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"Unholy" has many sexual themes and name-drops Balenciaga, a fashion house continuing to face backlash over a controversial ad campaign that featured young children and BDSM props.

"I think a lot of people, honestly, have kind of labeled what I stand for and what Sam stands for as religiously not cool," Petras, a biological man, said. "And I personally grew up wondering about religion and wanting to be a part of it, but then slowly realizing it doesn't want me to be a part of it."

"So, it's a take on not being able to choose religion and not being able to live the way that people might want you to live because, you know, as a trans person, I'm kind of already not wanted in religion."

[Chorus: Sam Smith, Kim Petras & Both]
Mummy don't know Daddy's getting hot (Hot)
At the Body Shop (Shop)
Doin' something unholy
He's sat back while she's droppin' it (She)
She be poppin' it (She)
Yeah, she put it down slowly
Oh-ee-oh-ee-oh, he left his kids at
Ho-ee-oh-ee-ome so he can get that

“Unholy” details infidelity among a couple with some designer brands being shouted out during verses of the song. “The Body Shop” refers to either a Los Angeles strip club or an actual car body shop. The song’s music video reflects the song’s message when we see Petras and Smith at a raunchy cabaret show featuring RuPaul’s Drag Race alums Violet Chachki and Gottmik.

What’s the best way to piss off half of America in less than five minutes?

It would be hard to beat what the Grammys did last night when they had pigtailed, filler-face-plumped Madonna introduce non-binary singer Sam Smith — who first came out as gay, then gender-fluid, and now demands to be called ‘they’ — to perform a duet of a song called “Unholy”, with a transgender artist named Kim Petras, in which Smith dressed up as Satan in red tunic, hat and horns while dancers performed a devil-worshipping ritual around him, as ‘they’ and Petras sang about a married couple who leave their children home to both commit adultery.

Oh, and then reveal it was all sponsored by Viagra manufacturer, Pfizer!

‘If they call you shocking, scandalous, troublesome, problem, provocative or dangerous,’ Madonna, increasingly resembling an embalmed version of the Bride of Wildenstein, told the crowd, ‘you are definitely on to something.’

Hmmm.

What if they – OK, me… – just call you, Madonna, a toe-curling embarrassing shambles of a once great pop star, now best suited for annual appearances on Halloween?

And what if they – OK, me again… – think Sam ‘Satan’ Smith’s desperation for attention is now fueled by a demented desire to be just as pathetically vulgar and repellent as the ageing disgracefully Material Girl?

I wouldn’t go as far as Senator Ted Cruz who tweeted about Smith’s performance: ‘This…is…evil.’

But judging by the instant fury that erupted on social media, I suspect many of his fellow Texans, and many of the other 210 million Christians in America, will have been very offended by this deliberate mockery of their Christian beliefs.

Petras made no secret of that being the intent, saying: ‘It’s a take on not being able to live the way that people might want you to live because as a trans person, I’m already not kind of wanted in religion. So, we were doing a take on that, and I was kind of hell keeper Kim.’

When they finished their incendiary act, host Trevor Noah pretended to be on the phone to his mother as he said: ‘ No, mom, it wasn’t the actual Devil… yeah, you did warn me about Hollywood….’ Then he turned back to the audience and quipped: ‘She says she’ll be praying for all of us.’

It really was a taste of pop-culture hell :

I’ve no idea whether Noah’s mother will be saying any prayers, though she should probably say one that her son gets a lot funnier than he was last night before his awards-hosting career comes to an abrupt laughter-devoid halt.

But I do know this whole unedifying stunt didn’t have a prayer of doing anything but unnecessarily enraging vast swathes of a country already bitterly divided by toxic political partisanship.

Someone who seemed to get this was Ben Affleck, sitting with a forced half-smile next to his new wife Jennifer Lopez as Noah tossed out his lame religious gags.

In fact, every time the TV cameras fell on the movie star’s face, he looked increasingly miserable.

As ‘music’s biggest night’ wore on, and on, and on, Affleck’s exhausted eyes glazed into the kind of expression normally only seen in hostage videos.

Beyonce won four awards, making her the biggest Grammy winner in history.
Meanwhile, J-Lo giggled, hooted, clapped, and shimmied around like a hyperactive Labrador, absolutely loving it.

‘Ben Affleck, blink if you’re okay,’ tweeted one concerned fan.

Poor Ben.

But who can blame him?

The whole night wasn’t just too long, it was also laced with lashings of what now seem to be the three obligatory awards show ingredients: absurdity, political virtue-signalling, and hypocrisy.

The absurdity came from the likes of Harry Styles who looked like he’d been wrapped in a giant piece of Christmas tinsel and sang like I sang at my family’s post-lunch festive karaoke competition – which is not a compliment.

The virtue-signalling came when First Lady Jill Biden appeared on stage to present an Iranian singer with an award for his song which has become a protest anthem in the repressed regime.

And then there was the hypocrisy.

Beyonce became the biggest Grammy-winner in history with a swag-bag of awards for her album Renaissance (Act 1) which has been lauded as an ‘LGBTQ+ battle cry.’

‘I’d like to thank the queer community for your love,’ she said in her tearful acceptance speech.

Bey had previously declared her mission with the record was to create a ‘safe place, a place without judgement… a place to scream, release, feel freedom.’

All very laudable, right to the point she then accepted a reported $24 million fee to perform two weeks ago at a hotel launch in Dubai, where it’s illegal to be gay, and neglected to sing any of her pro-LGBTQ+ songs on Renaissance lest it offend her paymasters.

Beyonce’s a brilliantly talented superstar but this was preposterously, jaw-droppingly two-faced, and a massive kick in the teeth to the ‘queer community’ who’d shown her such love.

