King Princess’s Homecoming
After the Civil War, the German-born Jewish businessman Isidor Straus moved with his family to New York City. Straus was enterprising and handsome, with small round spectacles, an angular nose, and a coarse, peppery beard. He started off as a crockery vender; by the turn of the twentieth century, he had made millions as a co-owner of Macy’s, befriended Grover Cleveland, served a year in Congress, and fallen in love. His wife was Rosalie Ida Blun, with whom he shared a birthday and seven children. On April 10, 1912, Isidor and Ida boarded the Titanic. She would decline a lifeboat, refusing to be separated from her husband. In James Cameron’s 1997 film, they embrace each other in bed, weeping, as the ship sinks. “I like to imagine they were thinking, ‘This is going to be a movie, we need to get our screen time,’ ” their great-great-granddaughter, Mikaela Straus, told me, taking a hit of a blunt on her couch, in Brooklyn. The last of her line of inheritance had been spent long before she was born. She’s bemused by suppositions about the advantages of her family legacy, which in reality boasts a centuries-deep ledger of addiction, estrangement, and untimely death. Only twenty-six, Mikaela, under the moniker King Princess, has begun to establish a musical legacy all her own. Over the past decade, she’s cultivated a reputation for a new kind of defiant, autodidactic pop stardom. Next month, she will release her striking third album, “Girl Violence”—her best yet—which cements her status not only as a virtuosic provocateur but as a generational talent.
When Straus was seventeen, she wrote and produced her first single, a lesbian pop song that would eventually go platinum. It was her first semester at U.S.C.’s Thornton School of Music, and she was showering in her dorm suite when she started to hum a new melody. She ran, naked and dripping wet, out of the bathroom, and frantically asked a roommate for their phone. Into it, she recorded the first few phrases of what would become “1950,” a snappy serenade to a crush that has since accrued over half a billion streams.
Straus had grown up in a recording studio, where she’d developed a shrewd understanding of pop arithmetic. Blending the honeyed soul of old-school crooners with the synthesized beats that dominated the airwaves and dance floors of her adolescence, she introduced audiences to what would become the King Princess sound: sexy, plaintive vocals, thrumming bass lines, and a fusion of digital and analog instrumentation. Shortly after the release of “1950,” in February, 2018, Harry Styles posted the lyrics on Twitter, garnering hundreds of thousands of likes overnight. Straus would go on to perform the song on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” then on “Saturday Night Live.” What made “1950” ’s success unique was its refusal to conform to the expectations of a Billboard-charting ballad; in a swirl of doo-wop snaps and reverb, it told a defiant, elliptical ode to gay history. “I hate it when dudes try to chase me,” Straus sings, in a raspy alto:
The chorus toys with the erotics of bygone danger—conflating the perils of mid-century homophobia with a modern lover’s desire to play hard to get. “I was just thinking about how sad it is that we, you know, are horny for our own oppression,” she quipped on a podcast. Straus, who knew she was queer before she could write her name, was a lonely child. Though her parents were largely supportive of her sexuality, others were not: when she walked down the streets of New York holding hands with girlfriends as a young teen-ager, passersby would hurl expletives, slurs, and occasional threats. For company, she turned to literature—Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness,” Rita Mae Brown’s “Rubyfruit Jungle,” Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” Fannie Flagg’s “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.” She particularly loved “The Price of Salt,” the only happy ending she encountered, and subsequently read every biography she could find of Patricia Highsmith and her lovers. She wrote the song as a way to reach across time toward them, to find a companion in history.
That spring, the producer Mark Ronson heard Straus’s demos in an A. & R. meeting at Sony. They got dinner—a meeting she’s described wryly as a first date—and, struck by her raunch and then by her technical acumen, he signed her. (One of his favorite songs of hers is called “Pussy Is God.”) After Straus received an advance from Ronson’s imprint at Columbia Records, Zelig, one of the first things she did was pay off some forty thousand dollars in outstanding student loans. Her début EP, “Make My Bed,” opens with a prayer of thanks: “Eighteen years I spent / waiting for this.”
