J Terrell’s “Stardom” isn’t a song asking for your belief; it’s a receipt for a future that has already been purchased. Presented as a dispatch from “Dream Radio,” the track functions as an audible incantation, a funky, propulsive spell designed to bend reality to its will. The confidence here isn’t boastful; it’s procedural, as if we’re listening to someone calmly read the minutes from a meeting where their own fame was unanimously approved.
The production is saturated with that clean, chrome-plated funk of the early 2000s, a definite spiritual cousin to the work of Pharrell. Yet it isn’t a simple throwback. It’s more like finding an old, unopened can of soda from that era that, against all odds, has somehow become more carbonated over time. The self-belief here is so pure and potent it briefly unhooks from music altogether. For a second, it made me think of the peculiar, unyielding geometry of a crystal forming—an act of nature so programmed and absolute it feels less like a process and more like an assertion.
Beneath the declarations of being a “rocket” moving at “full throttle,” the track operates like a hypnotic mantra. This is the artist as alchemist, treating fame not as a prize to be won but as a state of consciousness to be inhabited. The whole song vibrates with that central, almost spiritual tenet of manifestation: to announce the future with such conviction that the present has no choice but to step aside.
Terrell isn’t looking for a seat at the table; he’s informing us that he built the table, the chairs, and the whole darn building. So, is “Stardom” a prediction or a report on events already in progress?