I much preferred the typically blunt honesty from Ozzy Osbourne, who wasn’t there and sent up a producer to deliver his 7-word thankyou speech: ‘I love you all and f*** off.’

I’m all for the Grammys celebrating the best of the year’s music, and for being a bit edgy as they do so, and last night’s show was a superbly produced if over-extended concert.

But why troll America’s heartland so egregiously in the process?

...after she released Slut Pop, a seven-track tour through all her salacious sexcapades. Erotic as that EP was, it also wasn’t anything Petras’ cisgender contemporaries haven’t been doing for decades—and yet it struck a nerve for even those in Petras’ own life.

“I made Slut Pop, which is like this super insanely sexual thing. And all of a sudden, friends of my family would hit up my parents and my sister and be like, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of Kim for doing this?’ A lot of people reacted really mean and judgmental about that, and I think that just really triggered me to get into what is shameful, what is sinful, and what is not,” she says. “I don’t consider sex, for example, to be sinful, and I don’t consider being transgender or being gay as sinful, but so many people still do. And I think with abortion laws and stuff like that, it really is a thing that speaks to me as a trans woman, too, because I needed to adjust my body to who I am inside. And had I not been able to do that and had I not had control over my own body and my own life, I don’t know if I would be alive.”

While Kim Petras was asking fans to “get your tits out” and “whip your dicks out” on her NSFW EP Slut Pop, stan Twitter was pulling out something else: the receipts about her close collaborator Dr. Luke. Shortly after Slut Pop dropped Friday, fans on stan Twitter questioned why the producer, previously accused of sexual abuse by Kesha, is credited with co-writing the record and producing it in its entirety.

There’s “something v off with kim petras’ new EP being titled ‘slut pop’… and it being entirely produced by dr luke,” tweeted journalist Jordan Page about the project. “A man surrounded with notorious accusations of sexual harassment and assault?”

Page’s tweet — and that of many others that are reviving the hashtag #FreeKesha — pointed to the “Tik Tok” singer’s 2014 lawsuit where Kesha claimed Luke had “sexually, physically, verbally, and emotionally abused [her] to the point where [she] nearly lost her life,” along with numerous other accusations, including gender-based discrimination. (Dr. Luke denied the claims and filed a counter lawsuit against the singer, accusing her of defamation. Kesha dropped her suit in 2016, while Luke’s defamation lawsuit is still ongoing.)

Petras’ new album — crowded with shockingly explicit lyrics and hyper pop beats, all produced and co-written by Luke — served as a reminder of the ongoing court matrix surrounding Kesha and the disgraced producer.

“Kesha’s still signed to Dr Luke,” tweeted Ben Abraham, the songwriter behind Kesha’s “Praying” — a track many suspect is about Luke. “It’s still in litigation. He still controls her releases. It’s been 8 years. Women’s voices matter.” On Instagram, Abraham compared listening to Dr. Luke’s music to “watching Woody Allen movies.”

#FreeKesha organizer Michael Eisele — who also works as a publicist for Big Hassle Media — said seeing Slut Pop climb the charts reinvigorated the need to speak out about Kesha and her situation with Luke. “There are millions of people invested in Kesha, her music, and her well-being,” he wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. “So of course her supporters are going to be outraged when the product of a man she has allegations of sexual assault against is No. 1 on iTunes with a record called Slut Pop.”

On his KeshaToday account, Eisele tweeted, “People love to forget. We think about it every day. #FreeKesha.”

People love to forget. We think about it every day. #FreeKesha https://t.co/bhLiyiVkeP

— Kesha Today (KeshaToday) February 11, 2022

Others on Twitter were upset that Petras namedrops Lady Gaga — who has been open about being a survivor of sexual abuse and defended Kesha in a deposition for Luke’s defamation lawsuit — in the fellatio fete “Throat Goat.” “These lips go ‘la-la-la’/This throat, Lady Gaga,” Petras sings. (The song’s lyrics were co-written by Luke.)

In 2019, Gaga told lawyers, “That girl [Kesha] has experienced serious trauma and she is in the middle of it right now. And you are all a party to it.”

“How do you name drop Gaga, a victim of SA, in a song produced by the same man she spoke out against in court?” wrote one fan. “Lady Gaga said that testifying in support of Kesha in her legal battle with Dr. Luke caused her to have a breakdown,” added Chris Steadman, host of the Unread podcast, “Now, Gaga is name-dropped in a song co-written and produced by Luke… Very gross.”

Petras — whose rep did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment — was asked about Dr. Luke’s involvement in her music in an interview with BuzzFeed News last year. “I just feel like a lot of it is like getting transferred to me. A lot of people like to blame it on the women,” Petras told the outlet, later adding, “I think I’m sometimes being held to a different standard than other artists.”

Other musicians who have worked with Luke — including the likes of Saweetie and Doja Cat — have also shied away from giving direct answers about his involvement in their work. When Rolling Stone asked Doja Cat about working with the producer during a recent cover story interview, she claimed “there’s shit that he’s credited for, where I’m like, ‘Hmm, I don’t know, I don’t know if you did anything on that.'” She later retracted the comment in a statement, writing “The credits on my music are accurate, and I don’t want to imply anything else.”

With the #FreeBritney movement’s recent success in raising awareness about Britney Spears’ conservatorship, fans are left to wonder if it’s time for the same visibility with Kesha’s stand against Luke. “#FreeBritney was successful after so many years, now can we do #FreeKesha in a fraction of that time?” wrote one fan. “She deserves her happy ending.”

A rep for Kesha and an attorney and manager for Dr. Luke did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.