LISTEN: Before becoming the cultural juggernaut he is today, RuPaul was a total ‘Sex Freak’
RuPaul’s Drag Race, before his multiple Emmy nominations and wins, and before becoming the cultural juggernaut he is today, RuPaul Andre Charles was a “sex freak” scraping together a living in New York City with a dream of music superstardom.One of his earliest recorded tracks, “Sex Freak,” off his 1985 LP of the same name and released through FunTone USA, served to establish him as a musical and sexually androgynous oddity.
The music video for the spoken-word techno song had no band and no budget, just RuPaul’s raw charisma, a killer outfit, and some flashy lighting effects.
Yet little did audiences know that they were indeed watching someone who would change the culture of entertainment forever.The lyrics for the song are hilariously trite and go something like this: “On the street people stare at me/And I give them what they wanna see/I serve it up nice and hot, Ouh Girl!
You are a star.” And in other places like this: “Free the law, dance insane/Free the flow and work that thang!”“Boom shang-a-lang, work that thang!”Frankly, it’s exactly the kind of song you might hear from a Drag Race musical challenge, but that didn’t stop RuPaul from using his contagiously freaky personality to sell it.
