Genius

**Genius** is an American website that llows users to provide annotations and interpretation of song lyrics, news stories, sources, poetry, and documents. Kim Petras did an interview for their Youtube channel in 2018 and a photoshoot (by TK Atakora) and interview for their website on June 28th, 2019.

## Video Interview

Kim Petras "I Don't Want It At All" Official Lyrics & Meaning Verified
## Written Interview

The budding singer-songwriter spent years living vicariously through Hollywood’s pop culture icons. Now she wants to be one.

Paris Hilton’s cultural cache has waned quite a bit since her Simple Life heyday, but her name still evokes a certain mid-aughts nostalgia. The heiress socialite briefly became the center of pop culture in the pre-social media era, and even had a short-lived music career highlighted by the featherlight summer jam, “Stars Are Blind.” So it feels almost too right that Kim Petras was introduced to much of the world praying in front of a Paris Hilton shrine in the music video for her debut single, “I Don’t Want It At All.”

The scene is something of a metaphor for Petras' career. The budding pop singer and songwriter was born in Germany in 1992, and grew up idolizing the glitz and glam of Hollywood life from afar. American celebrities like Hilton were her north star.

“I used to stan Paris Hilton as a teen,” she gushed in a recent trip to Genius' Brooklyn headquarters. “There’s pictures of me in front of my whole wall, [covered in posters of] Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan and Heidi Montag and Ashley Tisdale, all the blondes of the 2000s. That was my entire room. I stanned ‘Stars Are Blind.’”

For Petras, the connection to mid-aughts stars like Hilton feels more personal. Well before her singing career began, she earned headlines around the world for becoming one of the youngest people to ever undergo gender confirmation surgery. She’s spoken about experiencing bullying as a trans teen, and explained that this idealized version of American celebrity helped her escape her “boring” life. “I feel like I’ve always been obsessed with American culture,” she said. “I grew up with YouTube and all of that shit. I was such a Disney Channel kid. I was like, ‘I want to be a Disney star.’”

She strove to recreate these types of pop songs and turn her dreams of fame into a reality, but hit roadblocks in Germany. “There was nobody I could work with that wanted to make the same music I wanted to make,” she explained. “All I’ve ever written is English pop songs, and American pop in particular was my obsession. So I was just like I have to move to L.A. eventually and just be a real legit writer.”

She would make the move in her early 20s, but found that her Hollywood dreams didn’t quite match up to reality. “It took a while and it was hard,” she recalled. “$5 a day to live on. I lived on Little Caesar’s Pizza and a sub for years, and just slept on a studio couch.”

Even with years of struggles, she never let the disillusionment affect her music. She channeled her dreams into pure pop escapism. “I wrote about my wish life,” she said. “'I Don’t Want It At All.‘ I wrote that lyric living on a futon with like four roommates. I kind of manifested that shit."

Her early manifestations included a publishing deal for her songwriting talents, which she pursued as a more “realistic” avenue for breaking into the music industry. “I was like, ‘Nobody is ever gonna write me a song. I need to learn how to do it myself,‘” she said. “[It was] always gonna be my vehicle to be an artist because people didn’t think I could be one.”

By the time she inked the deal, she had over 500 songs written. Many of them reflected childhood influences like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Hillary Duff, distilling the resurgent nostalgia for that era of celebrity-artists into pure saccharine delight. The aforementioned “I Don’t Want It At All,” a millennial reinvention of “Material Girl,” nailed this aesthetic so well that Petras was able to score a cameo from Hilton herself for the music video. It’s earned nearly four million views so far. From there, she couldn’t be stopped from feeding her fans.

The 26-year-old has spent the last two years virtually flooding the market with new music, releasing tracks as one-off singles drawn from her years of songwriting efforts in Los Angeles. Although the stunted rollout ended up being effective, Petras said that it wasn’t a strategy so much as her own impatience with the slow-moving cogs of the music industry.

“I had no following, nothing going on. So I was like, ‘How do I build buzz for myself, and how do I do it differently and stick out from the millions of artists?” she said. Petras’ unofficial first era would produced several standout tracks. She wrote “Hillside Boys” about blowing the money from her publishing deal on an empty mansion to live her Hollywood Hills dreams. Meanwhile, “Heart to Break” still stands her biggest song to date (with 21 million Spotify streams) and a living tribute to her perfectionist work ethic.

