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Tag: 00s songs

  • From “I Kissed A Girl” to “Good Luck, Babe!”: Queer Yearning and Regret Gets A More Layered and Genuine Upgrade in Pop Song Form

    From “I Kissed A Girl” to “Good Luck, Babe!”: Queer Yearning and Regret Gets A More Layered and Genuine Upgrade in Pop Song Form

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    In 2008, Katy Perry caught her big break with “I Kissed A Girl” (made all the more retroactively cringe because Dr. Luke co-produced it). After years of failed attempts at trying to “crack the industry,” complete with an early iteration as a Christian singer (her first release was a gospel album called Katy Hudson), Perry found that going “in total defiance of God” was the better route when it came to attracting an audience. Hence, the lead single from her first “real” album (it’s sort of like how no one counts Lana Del Ray a.k.a. Lizzy Grant as a “real” LDR album) being “I Kissed A Girl.” Otherwise known as: the ultimate straight girl tease. 

    Although the song was widely embraced at the time (as evidenced by its chart position at number one on the Billboard Hot 100), it still didn’t go without its criticism, even then. For example, of Perry’s “cosplaying” at bicuriousness, Sal Cinquemani of Slant remarked that “its appropriation of the gay lifestyle exists for the sole purpose of garnering attention—both from Perry’s boyfriend and her audience.” In other words, her lack of “authenticity” was a major source of contention. Playing the queer card not because she genuinely felt it in her bones, but because it was “salacious” and “scandalous” (indeed, looking back, 2008 wasn’t as endlessly modern as it thought it was, election of a Black U.S. president or not). A way to garner simultaneous titillation and outrage.

    This included the Kinga Burza-directed music video, which also served as the first bona fide visual from Katy Perry as Katy Perry (not Hudson). Sure, “Ur So Gay” (clearly, Perry has a thing with homosexuality) got a music video accompaniment as well, but it was little more than Barbie and Ken dolls acting out Perry’s venomous lyrics, giving the chance for Katy Barbie to stare judgmentally at the “so gay” guy’s 00s-era social media profile, which looked like a mashup of MySpace and Facebook called, what else, “facespace.” Interspersed shots of Perry playing guitar against rough-hewn animation of a blue sky filled with puffy white clouds has the faint echo of Jill Sobule’s own surrealist, cartoony “I Kissed A Girl” video from 1995 (featuring none of other than Fabio as the hetero love interest, well-known at that time for his romance novel covers). And yes, Sobule was well-aware of Perry effectively “stealing” her song concept and making it far less genuine (not least of which was because Sobule is actually bisexual). There are even lyrics in Sobule’s single (e.g., “I kissed a girl, her lips were sweet/She was just like kissin’ me”) that Perry mirrors in lines like, “I kissed a girl and I liked it/The taste of her cherry ChapStick” and “Soft skin, red lips, so kissable.” 

    As for her inspiration, it’s been said that a little drunken “tee-hee-hee” beso with Miley Cyrus inspired it, but Perry herself has stated a few times that a teenage crush of hers did, an “older friend.” Not to mention the lore that Scarlett Johansson’s lips also inspired it. At one point, Perry insisted she had never actually kissed the girl who served as her “creative stimulator” (“I never kissed her or anything. In retrospect, she was my muse for that song”) while, at another, she said, “I did kiss her. I was totally obsessed with her. She was beautiful—porcelain skin, perfect lips.” Whatever the case, it’s clear Perry’s heart isn’t in this song, that it’s total pandering to the straight male fantasy of two women kissing. 

    Enter Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” sixteen years later. A complex, densely layered tale of Roan enduring the kind of shit Perry probably would’ve pulled on a legitimate gay or bi girl. Granted, the person detailed in Roan’s tale really is queer, and is simply trying to deny it. Perhaps later on, she’ll even attempt likening it to “a phase,” if anyone should ever find out. Like her straight husband, who Roan prophesizes about in the verse, “When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night/With your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife/And when you think about me, all of those years ago/You’re standing face to face with ‘I told you so.’” Ouch. It’s certainly not likely that Perry will have that issue, waking up next to Orlando Bloom and continuing to dress in pinup-inspired attire that harkens back to the 50s and 60s a.k.a. the height of when compulsory heterosexuality reigned supreme (to that point, it seems no coincidence that the Stonewall riots happened at the end of the 60s). 

    Attire that she also wears in the video for “I Kissed A Girl,” heavy-handed with the “symbolism” of Perry cradling a pussy cat in her arms while viewers are treated to an overhead shot of her lying “seductively” on her bed. This while she sings, “This was never the way I planned/Not my intention/I got so brave, drink in hand/Lost my discretion/It’s not what I’m used to/Just wanna try you on/I’m curious for you/Caught my attention.” The ingrained sense of internalized homophobia that Perry was raised with is rampant in these lyrics. This much is made even more glaring when Perry adds, “It’s not what/Good girls do/Not how they should behave.” Roan, too, has her own issues with being a “fallen good girl,” but she addresses them in a manner that isn’t overtly coming from a straight girl playing at queer. 