In June, Straus told me how her time at the label ran its course. “We have enough documentaries about Britney Spears to know how it works,” she said, shrugging and packing her lip with Zyn, the nicotine pouches she’s substituted for a vaping addiction. She recalled how she and her mother—whom she jokes is the “D-list Kris Jenner”—had hired a lawyer to exegete every line of the contract for her, “and I still got fucked.” After seven years at Columbia, she left. “In L.A., I had become addicted to my own unhappiness. It reached a point where I was like, ‘I will die if certain things don’t change,’” she told me. “Mark was like a parent to me. He was gracious enough to let me go.” She made her new album, “Girl Violence,” free of oversight or contractual obligation, then scouted for distributors, landing with section1, the tiny partner label of the independent, Brooklyn-based Partisan Records. Their enthusiasm and compassion had surprised her. “I wasn’t used to people not caring about streams or views,” she told me. “Good art is not born out of fear.”
Straus, whose elfin face is framed by a piecey shag, with arched pink lips, a delicate nose, and hazel eyes underscored by creases that make her look a little strung out, was setting up for her semi-regular queer costume party, BAZONGAS, at a warehouse in East Williamsburg. The theme was “Slut Funeral”—a celebration of her new album’s lead single, “RIP KP,” and her own symbolic rebirth—and a handful of employees from Partisan were moving a two-hundred-pound steel casket to the lip of a stage, which had been decorated with more than forty fake candles. Helping with the manual labor in a ribbed white tank top, shredded jeans, and Timberland work boots, she joked to me that she had no security concerns about throwing a party open to the public: “What are these, like, weird, funny lesbians going to do to me?” Her anxieties about the exposure had more to do with her own behavior. “I had decided in my head that I wanted to be of the people, and around people, and available to people, so what if I fucked up?” she told me. “What if I have too many drinks, or get embarrassed or defensive?”
Straus modulates between a kind of studied languor and a firebrand’s stridency. “They’ve tried to media-train me at least eighteen times,” she said, within minutes of our first meeting. She repeatedly glanced at her publicity team as we spoke, even when they were out of earshot. The meta-acknowledgment of her ungovernability can seem strategic—as if it might make a journalist, or a collaborator, put less stock in her brash pronouncements.
Chris Robbins and Brontë Jane, the married founders of section1, first met Straus over Zoom. It was Valentine’s Day, and Straus introduced herself to her prospective bosses by describing the lingerie her girlfriend had brought over. Robbins recalls thinking, “Only one of you exists in the world.” Straus was mouthy, sharp, and knowledgeable, recalling the punky theatrics of Courtney Love and Gwen Stefani, but the pair were most compelled by the paradox of a certain calculated authenticity—she wielded vulgarity with the choreographed poise of a clown. “It’s this idea of Mikaela as a total fucking rock star, but in the most self-aware, almost self-parodying way,” Jane explained.
Straus’s approach to her new album reminded Jane of one of her favorite films, Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” in which a young nurse struggles to distinguish herself from her patient. The whole conceit of “King Princess” is arranged around a fun-house effect—seeing iterations of yourself that aren’t exactly you but which you nonetheless identify with. Straus took inspiration from the Surrealist French artist Claude Cahun (also androgynous and pseudonymous), whose uncanny self-portraits troubled the possibility of documenting a “real” self.
“I still don’t know if I’m supposed to call her King Princess or Mikaela,” Hugh Jackman told me. He acted opposite Straus in the forthcoming film “Song Sung Blue”—her feature début—and, in April, invited her to join him onstage at his Radio City residency. They duetted Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” and he recalled being taken by the immediacy of her performance. “She had rehearsed with the orchestra, but I felt like she was discovering the song for the first time as she sang it. That kind of confidence can’t be taught.”
When Straus was a teen-ager, musician friends would designate certain sessions in the studio with her as “king princess days,” summoning a punk-diva spirit to the console: Mick Jagger in a bustier. (“I’m literally fifty-fifty,” Straus told me, of her gender. “There’s a huge disconnect between my body and my soul. I think that disconnect is powerful if it’s harnessed, but sometimes you wake up and you’re, like, ‘If I put clothes on this carcass, I’m going to kill myself.’ ”) Her relationship to womanhood, which has been fraught and erratic since a tomboyish childhood on the baseball team, relies on notions of drag and extravagance; if the standard is a caricature, she can’t fail in its execution. For her birthday, in December, she threw a Harry Potter-themed BAZONGAS and dressed in full prosthetics as a busty, camel-toed Voldemort.
