Kelefa Sanneh profiles the pop star Kim Petras, the first openly trans woman to win a Grammy, ahead of her major-label début.
On June 23rd, Petras will release her major-label début album, “Feed the Beast,” on Republic Records; it was named for advice given to her by a label executive, who kept urging her to make more music for the company to sell. For Petras, the all-consuming nature of the music industry is part of the fun. Being truly pop means being widely palatable, and it also means risking public rejection.
By the time Petras and Joseph started building a résumé, in the mid-twenty-tens, pop stars like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga were no longer so dominant, and the songs on the radio were growing slower and moodier, under the influence of hip-hop and R. and B. In that context, Petras’s brash, upbeat sound seemed either behind the times or ahead of them.
Guetta had an idea: he thought Petras might want to write something based on “Sans Contrefaçon,” a 1987 hit by Mylène Farmer, a French pop star. He cued it up. “It’s like ABBA,” Petras said, approvingly. When Petras pulled into another music studio, the next day, she was wearing the same black Balenciaga basketball shorts she had been wearing the day before. “I slept in this,” she said. “I’m disgusting.” She lives in Beachwood Canyon with her three dogs, and she had spent the night thinking about “Sans Contrefaçon.” She and the other writers had eventually managed to transform it into a new song—not quite a cover, or a remix, but something that retained both the beat and the concept.
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