JC
Kim Petras
Listening to Kim Petras’ early releases makes me feel like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Except the singer doesn’t transport me to some made-up place inhabited by talking scarecrows and cowardly lions. Instead, she takes me somewhere way stranger: the 1980s. Seriously. I only need to listen to a few seconds of a song like Icy and I’ll be looking around for a Rubik’s Cube to play with or some shoulder pads to wear.
Not that her music sounds like a photocopy of what’s gone before. Yes, the spectacular Petras probably owns a few Madonna records but her early catalogue isn’t just some kind of scrapbook of old ideas. And to say Petras simply dumps us in the ’80s and leaves us there probably isn’t quite right, because Britney’s an influence too – and then there’s Petras’ delivery, which is very now. Without doubt, she’s an icon for the present.
Still, it’s true that Dorothy would feel right at home with Clarity (Petras’ first full album) blaring out of her radio, because there’s definitely a yellow brick road running right through the middle of this album. And I’m sure the last thing Kim Petras needs is a dimwit like me hypothesising about the challenges she must have faced as a transgender artist but clearly she’ll have encountered at least a few hurdles along her way to here.
And now she’s a POP STAR.
That sounds like an inspirational journey to me. And really you’ll relate to it because that fight to be yourself, well, we’re all in that battle.
Or maybe that’s me trying to make my life feel more significant than it is.
Whatever. Kim Petras didn’t spend much of her early career self-analysing. Yeah, it may have taken some work for her to build a career but singing about that would be drab. Instead, then, she made records that were all Gucci this and Prada that. And, to this day, there remains no doubt that Kim Petras is a material girl. But she’s also the singer of huge tuuuuuuunes, and each one one of them does exactly what pop music is meant to do and takes you away to a different world – the only downside being that coming back to reality is a bit of a drag. Something I’m pretty sure Dorothy knows all about.