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October 25, 2019 - Zelig Records/Columbia
Rare are those who rise to prominence from the lower classes. It is easy enough to pretend that the Western world does not run parallel to a caste system with examples like The Notorious B.I.G. and Dolly Parton. Inspiring as they are, their stories serve a more insidious purpose: a false narrative of inclusivity—that no one is excluded from accumulating wealth and prestige. Yet what we find most often in arenas of fame and visibility are exchanges made between the upper classes, favors traded among the well-established to position their children in whatever manner is desirable.
After nearly two years of releasing singles, King Princess showed out with her first full-length work Cheap Queen.
The title does little to misdirect from the heritage which afforded her the opportunity to create the album. Daughter of recording engineer Oliver H. Straus, himself a child of illustrious pedigree, King Princess, real name Mikaela Mullaney Straus, seems to have wriggled her way in the good old-fashioned nepotistic way. Ironically, (though the irony may be lost on Ms. Straus) her album takes its name from the drag term which refers to a drag queen who is “resourceful, making something out of not very much.” It’s hard to justify the lens she sees her own album through other than playacting, trying to close the gap between herself and the disenfranchised, since her album was literally crafted in tandem with one of the world’s leading producers. A wealthy, well-connected girl drags as a cheap queen, and the universe has become a little more convoluted. And the album creates its inverse: Something which has made very little out of very much, a waste of resources. But Cheap Queen is not without its moments. Though the first half is difficult to suffer through, Cheap Queen finds its legs in tracks like ‘Homegirl’ and ‘Do You Wanna See Me Crying,’ bringing in both grace and authenticity to an album that spends much of its time showing off nothing but good equipment and its excellent resources.
The album is well-produced but otherwise soulless. With help from Mark Ronson, Mikaela has released a project that reads more like a Mark Ronson project. His influence on the album is much more audible, echoing his previous efforts with Adele, Amy Winehouse, and Miley Cyrus. While initially pleasing to the ear, unadventurous arrangements and uninspired if not banal lyrics bring the zippy and tantalizing elements of Cheap Queen to a trudge.
The album opens with ‘Tough on Myself,’ which is corralled together with spacious brassy synths and Princess’s voice coming in with a strong sense of vintage soulfulness. For the first six lines, it works. Shortly after, momentum is lost on all fronts. The spacious synth has opened itself up only to coddle the same descending cadence about someone who’s too tough on herself and only wants to smoke blunts because she doesn’t handle others’ feelings well: “I get too tough on myself.” This, over and over again. Without vocals we’re left with a charming high-drama rift of a spaghetti western which stands on its own for about two repetitions, but goes well beyond the two, eventually buckling.
‘Useless Phrases,’ follows up with plucky gramophone static, another loving touch from Mr. Ronson. On its own the instrumental is nostalgic and heartfelt. Smartly, ‘Useless Phrases,’ exits before overstating itself, leaving no time for the listener to atrophy. The song’s brevity works well—four lines, two of which are the refrain “I don’t usually entertain such useless phrases,” which refers to two clichés in youthful dramas:
“You say you want me back.”
“I thought I had the facts.”
Any more time devoted and the song threatens to alert the listener to the broader scope of what they are hearing. With too much time to ruminate on what amounts to someone giving second thought to something they usually consider useless, a listener might begin to draw connections between the lyrics and their own feelings about Cheap Queen. In the voice of David Attenborough narrating Planet Earth: For the time being, the bullet is dodged.
For as short as ‘Useless Phrases’ is, its victory is even shorter. The title track ‘Cheap Queen’ drives home that if a person has parents with money and any talent at all, with the right connections, they can produce an album that sounds like it is supposed to be good. ‘Cheap Queen’s’ title espouses the ethos of a culture of drag queens, people who’ve had to make do, and make more than do with less than what’s available to most. However, Straus can’t help but reveal her lavishes: smoking weed, being brought wine, and having people travel far and wide to see her. She told writer Tatiana Cirisano at Billboard the album’s sound came from “the most vulnerable year of [her] life.” Yet none of that vulnerability turns up, as King Princess flaunts being desired and laments fake friends (although the lament is so brief, it seems they too are relished for the service of a mediocre line).
Inanity aside, or rather turning over the prismatic inanity of the album, ‘Cheap Queen’ is also mindlessly repetitive. With a refrain that appears six times in a two-minute-and-forty-two-second song, Straus and Ronson both seem to bank on the hook being catchy enough that it doesn’t matter that it says nothing except that King Princess can be good, can be liked, can be bad, and can make grown men cry. In short, the message is that King Princess is a human. For some, maybe it works. Again, its cadence is similar to Lorde’s hit song ‘Tennis Courts’ which was a big hit. Her voice is husky and confident. Not a single note falls out of place. If an audience hears it and is able to say “Yes, I am moved,” then King Princess has done a fine job. But what this listener hears is affluenza, an artist who thinks she can escape scrutiny of her privilege by claiming and amplifying an identity that makes little appearance in her work.
