SCHOOL of POP - STARRING KING PRINCESS

The breakout artist is leading a charge to push pop music beyond its PG-13 limits. Can she and other up-and-comers help the genre graduate to an era of sexually liberated songs?

- DOUGLAS GREENWOOD

Dreamland The five-and-a-half-acre Los Angeles property was Hugh Hefner's private home, but the Playboy Mansion occupied an outsize space in imaginations around the world. Hef liked to say the public projected its fantasies onto his front door. He also called the place an extension of his personality: welcoming, expansive, hedonistic.

I just thought some pussy was bomb, and I wanted to write about it," King Princess tells me, seemingly shrugging off the power and defiance of "Pussy Is God," her breakout single that was universally hailed upon its late-2018 release. Vice called it "the sexy lesbian love song we've been waiting for"; Pitchfork praised it as "textbook pop, a catchy ode to a lover"; and Spin deemed it "a fully-formed pop song... brash and funny, delivered with a confidence and swagger."

"After we wrote it" we refers to King Princess, born Mikaela Straus, and frequent coproducer and engineer Mike Malchicoff "we realized that it was going to be jarring for some people." She's right: The sexual charge of "Pussy Is God" is blatant, loud and unashamed. Unlike chart-topping bops cloaked in corny double entendres (think Britney Spears's "If U Seek Amy" or Hailee Steinfeld's "Love Myself"), "Pussy Is God" has no hidden meaning. King Princess's songwriting is so literal, in fact, that listening to her music reminds one that sex, despite the cultural climate, should be uninhibited and fun: "Your pussy is God and I love it / Gonna kiss me real hard, make me want it."

Pop music has always worshipped at the altar of sex. Elvis Presley put conservative 1950s America in an orgasmic haze with his pelvic thrust. Madonna drew ire for singing about being "touched for the very first time" in a wedding dress. The Spice Girls achieved. their iconic status when the group of five women suggested they "really, really, really wanna zig-a-zig ah," and Rihanna demanded that a lover "give it to me strong" on her 10th number one U.S. single.