I prance around the stage in a holographic leotard and thigh-high silver cowboy boots, my sheer tights sucking it all in. I’m performing at Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, a.k.a. “the Coachella of Europe.”
The crowd is mostly young enough to be my children, and they are screaming the lyrics of my songs so loudly that I can’t hear the playback. “Watch me work it, I’m PERFECT!!!,” they scream. A fan in his early 20s, with eyeliner and spiked hair, holds up an iPhone horizontally. The words “Kiss Me!” are on the screen. He’s looking up at me hopefully.
I have to squint to read the phone from the stage because I am a woman in her early 50s. Squinting while looking sexy is not easy, but I prevail. It has been over 15 years since I have had a hit as Princess Superstar. Yet, somehow, here I am.
A rock star in her 50s? Let me rewind. It was 2023, Christmas break, and I was at home in our Santa Monica, Calif., rental, buying last-minute gifts on Amazon. My 14-year-old daughter, Siren, yelled out, “MOM! Your voice is all over my feed!” She didn’t seem happy about it. I grabbed her phone and saw that my 2007 song “Perfect (Exceeder)” was all over TikTok.
How did that happen? Earlier in 2023, I had licensed the song to a small film production company for a small fee. It had not occurred to me that this would change my life. But then the film “Saltburn” became a sensation, and so did my song. It accompanied Instagram reels of women making elaborate cakes and doctors delivering babies. Often the clips were simply of women staring into the camera and mouthing the lyrics while hitting sexy poses.
I wondered what they were thinking when they sang “Watch me work it, I’m perfect.” I had meant it ironically; they mostly seemed to sing it un-ironically. I worried that it had become a self-indulgent look-at-me anthem, though that was probably a very middle-aged thought.
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