    Although Roan’s first single with a music video, “Good Hurt” (released in 2017), might have been nebulous to listeners who didn’t yet hear the official word of Roan’s queerness, “Good Luck, Babe!” leaves no room for “gray areas” (only gay ones) on the sexuality front. And it continues Roan’s tradition of queer aesthetics in her music videos (established with “Casual” and “Red Wine Supernova”). Something that would have been anathema to her during her younger years. For, just as Perry did, Roan grew up in a strict religious household. And Roan’s own austere upbringing informs many of her songs and videos. For example, when she mocks the “God Hates Fags” line with a sign on someone’s lawn in the “Red Wine Supernova” video that reads, “God Hates Magic.” Moments later, a female magician “poofs” that sign into a rose as an instantly turned-on Roan watches from afar (much to the dismay of the old neighbor woman to whom the sign belonged). Roan’s genuineness when it comes to getting across the magic and electricity of a relationship or sexual encounter with another girl in most of her songs, not just “Good Luck, Babe!,” obviously blows “I Kissed A Girl”’s minge out of the water (side note: the presence of water is also a not-so-coincidental staple in Roan’s videos, including “Die Young” [a title that has to be a nod to one of her influences, Kesha] and “Casual”). 

    And yet, it’s clear she’s still haunted by the repression and oppression of her past. Case in point, featuring a song called “After Midnight” on her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, that opens with the lines, “My mama said, ‘Nothing good happens/When it’s late and you’re dancing alone’/She’s in my head saying, ‘It’s not attractive/Wearing that dress and red lipstick’/This is what I wanted/This is what I like/I’ve been a good girl for a long time.” Of course, we know what happens to “good girls” who keep their lid screwed on too tightly for too long: they explode. Which is what Roan did after what can be called her “clean-faced Adele” period that pervaded music videos like “Good Hurt,” “Die Young” and “Sugar High.” But once she let the influence of drag culture fully take over, so, too, did her unbridled embracement of queerness. 

    “Good Luck, Babe!” is a new apex of that embracement for Roan, who stated that the song is about “wishing good luck [regardless of being facetious] to someone who is denying fate.” And, more to the point, someone who is denying fate by denying their own sexuality. Something that Roan herself knows all about having grown up in an environment where, as she admits, she was conditioned to believe that “being gay was bad and a sin.” After her move to L.A., that perspective changed drastically (just further proof for the religious zealots that California is for pinkos and queers, and will turn everyone else into the same). 

    Having been on both sides of queer—denial and embracement—Roan speaks with a wisdom that is pure and true when she tells the erstwhile object of her affection on “Good Luck, Babe!,” “You can kiss a hundred boys in bars/Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling/You can say it’s just the way you are/Make a new excuse, another stupid reason/Good luck, babe (well, good luck).” The “good luck,” obviously, is filled with sarcasm, for Roan knows better than anyone that to suppress your sexuality is to suppress your entire identity. It is nothing like the “I was so drunk”/“experimenting just for kicks” vibe of “I Kissed A Girl,” wherein Perry’s own ideas of compulsory heterosexuality are manifest in lyrics such as, “It felt so wrong, it felt so right/Don’t mean I’m in love tonight” and “Ain’t no big deal, it’s innocent.” 

    Incidentally, an article about Roan’s success and first album mentions Katy Perry specifically as an early influence: “She was enthralled and scandalized by the pop music of the late 00s and early 10s, such as Kesha [fun fact: Roan’s real name is Kayleigh Rose as Kesha’s is Kesha Rose], Lady Gaga and Katy Perry.” Kesha, appropriately enough (considering she was under Dr. Luke’s thumb at that time), actually appears in the “I Kissed A Girl” video among the gaggle of girls “frolicking” with Perry as rose petals and white feathers (from the requisite cliché pillow fight, duh) cascade down all around them.

    The “twist” at the end, however, is that it was seemingly just a dream, with Perry waking up next to her boyfriend in bed. Unless, in truth, it describes the exact scene Roan talks about when a queer girl keeps trying to play it straight her whole life. But, na, that just ain’t the case with Perry.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • When Nelly Warned of Climate Change

    When Nelly Warned of Climate Change

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    As far as early 00s bangers go, Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” is difficult to top. Not only did it get people to take their clothes off at house parties worldwide, but it also smashed new records at a time when streaming was still germinal and the Grammys hadn’t even yet offered up yet an award for such a category as Best Male Rap Solo Performance. Nelly managed to secure almost a million (760,000, to be exact) streams on AOL Music’s “First Listen,” which was launched the same year “Hot in Herre” came out: 2002. As far as concern for global warming went that year, in an annual global climate report, it was assessed that: “Global temperatures in 2002 were 0.56°C (1.01°F) above the long-term (1880-2001) average, which places 2002 as the second warmest year on record.” Oh how saddened one is to use the phrase, “Little did they know…” here, but yes, little did humanity know (despite ceaseless and ominous warnings), it was all going to get so much worse. That is to say, so much fucking hotter. And yes, Nelly seemed to want to make a hit out of that no-brainer prophecy in a song like “Hot in Herre.”

