Urb Show Review - July 2002

Princess Superstar
The Echo Lounge,
Atlanta, GA - 2.19.02

What befits a princess? A diamond tiara? A silk gown? A glass slipper? How about a royal audience? But at 11 p.m., 30 minutes after the scheduled curtain time on a Friday night in Atlanta, an audience was one thing the princess in attendance — New York's Princess Superstar, specifically — was without.

Inside the venue, which usually hosts indie-rock shows, the only voices were those of the Blackbyrds, Rush, Blondie, De La Soul and a mix of hip-hop, trip-hop, drum & bass and rare groove coming from local DJ Swivel's turntables. But by the time the bawdy-mouthed Princess [born Concetta Kirschner) went onstage, a procession of about 100 people had gathered to offer enthusiastic applause.

Emerging in a flowing black bodysuit like a less glam, bleached Grace Jones, the petite Princess made her first regal decree. "Let's get this shit started! I've come all the way from New York to rock your fucking world!" she declared as she and her all-male band—DJ Alexander Technique, bassist Crash and MC7EVEN — kicked into "Super Fantasy," the first track off her fourth album, Is.

And what, you ask, is Princess Superstar? She is many things — label owner, producer, provocateur — but that night she was a body glitter-covered bottle-blond, part performer, part performance artist. A high degree of theatricality went into the show: props, costumes,choreography. She threw come-hither glances and fuck-off glares. She "Got Panache." She was "Wet!Wet!Wet!" She was "feeling your love." The songs said it all. But what said even more was the line that formed after the show as she came back onstage to sign autographs and talk to fans.

Words: Tony Ware / Photos: Ken Forsythe

Princess Superstar's Five Strangest Fan Experiences

• "In Canada, a guy offered me 50 bucks to sign his dick. But it was $50 Canadian. No way!"
• "I like to tell the press what kind of guys I like to see if they come to my shows dressed that way. In the NME I said I liked English schoolboys, in the socks and blazers. Sure enough, some guys showed up like that... I just played in Mississippi, and I said I liked farmers, and there was a farmer at one of my shows. He had a straw hat on. That was hot."
• "People just go crazy at my shows. I've had guys spontaneously breakdancing onstage, girls molesting my bass player, boys and girls molesting me. People like to molest us a lot!"
• "When I was in Germany there were these old men camping out waiting for me to get to the venue. They'd been there all night, and they'd printed out the pictures from my Web site--every picture-- on photographic paper and wanted me to sign them. But they were old men so I wondered what the fuck was going on."
• "I get a lot of drag queens, and I've even heard there are two Princess Superstar impersonators in the country."

 
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