‘Ain’t Together’ follows up and adopts a similarly anonymous lyrical focal point. Leaving out any distinguishing lyrical details, ‘Ain’t Together’ features dreamy pop synths and a sleepy acoustic guitar reminiscent of late nineties pop rock ballads. Amidst a comforting assemblage of gentle instrumentation the track hints at romantic nuance but ultimately shies away. King Princess dares go no deeper than, “We say ‘I love you,’ but we ain’t together. Do you think labels make it taste much better?” Though she doesn’t prod, maybe it’s enough that she utters the question. After all, her target audience seems to be a much younger crowd finding their own way. It may be enough that they are able to hear a queer artist phrase the questions they have about their own budding lives. For that, one can cast no shade.
Now that I feel my issues with King Princess have been sufficiently meted out, we can move on to the luscious funk of ‘Do You Wanna See Me Crying?’ (Which by the way, I don’t know why she wouldn’t just elongate the title the full two words or six letters, ‘Do You Wanna See Me Cry For You?’). Here we see the pretentiousness in the early album peel away. King Princess lets her voice fall in rank with the instrumentals, using muffled vocals to generate just barely audible lyrics. The beginning of the song features confessions mumbled and buried under big funky percussion and her own voice auto-tuned to unintelligibility. Roughly midway, Straus comes out of her shell and her self-reflections become clear, her voice again taking the foreground, “Think I’m nicer to my friends now...keep my money in my hands now, do you wanna see me cry for you?” Finally, humility has entered.
Straus follows up with a touching I’m-not-like-those-boys ballad. Less musically interesting than the previous tracks, but more lyrically aware and touching, ‘Homegirl’ outlines the courting process, which is also the healing process in a world where much of romance lends itself to trauma. The track, with easy guitars and glistening vibraphone hits, feels out the tension between lust between women and a desire to differentiate oneself from the male role in lusting after. The instrumentation and the quaint, less robust quality of Straus’s voice in ‘Homegirl’ convey a desire to maintain innocence as though it’s something to be lost with a misstep. In a sense their queer love seems likened to virginity, in which an abstraction is subject to corruption or loss. Though a lot of the song gives way to easy lyrical tropes: tasting like danger, you look at me like him, safe in your arms etc.., one line invites and penetrates with vulnerability: “you don’t have to say it, we’re friends at the party, I’ll give you my body at home.” Outstanding, demonstrative of the precarious social mores and desires at work.
The next song, ‘Prophet,’ moves away from the ballad and into anthem territory. A jubilant track about queer culture being coopted and repurposed and sold. A tale as old as time, as long as time has been sold—perhaps clocks are the best measure, since they mark the time at which some people were permitted to have more specific time in the home and others had to do without. But actually, it’s not about that. It’s about a girl who wants to hang around a molly dealer because she’s in love with the molly dealer. Lines like “everyone wants a piece of your soul,” and “it’s all bout the money and the power, can’t step off it, someone else will cop it” transform from describing a theft of cultural trends into, fuck, about if this dealer stops selling molly someone else is just going to sell it.
Suddenly, one realizes the song only uses the word “prophet” to rhyme with the word “profit,” and not to describe the way larger cultures take from marginalized cultures. It’s hard not to feel a little cheated after reading about Straus as an aspiring queer icon. The problem with an aspiring ‘‘good person’’ is that they run the risk of envisioning the world as a stage upon which they perform good deeds. But a person doesn’t need to perform good deeds if they can just as easily say the right things in moments of visibility. The problem with Cheap Queen isn’t that it’s backed by money or that it was produced by prodigious people. It’s that it claims a background apart from itself, it dabbles in queerhood, it dabbles in drag. Both of which are fine to dabble in, but it doesn’t recognize the realm from which it reaches down to dabble only to return home as a tourist does, to comfort.
The world would’ve been just as well served if Cheap Queen had been diary entries instead of an album. Perhaps most so for ‘Isabelle’s Moment’ in which more vague ideas are laid over well equalized piano to create the sense of a harrowing moment. Again, the song manages not to offend by keeping itself short, but even in for its short-windedness the song possesses very little economy. The longest of the song bears Straus reiterating, “Is this how it’s gonna’ be” in reference to her difficulty making sense of her relationships, be it friends or lovers. Again, great fodder for a diary. But if she wants to actually highlight the community she claims to be a hero of and wants to elevate her music at the same time, her next move ought to be finding someone(s) from that community who can write some lyrics.
It seems pointless to go on detailing song after song, when the whole album feels fraudulent. What’s good in Cheap Queen has had its highlight, and what’s deplorable is more of the same. The valuable bits of Straus’s most recent project can be found just as easily and more heartfully in Miley Cyrus. And maybe that’s partially a factor of Straus’s age. She’s young, and has just had the privilege of dropping out of music school. If she is dedicated to the things she says she is, then consider Cheap Queen a misstep, something well-intentioned but confused. And if she can turn her music into something besides a hobby that she has a talent for, if she can imbue it with really empathetic passion, I’ll be looking to her in the future. But as of now, from excesses of comfort and privilege her voice is merely voyeuristic, a drag of a drag. ⛰️