#79

#79. King Princess - 1950 (#34, 2018)

8th of 2018

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We're here to celebrate a momentous achievement. On account of the fact that it now statistically cannot be beaten, I'm here to report that King Princess has the biggest gap between appearances. You have to go all the way back to January 2025 when I got to "Pussy Is God" (#908), and there you'll encounter a fascinating juxtaposition as back then I was apparently content to write 5 sentences and be done with the entire entry. It was primarily because I thought I had more to say about this one, which is somewhat true. A lot of it is just general observations, but they're ones that read a lot nicer when you're talking about something you openly enjoy.

King Princess is 5 generations deep in the family tree of Lazarus Straus. She could never get suckered into getting an Ancestry account because all of this information is extremely publicly available and organised. Her great, great, great grandfather Lazarus Straus was an entrepreneur who by the chance result of living 3 years longer than his associate Rowland Hussey Macy, was able to acquire ownership of Macy's, the department store. He soon after handed it over to two of his sons, one of which died on the Titanic, the other has a city in Israel named after him. The former had seven children, and the youngest son of those is King Princess's great grandfather. You can call out nepotism possibly but I'm not sure she has accrued mass wealth by this long chain of descendance, and it doesn't appear that there's anyone famous in her bloodline that was alive even 80 years ago. If there is a noteworthy connection, it's that her father is a recording engineer who owns a studio, so she grew up seeing bands come through and grind out the recording process, which drew her into music, though it made her hesitant to sign on at a young age because she craved creative control. Very early on, before she adopted the stage name, her father did help record her music. She eventually wound up with the newly formed Zelig Records, a subsidiary of Columbia Records founded by Mark Ronson, and would end up releasing her first two albums with them.

I do need to mention Columbia Records because it makes for the most transparent part of the equation and it's the kind of thing that would get dragged through the mud nowadays. A good part of why you have even heard of King Princess is because in March 2018, Harry Styles tweeted 'I love it when we play 1950.' At this point, the song "1950" had been out for less than two weeks and hadn't really made an impression anywhere. A week later and it started popping up on Spotify charts around the world. Harry Styles is also signed to Columbia Records so it's not exactly subtle what's going on here.

I actually missed that part of the equation at first. When I first heard of King Princess, it was because the song inexplicably got foisted onto Spotify's Hot Hits Australia playlist, which at that point tended to decide what became a hit. Two weeks after first appearing on there, it rocketed towards the top of that playlist which tended to be a monumental boon. You'd hear two of the biggest hits of the moment and the year in "God's Plan" (#507) and "Psycho" (#563), and then get this inexplicable change of pace. It's possible that a lot of people bounced off of it, but as long as they made it to the 30 second mark, it counted, and "1950" became a #25 hit in Australia largely through this. The song only narrowly scraped through to #48 in Belgium and even lower in some other European countries, but this song hung around for months until the playlist swapped it out for her follow up single "Talia" and then it suddenly crashed out of the top 50.

This was all very common practice at the time and so if you look at the charts circa 2018, you'll see massive stars and iconic hits that just keep inter-mingling with these random, unremarkable artists who were never heard of before or since. Actually at the very same time this was happening to King Princess, future Hottest 100 entrant Noah Kahan was getting his chart breakthrough very early in Australia with some thanks to similar leveraging (I should be fair to "Hurt Somebody" though because it actually cracked the ARIA top 50 before this playlist got to it). Perhaps there's still time for Dennis Lloyd to become a household name, who's to say? In fairness, he's probably still more famous than King Princess is, but he's never made the Hottest 100, so never mind.

This is all well and good for securing a hit song but when it comes to retaining credibility in a music discussion space, just a frightening prospect. If she actually had become a global star thanks to this song, it'd probably be hanging around her for eternity, the same way many have negative views on Gracie Abrams because of her associations through her father and Taylor Swift. Instead she only ended up sort of famous only in Australia where it was easier to escape the scrutiny. I probably wouldn't have lived it down either but the sneaky work around here is that I just really liked the song. I guess sneaking around does get you somewhere.

It's just another layer of why the song's arrival was so peculiar. Everything about it strikes you oddly. The artist's name, the song title, and then you listen to the song and it's this strange, stilted performance that doesn't remotely sound like popular music of the time. It's obviously not completely unpalatable, but it fits into a strange place where it's a ballad that isn't direct enough to appeal to the ballad crowd. People like grand, universal statements, and this song has a confusing title lyric and a chorus that's hard to even make out the words to.

I am not the right person to be talking about this, but as best I can understand, King Princess is a gay icon. I was recently put across the fact that there are only 6 people who have an '___ as a gay icon' Wikipedia article and I don't think any of them are actually confirmed to be gay (it's a funny list: Cher, Judy Garland, He-Man, Janet Jackson, Madonna & Reba McEntire). King Princess very much is, and isn't remotely subtle about it in this song. The first line is 'I hate it when dudes try to chase me'. What the song's title lyric really means, is throwing it back to a time when queerness was heavily hidden in society, and all higher authority was corrupt. From that, the song captures the idea of worshipping someone so far beyond what they actually represent as a person. Enjoying them conceptually in a way that might paper over the cracks that get in the way of that ideal fantasy. It's the same way I very much enjoy the song and completely have to pretend that it got here on its own merits. Realistically though, that's just every hit song, some are just more obvious about it than others.

For me, "1950" represents an exciting new voice in music, someone who's not really playing by the pre-established rules, and being rather interesting for it. I may not enjoy "Pussy Is God" very much, but it's unquestionably just a strange song for popular discourse. A somehow even more unabashedly queer song that's not shy in the slightest. "1950" has a chorus that's very stilted with a strong vocoder effect, but it's used in a memorable way that makes every line delivery feel important. In the years since, she's continued to impress me in unexpected ways. I'm particularly fond of "Ohio", a slow burner that goes wild halfway through, and she even got my Hottest 100 vote a little later with the song "Only Time Makes It Human", which snuck in at #199 in 2020. It's full on disco pop and one of the catchiest songs I've ever come across, guaranteed to get stuck in my head when I remember it exists. Strangely enough, it's a song with the same co-writer as "1950", Nick Long, who has since gotten a lot more attention for co-writing nearly every song on mgk's two big pop punk albums. Diversity, thy name is Mikaela Straus & Nick Long.