with photography by Joaquin Castillo
I knew it was him the moment I saw his figure around the pavilion entrance to 14th Street Union Square Station we agreed to meet. It was a sunny and hot spring day in New York which meant everyone was in very little clothing. Here he came, a man with well-worn blonde ends, gold-looking shoes (which I would later find out were wrestling shoes and look a lot like the Donald Trump sneakers), PVC pants with a matching black leather jacket and sunglasses. It was like if Tom of Finland went to studio 54, and if studio 54 made it into the 80s and was a much cooler gay club with go-go dancers and catchy spoken word tracks. There, in all his glory, Jack Powers: the only pop star in New York City.
We’re in Jack’s neighborhood just up from Union Square—he points out where his apartment is in relation to his local chic French café, A.K.A. Le Pain Quotidien, which we just walked up to while reminiscing about our kindred days in shitty UAL student halls in London (we’re Central Saint Martins sisters—Jack did Performance Design and Practice, I Fashion Journalism). Since we’re above 14th street, technically we’re in Midtown, and I’m doing what Jack calls “midtown drag,” bringing my Downtown and Brooklyn oriented ass up here for a rendezvous. “I used to live in The Village,” he confesses, “but then you’re just like around the same people all the time. Those people who do some arty thing.” But in midtown, Jack wanted to start setting up a new fantasy for himself, otherwise known as his real life, because the Jack you see online, the wide-eyed gaze and excited smile, quick talking and pulsating energy, is exactly the Jack you get in person. He said to my initial question about character building and performance, “It’s not a character, I’m just like this all the time. Sorry!” And that’s part of the reason Midtown drag stopped feeling like an identity he had to adjust to, “I feel like no one’s pretending up here.”
A certain what makes the singer, who started making music about two years ago, so magnetic in front of you and on your screen; When he looks at you, it’s like he looks so deeply into your eyes that you can’t help but wonder if he’s trying to read your mind. But admittedly, that kind of eye contact and attention is very flattering. And in the middle of a bustling fronch (read it like I spelled it) café, the cacophony fell away, and it was just me, Jack, our piping hot tea and my phone recording, left. Past the point of no return, everyone is so busy with their jobs that no one would bat an eyelash if Jack were to walk out in the black Mellita Baumeister get up he wore for the music video of his latest single, “Sell Out,” a gay American crime drama set to a soundtrack about embracing the je m’en foutisme of Midtown and being a glam superstar. It starts with a techno whisper:
“The whole town, Told me, Stay underground, Pop is crazy, What’s so wrong with everybody feeling good? So good.”
Then he lets out an orgasmic, downward glissando “OH!” and we’re off to the races as he taunts the listener with Oh!
Jack wrote his slate of new records, first of all “Sell Out” in L.A. with Jeppe Laursen, who co-wrote and produced “Bad Kids” and “Born This Way” off Gaga’s album of the same name. For the singer, this was like reconnecting with his inner child—which is never far from the surface to begin with. “’Born This Way’ was like such a huge album for me as a kid. So, to like, work with [Jeppe]. It’s just like been insane because the first thing that we did together on our first session was we just like improvised melodies. No Lyrics,” Jack told me, which was very different from his process before which stared with lyrics over a beat and “Twelve, thirteen, maybe more coffees and following the inspiration.” In other words, he’s traded Gaga’s memable “bus, club, ‘nother club,” for the real deal.
Mixed in with the 80s Italo disco vibes and vocals put through Laursen’s Space Echo reverb machine, Jack is exploring something new: 74 bpm. “It’s not gonna be like what you think. It’s got curve balls,” Jack says. What comes to mind are the pulsing synths and beat of songs like “House Party” and talky and sleazy guitar spoken word vibe on “Tommy Phenomenal,” both off of Jack’s first EP, 2023’s “Popstar.” One thing his first group of songs have in common is a pulsating sexuality which might not be front and center in his next three releases. “I wrote all this new music in LA, so I was thinking a lot about Americana,” the constructed Americana of Hollywood Studios and Lana Del Rey, because as Jack says proudly, “I’m a New Yorker before I’m an American. I don’t know about America that much ‘cause this place is so different than the rest of the country. Wacky, wacky, tacky vibes. I don’t know what it’s like in New Hampshire, I just don’t. I’m not gonna pretend I do. But I’m ready to explore it and discover it.”
Jack is reaching for an American dream in a place where people say what they want. They love showbiz out in the open. No humble drag, no “pretending to be, like, a ‘real artist’.”
He turns away for a second interrupting himself, “Sorry, Melinda is really acting up today and I told her it’s not a good time.” Melinda is Jack’s cough. He hopes she’s near the end of her stay in his bronchial tubes because he’s got to perform at his launch that Friday and she’d really bring down the vibes.
