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.
In short order, “Woo Ah” took over the world. Or, at any rate, the Kim Petras world, which was a bit smaller and a lot more vivid than the one most people lived in. Her fans called themselves Bunheads, for the off-center coil that Petras wore in her hair, and they treated Petras like the pop star she wanted to be. On Twitter, some of them celebrated #InternationalWooAhDay on August 1st, which was the anniversary of the day, in 2017, that she released her first single, “I Don’t Want It at All.” In 2019, fans sold out Petras’s show in New York, at Irving Plaza, which holds about a thousand people. It was a warm night in June, Pride Month, and the audience of Bunheads, largely male and gay, was happy to take direction. Before the music started, a robotic prerecorded voice came through the speakers. “When I say ‘Woo,’ you say, ‘Ah,’ ” it intoned. “Failure to comply will be grounds for immediate ejection from the premises.”
Moments later, Petras…
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