Slut Pop is a dull novelty record about sex without much to offer beyond shock value and a desperate bid for naughtiness.
In the past decade, the sex positivity movement has gained real traction in the mainstream. It’s not like pop music has ever shied away from sex, but it’s taken years for women to be able to express their sexuality in music to the same degree that men have. Kim Petras has decided to take this positivity to the logical extreme with her new EP, Slut Pop, designed to celebrate sex in all its dirty, messy glory. Unfortunately, the content ends up being so boring that it does little to achieve any sort of climax.
Much like the bag labeled “dead dove, do not eat” on Arrested Development, Slut Pop does exactly what it says on the tin, delivering seven explicit dance tracks that celebrate the raunchiness of sex. It’s effectively a novelty record, emphasized by the fact that Petras released it right before Valentine’s Day — something to play in the background while you’re getting it on with bae. Like many other novelty records, though, Slut Pop overstays its welcome, even at a mercifully short sixteen minutes. It’s so one-note as to be profoundly boring, which is never what you want to hear about a record meant to celebrate pleasure.
Part of the issue is that we live in a post-”WAP” world. Cardi and Megan changed the game nearly two years ago with a raunchy, funny, and remarkably inspired song about sex. Phrases like “macaroni in a pot” or “park this big Mac truck right in this little garage” became part of our cultural lexicon, and it’s doubtful those will fade from sight any time soon. While it’s not required that music about sex have the deepest, most profound lyrics, “WAP” showed that lyrical complexity on explicit subjects is possible. No such creativity is to be found within Petras’ work, however. She sounds like a robot going through the motions of sex, not enjoying it but merely putting in her time until it’s over, and all the songs boast repetitive lyrics that grate after just a single listen. The chorus of “Treat Me Like a Slut” is the title, with “little dirty bitch, yeah, I like to fuck” subsequently chanted until it loses all meaning. “Superpower Bitch” repeats the word “cum” 33 times. The bridge on “They Wanna Fuck” is — surprise — a loop of the phrase “I wanna fuck.” Indeed, the explicitness of the lyrics here is what makes the end product so unsexy. It’s not that music shouldn’t be explicit (again, see Cardi talking about the sound of her pussy), but the sum of Slut Pop is an exercise in diminishing returns — what should be shocking instead becomes blandly banal. If Petras was trying to make some kind of statement with this approach, then perhaps she succeeded, but that seems very doubtfully her intention.
However, the most discomforting thing about the EP is not the content, but the personnel behind it. Dr. Luke (aka Lukasz Gottwald) has co-writing and production credits on every song — the same Dr. Luke that stands at the center of multiple allegations of sexual abuse by Kesha. Say what you will, but there is something decidedly unsavory about a man involved in a years-long public court battle over sexual misconduct producing such explicit work with another up-and-coming pop girl 20 years his junior. Dr. Luke seems to have adopted Kim Petras in the past few years as his attempt at a redemption narrative within the industry, but while helping build the profile of one of the industry’s few openly trans stars is certainly noble, the effort does nothing to erase his past misdeeds. If anything, it feels less like he actually wants to work with Petras and more like he is using her profile as a statement: he’s progressive and queer-friendly, the good guy in this situation. All his involvement manages here is to make Slut Pop all the more skeevy.
Published as part of Album Roundup — February 2022 | Part 1.
