Kim Petras, “Slut Pop,” 2022, press image

It’s a fitting irony that last year’s “Unholy” provided salvation to Kim Petras’s career. Peaking at number two on the German charts, the Kölnerin’s collaboration with English nonbinary singer-songwriter Sam Smith was a number one hit worldwide (from Austria to Australia) in its first week of release. Its virality saw it crawl to number one on the US Billboard charts, by which point its bombastic refrain was ubiquitous on every social media platform. Petras became worthy of the term iconic at last, through an omnipresent pulse that filled the rest of the year, then outlasted it. While community historian Morgan M. Page has warned against framing cultural breakthroughs in terms of “first trans to …,” it can’t be denied that this was an unprecedented breakthrough for a pair of trans pop singers. [1]

This landmark is especially heroic given the doldrums Petras had been trapped in only months before. Her new label had shelved an entire album of the performer’s tracks from release. Prior to “Unholy,” Petras had been left in the most awkward of positions: a pop star without a certified hit. Strings of strong single releases in quick succession adored by a lively fan base (and performances at huge events including LA and Sydney Pride) had failed to achieve a “breakout” moment. Pop stars exist to be enjoyed, or at least known, and failure on this front is a breakdown of function.

While some fans dismayed by Petras’s lack of broader recognition accounted for it as a lingering institutional transphobia, across the first half of 2022, deeper involvement of the previously independent artist with the music industry was a continuous disaster. Especially the reality of working in the post-MeToo entertainment industry threatened to undermine the breezy approach to leisure and sexuality relied on by Petras. This was not an artist gladly engaged in nuanced discussions of complicity. As she put it in one interview, “I write about boys, heartbreak, sex, having fun …” [2] This itinerary of desires is adhered to strictly in her songs (including “Unholy”) and usually approached suggestively. So, what kind of a heterosexual is Petras?

Men in Petras’s songs appear vaguely, primarily through gazes. True to the critiques of canonical feminist theories of the visual, Petras, in her orientation toward men, yearns more than anything simply to be seen. Her single “Hillside Boys” provides us with an exemplary erotic vignette:

My silhouette is in the frame of your shades again

And your cigarette’s facing its final breath …

When I’m in your eyes I just melt again

Male activity here extends as far as observing and smoking. Petras’s curves accordingly exist to impress themselves, with Petras finding herself becoming literally defined by the outline reflected back to her by the shades. Heterosexual exchanges are reduced to Petras’s receiving refined gifts (“Unholy” is not her first song to feature a string of desired luxury brands) and dissolving looks. This outlook seems to inevitably yoke together what Petras openly wants most: boys and an audience.

It was this overt and polyvalent longing that first drew me to Petras. the combination of vagueness in desired object and total clarity in aims produced a persistent simplicity – charming despite the calculation (or thanks to it?). The shrewd concealment of struggles beyond predictable boy troubles could be read either as avoidance or purposeful elision. Either way, Petras’s work presented at least the passable facsimile of having avoided damage that for previous generations had seemed inevitable – or at least she avoids mentioning it.

The fantasy sketched out by Petras’s singles was a powerful one: that anyone determined enough (and pretty enough) could attract and thrive on an ordinary kind of attention. Whatever your circumstances of birth, enough resolve could get you hot, well kept, and wanted. Altogether, the persona seems to establish the aesthetics of the ordinary slut: the craving of an endless procession of men doubling as a route to stardom – and normalcy. But the charge of this carefree aspiration was to come into rapid cross contamination with heterosexuality’s more brutal side.

The aspirant Petras has faced repeated rounds of controversy for working with Dr. Luke, an industry powerhouse producer notorious for an exploitative and cruelly extractive relationship with the pop star Kesha. Kesha’s career was launched by 2009’s “TiK ToK” (a single so successful it probably named the app Petras now relies on). But by the 2010s, Kesha was left in effective contractual imprisonment to Dr. Luke, whom during their vying lawsuits she accused of abuses, including drugging and rape. Kesha’s fan base ran a social media campaign (#FreeKe$ha) that came to righteously turn on Petras, whose own following also skewed young and queer. Australian pop star Troye Sivan included Petras in his 2018 “The Bloom Tour,” named after a lewd track celebrating anal bottoming (a perfect fit for Petras’s own playfully sexualized approach to pop). The controversy flared ferociously, and Sivan and Petras each issued a measured apology. [3]

Kim Petras, “If Jesus Was A Rockstar,” 2022, press image

Perhaps as should be expected from a pact with the devil, by 2022 her once fecund working relationship with Dr. Luke seemed to be taking Petras still further from worldly glory. This was a substantive decline; for instance, in 2019 the chorus to their cowritten “Personal Hell” was knowing and wry: “Touch me, only your hands make me come … alive.” But by Slut Pop (2022), this enthusiastic heterosexual persona had become blunted to the point of aimless grotesquerie, with the EP’s title track beginning: “This is slut pop, whip your dick out / Turn your bitch out, out, out, out-out-out-out.”

