Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
After the Civil War, German-Jewish businessman Isidor Strauss moved to New York City with his family. Strauss was a quick-witted, handsome man with small round glasses, an angular nose, and a wiry red beard. He began his career as a tableware salesman; by the early 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 Bloon, with whom he shared a birthday and had seven children. On April 10, 1912, Isidor and Ida boarded the Titanic. She refused a place on a lifeboat rather than be separated from her husband. In James Cameron's 1997 film, they cuddle in bed, crying as the ship sinks. “I like to imagine them thinking, ‘This is going to be a movie, we need to get our screen time,’ ” their great-great-granddaughter Michaela Strauss told me, smoking a joint on a couch in Brooklyn. The last of her inheritance was spent long before she was born. She is shocked by the suggestion that her family’s legacy, which in reality boasts a centuries-long history of addiction, alienation, and sudden death, is privileged. Michaela, 26, under the name King Princess, has begun to carve out her own musical legacy. Over the past decade, she has carved out a reputation as a brash, self-taught new pop star. Next month, she will release her impressive third album, Girl Violence, her best yet, which will confirm her status as not only a virtuoso provocateur but a generational talent.
At 17, Strauss wrote and produced her first single, a lesbian pop song that would go platinum. It was her first semester at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. She was showering in her dorm room when she began humming a new tune. She ran out of the bathroom, naked and dripping wet, and in a panic, asked her roommate for her phone. On it, she recorded the first few lines of what would become “1950,” a spirited serenade to a lover that has since amassed more than half a billion streams.
Strauss grew up in the recording studio, where she developed a keen understanding of pop arithmetic. Mixing honeyed old-school soul with the synth beats that dominated the airwaves and dance floors of her youth, she introduced audiences to what became the King Princess sound: sexy, plaintive vocals, droning basslines, and a mix of digital and analog instruments. Shortly after “1950” was released in February 2018, Harry Styles posted the song’s lyrics on Twitter, amassing hundreds of thousands of likes overnight. Strauss went on to perform the song on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and then “Saturday Night Live.” What made “1950” unique was its refusal to conform to the expectations of a Billboard-charting ballad; in a swirl of doo-wop clicks and reverb, it delivered a bold, elliptical ode to gay history. “I hate it when guys try to hit on me,” Strauss sings in a raspy alto:
But I like it when you try to save me.
Because I'm just a lady.
I like it when we play in the 1950s.
So cold that your gaze is about to kill me.
I'm surprised when you kiss me.
The chorus plays with the eroticism of bygone danger, mixing the risks of mid-century homophobia with the modern lover’s desire to play hard to get. “I was just thinking about how sad it is that we’re, you know, horny because of our own oppression,” she joked on the podcast. Strauss, who knew she was queer before she could write her name, was an only child. Although her parents were generally supportive of her sexuality, others were not: When she walked the streets of New York City holding hands with friends as a teenager, passersby would hurl obscenities, insults, and the occasional threat. For companionship, she turned to literature—Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Rita Mae Brown’s The Ruby Jungle, Nella Larsen’s The Passage, Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. She particularly liked the song “The Price of Salt” — the only happy ending she had ever encountered — and subsequently read every biographie she could find of Patricia Highsmith and her lovers. She wrote the song to reach out to them across time, to find a companion in history.
That spring, producer Mark Ronson heard Strauss's demos at an A&R meeting at Sony. They had dinner together—an encounter she wryly called their first date—and, impressed by her audacity and then her technical acumen, he signed her to
Sourse: newyorker.com
