Following his breakout lead
single, "Know Me," rising singer Rubby returns this
month with "Confiesa," which dives deeper into the nuances of his
queer Dominican identity. The song title, a direct translation to
"Confession," is "both an invitation and a request to someone
across the dance floor to indulge in a fantasy, regardless of whether the
interaction would be forgotten," he says of the sparse, spacey
track.
Rubby challenged
himself to write the song entirely in Spanish, having never done so before. He
says he wanted to add to the conversation about what Dominican artists can
create and pen an original track he wished he had while growing up. Where much
of the music he listened to as a young kid centered on beautiful women and
hetero romance in the club, Rubby's "Confiesa" is without gendered
pronouns—something everyone can relate to, he says.
The artist
teamed up, once again, with Adam Kelley (Young Man), who
sent Rubby the track back in November. The instrumental is a hybrid of
atmospheric electronica and soft reggaeton, with an ethereal intro that builds
as dembo drums drive "Confiesa" forward. "I was really into the
idea of plugging deliberately soft or even weak sounds into a dance music
template," Kelley says, creating a track that recognizes the club as a
space for both sexual liberation and dark emotion. "I tried to find a way
to evoke that tension by using drum patterns that are intimately associated
with dancing and euphoria, while keeping the rest of the instrumentation really
subdued."
The
"Confiesa" video, co-produced by BenDen Productions, elevates
Kelley's intentions with an erotic queer storyline, where Rubby inhabits both
masculine and feminine qualities as El Espiritu de Anaisa. "It was said
that Anaisa, the patron saint of love, money and general happiness, would
possess men and have them act out all their homosexual fantasies," Rubby
says. "Homosexual men would claim being possessed by the spirit to hide
their sexuality and distance themselves from their acts."
Rubby wears a
traditional "tipico" Dominican dress, which his mother brought back
for him, and holds the Diablo Cojuelos mask throughout. A staple in Dominican ethnic
art, the masks are believed to transform someone's spirit and represent higher
beings who influence our lives. Where Rubby's look is noticeably femme, the
demonic mask takes the form of the masculine—duality that Rubby knows well.
"By wearing the dress, I did not only want to deconstruct notions of
masculinity, but situate it within a traditional cultural context," he
says.
Kelley
experiences "Confiesa" as an extremely intense internal drama.
"You're imagining this other person is seeing you and feeling the same
attraction, even if it's purely a fantasy," he says, emphasizing that
helpless, alienated feeling of waiting for another person to make the first
move. At the end of the track, Rubby unfurls the lyric, "I won't see you
in the morning, it doesn't matter," which he improvized during an early
recording session. "This has always struck me as tragic, because it means
closing the door on an opportunity forever," Kelley says. "Even if
that opportunity never really existed in the first place."
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