Rather than providing any stand-out track, the EP’s songs merged into an interchangeable sludge. As well as failing on its own terms to attract the elevating attention of any censorious right-wingers (in the manner of Ben Shapiro’s po-faced recitation of Cardi B’s “W.A.P.”), Slut Pop also threatened to bleach any discernable erotics from Petras’s act, besides a certain mechanical insistence to spurn propriety. After this processing, even Petras’s charming enthusiasm for 2000s pop turned against her: a strained reference to Lady Gaga in a song largely focused on deep-throating was taken as a purposeful slight, given Gaga’s prominence as an outspoken Kesha supporter. Perhaps to the advantage of all concerned, Slut Pop sank almost without a trace.

Even as interview responses from Petras on the topic of Dr. Luke became increasingly vague and evasive, the ongoing controversy was referenced in the title of her unreleased third album: Probelmatique. [4] Though Petras offered no clear defense of herself in the album’s lyrics, Prolematique still signaled a progression in quality that matched the assumed heavy promotion now possible with her having signed to a major label. Yet by mid-2022 Atlantic Records had left the release in what Petras called “limbo.” When its tracks were eventually leaked, Petras’s exasperation was evident in her Twitter remarks absolving fans of any ill will: “It’s ok if u wanna listen to the leaks … I’m not getting to put out any music anyways I’m fucked.” [5]

But despite its improved quality compared to Slut Pop, the material seemed to attempt an awkward dual purpose: providing a breakthrough that would make Petras a solid household name while obliquely referencing industry disputes that those not already plunged far into celebrity gossip had never heard of.

Things were to change rapidly after Petras announced she was free from “popstar jail.” [6] To put it simply, Petras’s jailbreak came through “Unholy,” a hit song about cheating.

Popular music hits have been measured differently from era to era: from the quantity of sheet music sold, to physical recordings, to downloads, to streaming service hits. In recent years, the industry has tailored its output purposefully around virality, with content purposefully produced to receive enthusiastic dissemination and rearticulation. What is required by this era’s pop stars is to rack up not only hard figures but moments of repetitive reverence: tunes to be mouthed silently along to, gyrated over, shared through replication.

While older generations of industry moguls sought out “hairdryer songs” to be sung by youths readying themselves for a night out, today these moments of amateur immersion appear on-screen, one demonstrative activity of pop’s circulation.

The simplification of Petras’s already accessible work up to this point had purposefully distilled itself, attempting to transmute the singer’s more loyal (queer) following into a broader mass. Although listeners had already had a taste of this treatment with her 2017 collaboration with hyperpop pioneer Charli XCX in “Unlock It,” the phenomenon was unleashed with unparalleled force by “Unholy.” In contrast to the debacle of Problematique, the preview of the release seeded the song’s chorus a month before full release, launching a convulsion of social media imitations. Comments on YouTube accordingly seem startled by the video’s release date in September, some remarking that the chorus felt like it had been around for years. The track lent itself to this treatment exactly through the relative density of the arrangement. Many attempted “stripped back” versions of the refrain acapella, replacing its full choir with their single voices, demonstrating their delivery’s force (or comedic lack of it) and room resonance.

I’ll leave to musicologists a further exploration of the various formal features of the track that hooked in listeners (as dancers and singers) after I first note its distinctive use of the D phrygian dominant, the vocal part’s threads of melisma redolent perhaps of RNB, a certain “exotic” noncommittal flourish dissonant with the overbearing choral polyphony, or the single’s place as a culminating point in the ascent of hyperpop from fecund niche (for nerds) to dominant genre (for the masses). [7]

More important to me is that it’s deliriously gay.

Kim Petras and Sam Smith, 2022, press image

What is most gripping most about “Unholy” is the ongoing balancing act of producing queer pop: tracks both able to gain traction among the broadest possible audience while arousing the obsessive pop queens of the online commentary (and more urgently in Petras’s case, mollifying them).

As well as inviting imitation, the widely replicated full choir intro lends a histrionic tone to proceedings. The accompanying music video plays up this familiar dissonance by hiring a medley of subcultural stars to fill a bawdy theater situated with willful contrivance above an auto repair shop. The routine’s dancers include Violet Chachki and Gottmik, two stars best known from Ru Paul’s Drag Race (Gottmik was the show’s first out transmale queen). More subtly, the philandering husband making the most of the venue is actor Paddy O’Brien, otherwise known as a gay porn performer. Together, this cast writhe and cross themselves over mores around monogamy that they seem vanishingly unlikely to share, doubling up as temptresses and prudes. After a resounding chorus, Kim is introduced by Smith in a hushed moment, descending onto the stage while framed in a black heart.

