REVIEW: All Hail the King! on King Princess' Cheap Queen
by Mitchell Griffin
There is new royalty in town. King Princess is the new lesbian Queen of Pop. Hands down.
Cover art for Cheap Queen
I have to send my apologies to Hayley Kiyoko and girl in red. I really do. I love them, too, but my heart belongs to King Princess.
Joking aside, the new queen deserves recognition. She is part of a wave of artists redefining queer identity in the music world. Their music is unabashedly displacing heteronormativity in music. As she told NPR, the music isn’t about being gay— it’s an authentic reflection embedded in the music that isn’t to be seen as a subgenre existing adjacent to the mainstream.
King Princess, aka Mikaela Straus, aka a 20-year-old from Brooklyn in the midst of her meteoric rise to fame, aka a star that effortlessly exudes unmatched charisma, released her debut album recently. Everyone should know this. If you didn’t already know, I’m personally sorry you had to endure this deprivation, one you were entirely unaware of, but now you have a chance to indulge.
Her debut album, Cheap Queen, is a soothing, sultry, deeply emotional 13-track collection that follows her first EP from 2018 and singles, covers, and collabs with Mark Ronson and Fiona Apple.
The EP Make My Bed featured songs like “1950” and “Talia” that jump-started her rise to stardom. “1950,” the first song of hers my ears were blessed with, is a ballad for the times when gay love was hidden more than anything and is inspired by the 1952 novel The Price of Salt, which the film Carol is adapted from. Her next release was the single “Pussy is God,” which is perhaps one of the best bops of all time.
Fittingly, the cover art of Cheap Queen is none other than King Princess herself adorned in drag. It begins with her lamenting in “Tough on Myself” and ends with another slow, sad, beautiful track in “If You Think It’s Love.” The album deals with heartbreak through soothing pop melodies interspersed with hits like “Useless Phrases” and “Hit the Back.”
Her songs compel you to feel her heartbreak and joy along with her. They aren’t stereotypically vacuous pop songs that rely on annoyingly repetitive catchy beats. It’s easy to brush over the album as one filled with a slew of similarly slow, heartbroken songs but every one of them is deserving of the time it takes to carefully listen to every beat, every perfect background vocal, every piano and guitar note, ad infinitum.
“I can be good sometimes/I’m a cheap queen/I can be what you like/And I can be bad sometimes/I’m a real queen/I can make grown men cry”
In a hilarious video that may or may not represent something akin to a genuine interview, she perfectly describes “Hit the Back” as a song [redacted due to uncouth language that CAN NOT be found at roughly the 4:30 mark of the video linked above].
King Princess’s music videos are all artistic masterpieces. Whether she is floating in the clouds on a bench with a flying, googly-eyed sandwich, being a living human cake, or other actually normal human things, they are yet another component of her creative powers that propel her further into pop royalty as her career continues on its inevitably illustrious track.