- Confrontational footwork.
- Speaking about her last album, Painful Enlightenment, Jana Rush described it not as a footwork album but as a "dark listening experience." She's not wrong. Sudden instrumental solos and sporadic handclaps renders almost every song unstable. Rather than encouraging you to dance, the LP often induces the kind of anxious feelings she must've been battling at the time. But if depression is anger turned inwards, then Dark Humor expels it back out, marrying the erratic approach of Painful Enlightenment with the incendiary rhythms of her debut album Pariah to create something truly confrontational.
"Unk," a major highlight, is like those two albums combined into one song. The synths sear the foreground with the zip and sizzle of a lightsaber, while pleas of "I can’t stand it" mirror the desperation of "Disturbed." But the ferocious synths push the song towards the kind of whole-body ecstatic freakout you'd expect from the early days of acid house in the '80s. "Lonely," a collaboration with DJ Paypal is equally as frenzied, with uplifting horn blasts that interrupt the song's saxophone wheezes and drunken double bass plucks. Its brilliance is mirrored by its video, where two contemporary dancers are paired with two footwork dancers. Despite the footworkers' finesse, it’s the contemporary dancers' erratic movements from long and elegant to sudden and aggressive that catches the eye because, like the song, they show a disregard towards the established form of footwork, choosing to inject it with a vogue twist instead.
Rush doesn't only challenge the norm through rhythms and arrangements but through through her choice of vocal samples, too. She has spoken out in defense of women working independently from male producers or artists: "U don't have to sleep with or SUCK anyone's dick to pull up in this GAME," she wrote in an Instagram post last fall. "Make Bitches Cum" carries that same energy, the title reading more like a demand than a brag. The song itself is effectively an edit of 2Pac's "No More Pain," where Rush chops-and-screws Devante Swing's cascading keys and LFO bass. But the highlight comes when she turns "Bitch, I want some ass tonight" into her own rallying chant with a clever stutter effect.
She has fun with the effects on "Don't Want No Dick," literally turning the "short"—— from 20 Fingers' "Short Dick Man"—into a pinprick of a squeal, before spelling out the refrain with a volley of monosyllabic jabs. Her choice of samples might seem tongue-in-cheek, but their unrelenting force is empowering, challenging footwork and ghetto house's mostly male and often heterosexual narrative.
There are bumps in the road on Dark Humor which drag the mood back into the helplessness of Painful Enlightenment. Menacing laughter and throbbing bass make "Suicidal Ideation (Aural Hallucinations Mix)" a slow, depressing start for the EP, while "Clown"'s repetition of "I'm just a clown" over incessant waves of low end is like a nagging negative thought wearing you down. But what starts with a hangover from "Suicidal Ideation (Aural Hallucinations Mix)" ends on the more confident and rowdy "Make Bitches Cum," making this mini-album a different kind of journey. Iff Painful Enlightenment was Rush reinventing the wheel away from the dance floor, Dark Humor is a blueprint for how to ruffle feathers on it.
Tracklist01. Suicidal Ideation (Aural Hallucinations Mix)
02. Don't Want No Dick
03. Break It Remix
04. Lonely feat. DJ Paypal
05. Unk
06. Clown
07. Make Bitches Cum