“We really spent three months on that song,” she said with a sigh. “I’m fucking proud of ‘Heart to Break,’ I think it’s really well written, and I really banged my head against the wall a million times.”

The success of her first era is impressive for an artist whose music is still released independently, if not yet on the level of the pop icons she idolizes. But she’s been dogged by one persistent issue: Dr. Luke. The embattled producer, whose career as one of the 21st century’s most successful forces in pop music came to a screeching halt amidst sexual assault allegations leveled by Kesha, has just a handful of credits to his name since that news first broke in 2014. Many of them are for Kim Petras.

It’s an thorny issue that Petras has handled (at best) inelegantly. Last year, after being drafted as an opening act on Troye Sivan’s tour, Petras had to publicly apologize after comments resurfaced where she seemed to insinuate that she thought Kesha was lying. She repeated her apology in our interview, and said the whole conflict was about “a lawsuit that I don’t want to talk about, that I have nothing to do with.”

She’s right about the optics of an aspiring trans pop star being held accountable for the alleged actions of a rich and powerful man far above her pay grade, but fans and critics have continued to question why the artist hasn’t moved on to less controversial collaborators. The answer likely lies in her aforementioned publishing deal, which she signed with Luke’s Prescription Songs while she was still a struggling songwriter.

“Yes, he signed me. It’s like that,” she offered when asked why she hadn’t considered parting ways with him. In just a few words, it becomes clear. Whether Petras believes Dr. Luke or not is mostly irrelevant when her career is tied to his. Attempting to formally cut ties with the producer, even amidst his current level of scrutiny, could involve a legal battle and would in all likelihood be an epic act of career self-sabotage right when her music is hitting its stride.

It’s a problem she seemed to hint at in our interview. “I love Twitter but I think there’s a lot of opinions that everybody has about everything and conclusions that everybody jumps to that I don’t want anything to do with,” she said. That explanation may not be enough as her star continues to rise, but she’s left with few options.

Instead, she’s trying to branch out.

Petras' next project, Clarity, dropped today following another small avalanche of songs. Luke’s name is still peppered throughout the credits, but she’s eager to talk about the other people she’s working with, too. This includes pop upstarts like Vaughn Oliver, B Ham, and Madison Love, as well as more established acts like songwriter Theron Thomas and producer Nic Nac.

“I feel like the more successful people get, the more secluded people get and they’re more surrounded by people pleasers and social climbers and all of that,” she said. “I just love working with new people who are excited to write… I don’t ever want to get jaded and get lazy.”

This new project is drawn from a batch of songs that Petras worked on in December, January, and February following her tour with Troye Sivan. She wasn’t able to record on the road, but pieced together songs from words written in a notebook. “There were words that were more important than others and just kept coming back,” she said.

Her first single from Clarity, “Broken,” finds Petras showing more emotional range, coping with a breakup by celebrating her newfound success.

She’s since dropped songs like “Got My Number,” which revealed the real phone number of her friend and collaborator Jesse St. John, “Blow It All,” and “Sweet Spot,” all of which further refine her talent for escapist music.

While the sounds they draw from are machine pop at its peak, Petras manages to subvert these ideas through both her indie credentials and the earnestness of her writing. You can tell how much these influences and the craft of songwriting mean to her, even if she says she’s changed her mind about whether writing the “perfect pop song” is even possible.

All these singles appear on Clarity (out today), representing a continuation of the rollout strategy that’s helped her get noticed in the first place. “I’m just in the studio all the time and I want to drop songs all the time and be with my fans in real time and not have a big strategy thing,” she said of her unconventional rollout. “I’m just doing what feels right and I’m not thinking about it much.”

She’s also drawing some inspiration from a very different early aughts icon, rocking thigh-high boots emblazoned with the Pokémon Jigglypuff in recent photos and even sharing alternate single covers starring the singing pink balloon creature. “Jigglypuff is essentially me for a lot of years. Singing and people falling asleep and people sleeping on me,” she laughs. “I just feel represented and seen.”

As her star rises, it seems like a lot of other people are feeling represented and seen, too, and Petras is finally finding her real life collide with the world she’s been creating in her head for so long. It’s her own little slice of American Hollywood heaven, although she’s finding out that it’s not such a simple life.

## References

<references>

1. ↑ https://genius.com/a/kim-petras-american-dream-june-2019-profile-interview