voices – it just remains for mainstream consumers to start listening. Shangela’s innocuous voiceover on Ariana’s album may, in the not too distant future, be recognised as one small step for a drag queen, but one giant leap for dragkind.