The singer grew up in Stuy Town in Manhattan, in a “quite small apartment.” Two kids, two parents. The day after our interview, Jack and his dad went to go get mani-pedis to celebrate the release of his single and music video for “Sell Out” which he showed me, jokingly looking to see if anyone was watching us on Broadway and E 21st Street out the window. There was a genuine second of hesitation though. After all, as Jack told me and Joaquin Castillo on the day of our cover shoot that the gays are always stealing his looks. His signature Bob most recently popped up on Troye Sivan, but he’s not bothered at all. “By the time they use my looks, I’ve already been onto the next thing for months. These artists aren’t in control anyway,” he said. “It’s their cabal of homosexual managers and stuff who all have great taste,” alluding to himself of course, “and I mean really we all see the same things on Instagram anyway.” And he’s right. There’s a certain ubiquity to art queers these days that is fed on Twitter, or X, or whatever, and those half thirst-trap have creative masturbation Instagram stories we all screenshot of each other’s. The difference is Jack knows that he’s the one being ripped off and the rest of us can only hope to catch up.
After leaving Central Saint Martins and getting experience dancing and performing at friend’s events in London, Jack moved to Paris for 10 months to perform at the Manko Cabaret, now closed, doing three solos a night in front of a mix of rich people and fashion celebrities like Jean Paul Gaultier and Rick Owens back in the day. “It was the Vogue Paris entourage and all the fashion victims who would follow them to any cool place.” It wasn’t until 2021 and the pandemic hit that Jack really sat down and started making music, releasing his first single, “This Should Be on TV,” painted banana peel yellow with a ginger banana peel shaped hairdo on the cover. It was the beginning of the legend of Jack Powers.
Now, the singer is ready to sell out for real—and he’s not afraid to tell you about it. We’re in the moment right now when faux-genuine behavior is all the rage and personal reinvention is an act of humble authenticity. “It’s okay to be ambitious. And like, if you want to go out there and do a commercial for a toothpaste company or like, Gaga doing ads for Pfizer? Love it.” With his slicked back hair and suit and tie for “Sell Out’s” cover, Jack, like Stefani Germanotta herself, is in his “LinkedIn era.” After years in Europe where he felt like his ambition was looked down upon Jack says, “I think it’s embarrassing and I’m like fuck that. I always thought that was so stupid. It’s cool to try hard. And I try the hardest.”
As a queer artist though, it can be exhausting to fend off hate from the straights who don’t get it and attacks from fellow queers crying foul at how Jack is prosecuting his career. “And I feel like queer people sometimes do that amongst themselves. Like, you can’t take what you’re given. And I feel like it’s super harmful that there’s this narrative where we have to operate outside of a system that isn’t going to change right now. It’s so tiring that I think why should I have to be better? Or, like, not take this money when it’s right there for me?” So, Colgate, if you’re reading this, cut Jack a check. But at the same time, Jack doesn’t see his work fitting in with the creative establishment in New York. He has no interest in performing at a rooftop Whitney party because it’s a thing to do, because to him, it’s just not that cool and what they want to achieve is so far apart. “If anything, I’m just like talking to friends and like the people that like my music and that’s who I care about.” He’s talking about fans like Veronica Electronica, who just happens to be one of the first people I met in London. They used to smoke and side outside with the cool kids my first year there at school who actually went out like you we’re meant to, get messy and do it all again the next day. Veronica would turn up a little late in 9-inch heels and produce a hair straightener to flatten their already pin straight black hair. It was absurd. And I didn’t show it at the time, but I wished I was more like Veronica, the princess from Connecticut and the opposite of everything that “Sell Out” is about rejecting. “That’s why Americans go to London, just to do shit without anyone watching. It’s so Puritan here. I feel like you need to like go away to come back and just not give a shit.”
Other than the fact he doesn’t have to put up with Downtown hipsters, for Jack, living in Midtown allows him to commune with the New York history that means the most to him. “Max’s Kansas City was on Park right there. Just like two blocks down. The Warhol factory was right there too. It’s like this is where it was going down. So, the energy is still here. tap into the energy after I go through all of the corporate bros,” two of which, according to Jack were undressing each other with their eyes the whole time we were speaking. He stopped to make me turn around and look, and the two young guys in blue button downs, like Jack and I in this Midtown café, seemed to let the whole world fall away as stock trade data became love poems. Jack is riding a post pandemic reinvigoration of the city’s creative base into his next era. At The Hancock, a wild new space which is a place to live, recording studio, venue, and who knows what else, he had an event to launch “Sell Out” and the rest is history. “That mani-pedi really made it,” he told me on set weeks later. But as he continues to craft the next iteration of his look and life, take note of where he’s playing and what he’s wearing, because in 30 years some other journalist will sit at Le Pain Quotidien and ask some young new artist, ‘Why Midtown,’ and they’ll say, ‘Max’s Kansas City was down the street, and Jack Powers lived here at the start of his career.’ But for now, Jack is happy to take your check.