In February 2023, German-born pop star Kim Petras was rewarded with a Best Pop Duo/Group Performance Grammy for the world appreciating her and Sam Smith’s desire to engage in “Unholy” acts.
Nine months later, as a “Problématique” pop artist attempting to “Feed the Beast” of global superstardom, she visited Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium on Saturday evening, Nov. 12, 2023, to support the two just-named albums she released in the second half of this year.
Moreso than anything, the event identified her most tremendous appeal as embodying raw sensuality at 130 beats per minute.
Petras has essentially played a weekly show for three of the past five years, alongside releasing nearly a dozen albums, EPs, or mixtapes of material.
Thus, a show expected to feel like something more in line with heralding a pop star-to-superstar evolution isn’t the case.
Instead, Petras’ material feels lived in like the best internet-marketed fast fashion. Metaphorically, it’s not meant to be washed and pairs well with an expensive piece or two. Sonically, her work highlights that supernova hit song influences and mega-massive viral tunes are being entrapped, viciously scraped of their core essences and then paraded to a fist-pumping, body-bumping, easily excitable crowd of thousands.
Petras is also someone who, for two-thirds of her life, has battled with attempting to embody who she felt she always was. As she stated in a 2008 interview after transitioning genders via surgery at the age of 16, “I was asked if I feel like a woman now – but the truth is I have always felt like a woman – I just ended up in the wrong body.”
Moreover, she’s a non-American-born artist and the daughter of a choreographer and artist mother and architect father.
Therefore, her work’s take on American pop comes most directly from the early 2000s hard electro and happy hardcore-style European hyper-pop realm filtered through multiple layers of American R&B and hip-hop flavor of the 2000s and 2010s. Add that musical tourism to a touch of surrealist gothic art, 21st-century computer-defined digital imagery, plus almost oversexualized visuals. Then, drench that in vibes defined by Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga.
Imagine a television commercial for a 90s-era Club MTV reboot special emanating from the Louvre hosted by rapper of the moment Ice Spice and celebrity icon Paris Hilton.
That’s who Petras arrived onstage embodying at Municipal Auditorium to a lower bowl that felt like a Berlin-style techno club blended with a house music night in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood — but not so much Music City’s Lower Broadway.
Given the global ubiquity that area’s feel and style have achieved in 2023, Petras’ concert achieved an impressive feat.
The opening track, “Feed The Beast,” arrived with a stage awash in red light and Petras’ dancers dressed like demons attempting to possess her body and soul.
The performer spoke about how this era of her career sees her attempting to “face and feed,” but not “fear” the beast.
For the average star, there’s always a conversation about setting healthy barriers between yourself and the perils of stardom. However, Petras’ life has been defined far beyond awareness of stereotypical barriers.
Alongside song titles like “XXX,” her material dives with a level of depth and scope into ribald sexuality in a manner that, if re-enacted by Petras’ predominantly queer fanbase, could violate probably 100 written and unwritten laws or norms of socially acceptable behavior in Nashville and surrounding areas.
Petras, in her set, unlike her fans, appears thoroughly undaunted by the potential perils of her lifestyle and successes. Thus, her set arrives like a pleasing moment of exhibitionist pop.
Like the artists who so clearly inspire her work, Petras’ greatest asset is her voice, which has multi-octave range and force. It’s not a thin sliver of an instrument. Instead, it — on songs like “Turn Off the Light,” encore “Heart To Break,” “Alone” and yes, Grammy-winner “Unholy,” engages with battle with the air and environment around her.
Imagine Petras onstage, like a Care Bear, staring long and deep into the heart of darkness and emanating explicit promiscuity via beats and rhymes as a shield against a tormented world.
Like so much of Petras’ life and live show, it is too absurd to be believable, but in being so familiar and ear-pleasing in delivery, it is growing in its authentic truth.