The boundless horniness of earlier iterations of Petras’s shtick appear cooled while not refined: men’s worth is best summarized in consumer goods brought to the table, while she offers a “no drama” hookup knowingly situated at the center of a grandiose melodrama. This account of sugared lust is frankly put but also relished. No-thrills intimacy with unambiguous attachment only to exchanges of bodies and commodities.

Today’s icons are known only through their recasting. Consistent with much of Petras’s work, her bid for pop grandeur consists of composite references to existing icons. [8] Her dance across a car implicitly pays homage to Madonna, while explicitly, she corrects Slut Pop’s slip by referencing an absent great only through reference to her glamour: “And he, he get me Prada, get me Miu Miu like Rihanna.” A strange quality of the emerging ’00s trend that Petras exemplifies is that era’s popular-culture tendency to refer inward to other moments (especially the 1980s).

But still more striking to me is that this performance doubles Petras’s role: as both an impeccable transsexual and as the act’s Straight Woman (a token dose of convincing heterosexuality in the midst of dragged out revelry). “Unholy” was not Petras’s first collaboration with other trans people: her work with the late SOPHIE produced two minor hits (“Reason Why” and “1, 2, 3 dayz up”). But “Unholy” establishes a more closely reciprocal exchange between costars with symmetrical needs – Petras of course craving the elevation provided by Sam Smith’s much better established career. For their part, Smith had faced unkind treatment around their identity. Like the rest of us (if with a larger budget), pop stars such as Smith or Harry Styles are offered a choice of identifications that truly amount to picking one’s poison. [9]

Deliberate vagueness or non-statement clearly results in an untold number of think pieces chewing over “cis men” and their supposed appropriations, while explicit assertions of nonbinary positions attract the baleful gaze of committed phobes. In this light, “Unholy” deploys Petras at once in celebration and consolidation of Smith’s efforts to escape this opinion, with all the dismissals and scathing bodily assessments it invites. Explicitly out as nonbinary since 2019, Smith appears in the video clad in an androgynous medley of corsetry and leather harnesses, giving burlesque and butch leatherdyke in admixture. They play the role of host and onlooker, raising tension before finally introducing their dolled-up adulteress counterpart with delighted gravitas.

The faux horror of “Unholy” around disrespect to the institution of marriage ascends to an ambivalent finale with the nonconfrontation of our philandering husband with his wife (Maren Fidje Bjørneseth), a tall blonde woman clad (like Petras) in white. Rather than denouncing either her spouse or his kept woman, she joins the throng and strips her wig and coat to reveal short-cropped (if still blonde) hair and bulging lingerie.

What’s revealed in this brief closer is quite unclear: on the one hand, Petras’s personal station as the icon of heterosexuality seems consolidated by her counterpart’s display. Yet on the other hand, the fuss over marriage seems subjected to momentary ridicule: abandoning your children and betraying your marriage is now no less of a breach from the hetero regime than fidelity. Or perhaps these proceedings link a chain of unacceptable objects of desire, passed ceremoniously from Smith (beyond the pale), to Petras (dubious but presentable), then back to Bjørneseth (within and beyond the pale, by turn). Or perhaps this is more simply a moment of prestige: the ensemble’s pop debut actress to demonstrate the contrivance of their playing pretend at drama-struck hets (save Petras?). Regardless, “Unholy” assures us that longing for dickgirls is not so easily escaped as self-declared “strict heterosexuals” might hope. That desire in the current era is closets, all the way out.

Even with this jarring climax lingering, can we call “Unholy” an attempt at subversion? The titillated movement “with the grain” of hetero-fidelity could instead attempt a reconciliation. While evoking accusations made of queers and transsexuals as sinners, “Unholy” is no frontal offensive of the kind attempted by another viral star, Lil Nas X. Tired of being told he’d burn in hell, Lil Nas X, in the promotional for “Montero,” descends into the flames of hell, only to seduce and straddle the devil himself. By contrast, it’s unclear if “Unholy” has any intention to undermine the conventional order, or simply sing romance’s truisms back through innumerable social media clips. While all aspects of LGBT life (and especially transgender children) are under increased pressure in both the United States and Britain, “Unholy” offers no clear defensive move. In a context where drag performers are being menaced as corrupters of youth, children are mentioned in the song only to be “left at home” by misbehaving monogamists (neglected rather than corrupted by paternal sins). Heterosexual mores and camp stylization are posed in tacit juxtaposition, but the conflict is left as latent, and most apparent to those in the know (certain viewers must have gotten a laugh from the visual punchline of O’Brien rolling around with women, for once.)

