From Apollonia and Debbie Harry to Aimee Mann and Crystal Waters, we salute the unstoppable artists whose sounds, styles, and stories continue to define generations.
(Crystal Waters wears a Balmain coat; High Sport pants; Dolce & Gabbana boots.)
Excerpt from W Magazine
Crystal Waters’s catalog of clubland classics doubles as commentary on culture and class. Her breakout hit, “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless),” was the soundtrack to the summer of 1991. “The tune, which blasts from boomboxes and cruising Jeeps, has become seemingly ubiquitous,” The New York Times reported that June.
More than 30 years later, “Gypsy Woman” still resonates: sampled by Katy Perry and Doechii, channeled by Azealia Banks, echoed on Beyoncé’s Renaissance. Waters wrote the song after seeing a homeless woman singing in D.C., an encounter that changed her perspective.
A New Jersey native and great-niece of blues legend Ethel Waters, she had been pursuing a “Sade thing” before meeting Baltimore’s Basement Boys. “Once they brought me to New York’s Sound Factory, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m in,’ ” she said. Her voice came alive in nightclubs. “All those vocals on the final ‘Gypsy Woman’ track were demos,” she added, laughing.
Mainstream success was just as unscripted; in the early ’90s, house music, rooted in queer culture, was still dismissed by the mainstream. “I was one of the only ones performing at Pride,” she said. Her 1994 follow-up, “100% Pure Love,” spent 11 months on the Billboard Hot 100. She’s since earned 12 No. 1s on the dance charts.
Waters continues to expand her footprint with everything from bootleg edits on micro-video platforms to her podcast I Am House Radio. “If I wrote ‘Gypsy Woman’ today, some exec might say, ‘Nobody wants to hear that,’ ” she said. “Now teenage boys know me as the TikTok lady.”