Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl”: The Worst Song Of/Most Fitting Song For 2008

noah | May 12, 2008 5:00 am
Before you ask: No, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” is not a cover of Jill Sobule’s song, although by the time you get through the first verse of the above clip I bet you’ll be missing that 1995 track’s relatively subtle charms. No, Perry’s song–which I heard on New York’s top 40 station, Z100, multiple times while driving around this weekend–is a stomping bit of electrotwaddle that’s half “Rock & Roll, Pt. 2” and half rejected Tila Tequila track with a dollop of Orgy, backed by a band who sounds like it got its start as one of those generic school-dance outfits that you see on your second-tier teen comedes. And its lyrics read as if they were scripted by a Girls Gone Wild producer who was feeding post-makeout lines to two reluctanct subjects–and then somehow made less poetic in re-editing.

No, I don’t even know your name, It doesn’t matter. You’re my experimental game, Just human nature. It’s not what good girls do, Not how they should behave. My head gets so confused, Hard to erase.

“Erase” doesn’t even sort of rhyme with “behave”! But wait, there’s more:

Us girls we are so magical, Soft skin, red lips, so kissable, Hard to resist, so touchable. To good to deny it. Ain’t no big deal, Its innocent.

In a lot of ways, “I Kissed A Girl”–with its completely unerotic attempts at being “sexy” and pleading insistence that Katy does, in fact, own her sexuality, and that her emergent bisexuality “no big deal” even though it’s clearly enough of a big deal for her to proclaim, ad nauseam, that she “liked it” to the world in her overly strident voice–is the perfect song for 2008, a year in which concepts like “subtlety” and “selling your talents” and “thinking that people who attention-whore themselves are kinda cheesy” are kicked to the curb by people like, well, Tila Tequila and Katy Perry. Surely it’s only a few more months until she gets a Blender cover of her own.

Katy Perry – I Kissed A Girl [YouTube]

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