“Unholy” was more successful than Slut Pop in attracting evangelical right commentators’ picking over its esoteric signaling. But such was its traction among the youth that this reactionary attention felt almost incidental. What makes “Unholy” a queer pop breakthrough is its establishing of a clear screen for the projection to mass audiences: possible to read equally as a lament for monogamy’s decline as the assumed Western default or as a mocking celebration of vying forms of life becoming popularized and now marketed unabashedly. The cost of this is an exaggerated display of “hiding in plain sight,” an exuberance that stops itself short of explication. The symbol of the cross used in the video’s dancing may evoke camp slang that dubs nights of gay clubbing as “going to church,” but the performance stops short of mimicking a liturgy. There is no attempt to sketch out what looking “faithful” in the gay way might look like. The lives hinted at remain “alternative,” rather than being presented as their own new order.

But would anyone involved have had it any other way?

Kim Petras, “Coconuts,” 2021, press image

While a matter of public record, Petras’s transition has not been explicitly foregrounded in the course of her pop career. Although not entirely absent, explicit references to her transition in Petras’s music have been limited to a funk-tinged and unforgettable track, on her horror-themed album Turn Off the Light (2019), titled “TRANSylvania.” Petras also gave a purposefully raunchy performance at the MTV Europe Music Awards (featuring “Coconuts” and “Hit It From The Back”). This compounded an already provocative choice by organizers to host the event in Hungary shortly after anti-trans legislation was passed by fiat there in 2021. But for the most part, Petras’s transition is presented as a matter long since resolved.

By the time her music career brought her international attention, Petras had already spent three years as a teen advocate for the surgical transitions she eventually secured at age 16 (with the full support of her family). That within the German media circus Petras couched her appeal to the public in the most unreconstructed “born in the wrong body” rhetoric could seem easily forgiven. Yet the consequence was Petras’s serving as an especially visible face for a 21st-century vanguard: the expanding minority who approach transition as a set of technical challenges, ideally best tackled by a teenager (thus freeing up their 20s for other activities). It’s in that context that it became expedient to leave unspoken the specific turmoil and frictions faced by trans people expressing desire (and more so, serving as its object).

Yet the result is a haunting of Petras’s heterosexuality: longing for men is willfully presented as slutty, and even masochistic (see the celebration of rough sex in “Do Me,” or the emotional trials embraced in “Heart to Break”). But the truly perverse dissonance of longing to be longed for by men vanishes: how male desire is both uniquely socially validating and dangerous. This ambivalence is only latent in Petras’s songs, which are strewn with more simplified reminders of her desirability and which never quite spell out the high stakes of male attention for trans women. The worst she has to fear from her boys is predictable heartbreak. Lust that is free from any need for reassurance produces an uncanny exuberance, and male attention appears tidy and without panic.

To be more blunt, violence toward trans women is often carried out by their male sexual partners, whether boyfriends (or husbands) or the clients of sex workers. The romantic lives of hetero and bisexual trans women are shaped around this quandary in a broad range of ways. There is an infinite supply of men attracted to trans women, but identifying those who’ll make the experience fall between “no fun” and fatal is a fine art. Even those who’ve avoided direct violence at the hands of their partners are often tasked with doubling as counselors, easing the world’s most predictable identity crises (an extension of care that doubles as self-protection). Through skipping any mention of this, Petras allows us to picture her as personally unaffected – and as such, to fantasize more clearly about achieving the same escape.

Through exclusively homing in on the heady thrills of hetero womanhood, Petras resists expectations through a sacrificial move: all phobias excluded, social tensions brushed over. Having served her time as an advocate, Petras today employs a method that is not the point-by-point rebuttal but rather insistent exuberance, clearly expressed. Petras offers with defiance what most men wanted anyway: sex without any identification with them or lasting attachment in its wake. But this calculated refusal of complexity threatens to close down solidarity between sex’s outcasts, just as it requires rejecting shared cause between viral pop stars. Such are the demands of a smooth surface. While drama can and must be alluded to (Problematique), it never gets hashed out.

But what’s most striking is that this strategy of avoidance not only sealed Petras off from emancipatory politics (hardly the priority of most pop stars), it also didn’t even serve her functionally. “Unholy” proved that for all the reduction to heterosexual norms Petras had attempted, the only way for her to truly become a star was not through full submersion into the normal but through being surrounded by gays.

Jules Gleeson is a writer from London who lives in Vienna. Her essays, reviews, and interviews are widely published. She has performed stand-up comedy and given philosophical lectures internationally, at communist and queer events. Jules edited the anthology Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021) with Elle O’Rourke and is now writing a book on intersex liberation and the 1990s.

Image credit: © Universal Music