POP UP

Kim Petras has dreamed of superstardom since she was a teen-ager. Has her moment arrived?

- KELEFA SANNEH

Most people who listen to popular music don’t spend much time reading the credits. So producers who want to make sure their work is recognized occasionally mark their creations with what’s known as a producer tag—an audible watermark near the beginning of the track. Metro Boomin, one of the dominant hip-hop producers of the twenty-tens, sometimes used a sample of the rapper Future, one of his clients, saying, “If young Metro don’t trust you, I’m gon’ shoot you.” Take a Daytrip, a duo behind many of Lil Nas X’s biggest hits, had a more celebratory tag: “Daytrip took it to ten!” A few years ago, a pop-obsessed German immigrant named Kim Petras decided that she needed a producer tag of her own, as part of her plan to achieve musical ubiquity. Petras is not, in fact, a producer but a songwriter and a singer. The tag she created was, like her music, enthusiastic and more than a little absurd: “Woo Ah!” The “Woo” is high, like a siren; the “Ah!” is breathy, like a sigh.