If there’s one thing that Kevin Aviance learned in the last few years, it’s that timing is everything.
Sometimes, the timing takes much longer than he would have thought, like when his 1996 club single “C-nty” became the backbeat for a fan-favorite B-side on Beyoncé’s 2022 album Renaissance. But sometimes, the timing is much more immediate, like when he settled on the title of his new album.
“I remembered seeing a hippopotamus at the zoo, and I was like, ‘They’re so fierce. If you see hippo in the wild, you better run, bitch,” Aviance says, as his glamorous makeup twinkles in the light of his computer screen. “So I said, ‘We’re calling the album Hippopotamus!‘ The next day, Moo Deng was born. And I thought, ‘You cannot write this s–t, b–ch!’”
The album’s title is far from the only thing that feels kismet on Hippopotamus!, Aviance’s first full-length solo album in more than 20 years out Friday (Oct. 10). After helping shape the house and ballroom scenes of New York City in the mid-90s — and earning three Billboard Dance Club Songs No. 1s in the process — Aviance returns a few decades later to his beloved genre, now anointed not only by a pair of pop music’s paragons, but by himself as a vital artist in dance music’s history.
Oscillating between retro-leaning ballroom-inspired singles — including a series of bitch tracks, vogue numbers and interludes — and modern dance songs showing his forward-thinking worldview, Aviance goes out of his way to make Hippopotamus! more than just a victory lap. “I just really wanted it to be authentic,” he says. “It’s really hard to be 57 out here in these streets doing this … but hopefully I’ll be 80 and still doing this, and I hope that the music keeps evolving and teaches me more about myself.”
The process for creating the LP started just over three years ago, shortly after Aviance earned the biggest credit of his career on “Pure/Honey,” the penultimate track of Beyoncé’s house-inspired masterwork Renaissance. Throughout the thundering track, Bey interpolated his vocal from “C-nty” to serve as a piece of the track’s bassline, alongside other prominent ballroom samples from MikeQ, Kevin Jz Prodigy and the late Moi Renee. Even three years later, Aviance vividly remembers how life-altering his 2022 experience felt and still gives the pop superstar all due credit
“I’ve seen a lot of people take from the gay community. I’ve never seen anyone lift up our community, a sub-genre, the Black queens the way she did, where she said, ‘Look at this! Aren’t they talented?’” he recalls, still moved by Beyoncé’s munificence toward him and his people. “I couldn’t even talk about it before, what it meant to me. She is 100 [percent] and her team is 100 [percent], and they have been nothing but so kind and so real.”
Aviance’s return to the spotlight didn’t stop there — during her Celebration World Tour, Madonna reunited with Aviance on stage three decades after he appeared in her “Secret” video. The pair judged the on-stage voguing competition at her show in Washington D.C., which Aviance cites as another night he will “never forget.”
“I’ve been obsessed with Madonna since I was 14 years old. To go through all the stuff she went through, and all the lives that she saved, Madonna is The One,” Aviance says. “I mean, both of these women just mean everything to me.”
As he performed The CVNTY Tour — a series of unofficial post-Renaissance Tour afterparties where he played high energy DJ sets remixing Beyoncé’s music — Aviance felt the energy from the crowds moving him to get back to making original music. Plus, he felt like “it would be stupid not to” capitalize on the moment.
He got in touch with his former collaborator DJ Gomi, and the pair started working on a couple new songs. But as time went on and the pair kept collaborating on more and more new music, Aviance realized that his original plan to drop a few one-off singles didn’t make sense anymore. “I was like, ‘Am I making an album?’” Aviance recalls. “And Gomi goes, ‘Let’s just keep going, don’t think about it.’”
The process wasn’t always easy. When he and Gomi were working on the album’s lead single “Beautiful,” the two kept going back and forth; Gomi’s initial vision was an old-school, Donna Summers-inspired disco anthem, while Aviance was more interested in bringing a more modern nu-disco sound to the record. The final product, as became a theme on the rest of the album, was a blend of both their ideas.
Other songs on the album proved to be much harder to create. Late album standout “What a Friend” sees Aviance giving his own spin on a traditional gospel hymn, with his voice providing the only melodic line in the song while a set of house beats back him up. When the song proved to be much more difficult than he or Gomi had anticipated, Aviance dug his heels in, saying he “needed” the spiritual track on the album.
“Girl, we worked on that song for about six months. I was trying to bring church to the club, and nothing we were doing was working on this song,” he says with a sigh. The pair finally cracked the code once they brought in a choir of singers NYU to create backing harmonies starting on the second verse, bringing a sense of community to a record about creating shared space. “I told them, ‘Your college tuition was used very well,’” he jokes.
When asked why including a spiritual hymn on his album felt vital, Aviance points to the state of evangelical right-wing politics, saying that he wanted to show that queer people have just as much ownership over belief as those on the right who use it as a cudgel against the community.
“The words that come out of their mouths have nothing to do with The Word, you feel me?” Aviance says. “The church I grew up in never once brought up my gayness. My pastor said, ‘My job here only is to teach you how to speak to God. That’s it.’ That has always been what this is about to me, not the negativity that they like to bring up; that’s not in [the Bible].”
But one song that stands out amongst the rest on Hippopotamus! is unquestionably “Bloodline.” On the penultimate track of the album, Aviance brings together all of the references and influences that helped shape his career and creates a stunning ode to the resilience and power of the LGBTQ+ community of the past, the present and the future.
The track also serves as a tribute to Hector Xtravaganza, a monumental figure in New York’s ballroom community, often referred to as the “grandfather of ballroom.” His co-producer on the song Cherie Lily shared some words the late legend shared with her before his death in December 2018: “We are a family, our bloodline is the music and the melody lives on.”
“I had never heard anything like that before, but it’s the truth,” a tearful Aviance recalls. “If you are a real LGBTQIA+ girl, then you have a fierce soundtrack in your head at all times. It gets us through everything in life. So as soon as I heard those words, I said, ‘Let’s go, this is the song.’”
It’s a fitting way to close out the album (the final track is an updated version of Aviance’s “C-nty”), as Aviance finds himself now looking to his own legacy. At 57 years old, he’s far from done with his career, but as he thinks about other Black queer icons like Sun Ra, Big Mama Thornton and Sylvester, Aviance cannot help but hope that his music can help others the same way that his heroes’ helped him.
“Music saved my life. If I weren’t doing this, I don’t know where I’d be — actually, I know where I’d be, I’d be dead,” he says. “I never stopped doing music this whole time, I’m always putting out a track. But to do an album like this, that we worked so hard to make this album sound like today, was calculated — so that somewhere, someone can play this and hear the message.”