Get ready to have a new summer “crush.” RALPH, the singer who has been lighting up dance floors and making hearts swoon since 2015, has just released her cover of Jennifer Paige’s 1998 hit, “Crush,” and it’s your new summer jam. While it still retains a dash of the sultriness that made the original a hit, RALPH updates it for 2020, delivering her own flavor of dance-pop brilliance to capture the precise feeling — that sparkly, energetic, bubbly feeling – of falling in love. If that wasn’t enough, RALPHhas released an animated video for the track, one that harkens back to her own childhood. As it turns out, Jennifer Paige’s track is rather near-and-dear to RALPH’s origin story.
“I had a really cool-girl babysitter when I was 10,” she tells HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY. “She was a singer and took me for my first manicure and showed me all the best pop songs. I remember her playing ‘Crush’ while we were driving in her little VW convertible, and I’ve loved the song ever since. It will forever remind me of being an excited pre-teen who has just started idolizing powerful women and pop.”
The video was brought to life by artist Amika Cooper (aka blackpowerbarbie.) She said that the “Crush” video was an “ode to how magical it was to be a pre-teen in the early 2000s. I wanted to find a way to depict the kind of fever dream you would enter while sitting in your room, reading teen magazines and listening to your favorite pop stars and just being swept up in the fantasy of pop music.” She also said that RALPH’s music “takes me back to that place, and I hoped this video would be the perfect opportunity to celebrate that.”
“Crush” comes after RALPH’s single, “Superbloom,” the first single on her new label, Rich Man Records. The name comes from a famous Cher quote (“My mom said to me, ‘You know sweetheart, one day you should settle down and marry a rich man.’ And I said, ‘Mom, I am a rich man.'”) and that appreciation of self-made success and feminine power shows why RALPH is an icon-in-the-making. In 2018, she dropped her album, A Good Girl, and last year, she put out her Flashbacks & Fantasies EP.
So, it shouldn’t be any surprise that when the queens of the inaugural season of Canada’s Drag Race needed some help with a rap battle challenge, they called the Toronto native for some advice. It was great. It was such an amazing experience,” she told NewNowNext. “I think with Drag Race… I just love the show. Anyone watching, I think, starts to understand what a challenging and complex job it is to do drag. I’m just so in awe of how insanely talented, in so many elements, you have to be, to be the number one drag queen.”
RALPH’s “Crush” is out now.