    Taking elements of Chuck Brown’s 1979 single, “Bustin’ Loose,” (hence, “I feel like bustin’ loose/And I feel like touchin’ you”), Nelly created a club (and yes, climate change) anthem out of it by also appearing in a music video helmed by Director X, already a beloved protégé of Hype Williams at that time. The scene of Nelly pulling up to the club in his car would end up seeming to inspire Britney Spears the following year in her own video for “Me Against the Music,” in which she, too, opens her video with a pulling up to the club scene. And, on a side full-circle note, “Me Against the Music” would be the one hundredth track for AOL Music, First Listen to offer up as an exclusive streaming preview. Because, back when such internet technology was still new, music releases could still be positioned as an “event.” As much as going to the club to dance in a sweat-drenched fever could be. And that’s precisely what happens for the majority of “Hot in Herre,” as female dancers (after all, it’s a rap video) with visible beads of sweat dripping down their faces and bodies do their best to ignore the unbearable temperature in the name of having a good time and also trying to get laid. Because there’s a reason wanting to bone goes back to a phrase like “being in heat.”

    As Nelly moistens his lips, jumps the divider of his VIP area and approaches the woman who’s attracted his attention, played by Pasha Bleasdell (who tragically died of a brain tumor in 2022), bodies continue to converge on one another as Nelly gets his moment to shine on the dance floor with Bleasdell in front of him. While that goes on, many of the (mostly female) dancers in the club proceed to take Nelly’s advice about taking off their clothes—or at least pieces of them. The “sexily glistening” (as opposed to grossly sweaty) bodies that are paraded by Director X are of a uniquely 00s aesthetic that has only recently been revived with similar effect in Euphoria. Soon enough, Nelly is starting to take some of his own more frivolous articles of clothing off as other clubgoers fan each other with their hands and generally start to appear as though they’re attending a taping of MTV’s Spring Break as opposed to a Nelly video filmed in his adopted hometown of St. Louis. And, talking of St. Louis, the lesser-known version of the video (reserved for showing to the European set) took place in front of and inside of the famed St. Louis Arch (or at least a CGI’d version of it). Starting with Cedric the Entertainer as the bouncer (in the original, he’s the DJ) for the club that the Arch has become, various revelers enter the elevator leading up through the Arch as one man blows his hand back and forth to indicate the hotness inside the elevator, though it actually looks like he’s just trying to wave away the scent of someone else’s fart.

    Soon, Nelly pulls up to the arch and gets in the elevator with just one other woman as we’re asked to ignore the architectural impossibility of a nightclub being able to “fit” inside the so-called top of the Arch. And while, yes, one can technically ride to the “top,” the elevators to do so are nothing like the posh one presented in Nelly’s rendering of it. But, clearly, 2002 was a much easier time for enlisting viewers’ suspension of disbelief.

    As a randomly-placed thermometer shows the temperature going up while more people enter the imaginary “Arch Club” (complete with a staircase in the background), Nelly pretty much recreates the same scenes from the U.S. version of the video, except with a far more “European” slant…in that when people start to peel one another’s clothes off, director Bille Woodruff is sure to capture the sweat whipping off people’s bodies as this happens. We’re talking it looks practically like the Flashdance bucket scene. Woodruff, unfortunately, would also direct a number of R. Kelly videos over the years, whose crimes against women would make Nelly’s various rape allegations (one of which broke just before the #MeToo movement of 2017 did) look positively tame…not to trivialize what happened to the women who were assaulted by Nelly. But, back in 2002, both men were still safe and protected in their fame bubble, chock-full of enablers and sycophants as it was. The pressure, for Nelly, didn’t get truly “hot in herre” until #MeToo finally did. The roof was on fire, in other words, much as it is in the club in the U.S. version of the video, at which point the ceiling sprinklers finally burst. The way a storm has to erupt whenever it gets too sweltering. As for the second version of the video, the thermometer ends up breaking, spewing red mercury as it does.

    At the end of the decade that Nelly reigned over (though really just the first half of it), the 00s were reported as being the hottest on record. “Hot in Herre” (“herre” being this cesspool of a globe) indeed. But that was soon to be topped by the report on the burning temperatures of the 2010s. Undeniably, the 2020s will keep upping the previously-held records, with Nelly’s formerly “sexy” single becoming, increasingly, an eerie and macabre prophecy. Complete with him also telling people to “let it just fall out” and “let it hang all out.” Elsewhere among his rapey lyricism, he includes, “I got a friend with a pole in the basement/(What?)/I’m just kiddin’ like Jason/Unless you gon’ do it…”

    Cringeworthy moments of the song aside (including “What good is all the fame if you ain’t fuckin’ the models?”), Nelly does bring up a valid question when he keeps urging people to take their clothes off in the heat. And that is: will clothes really still be required when the heat gets more insufferable? Like, Hades-level insufferable. Or can we all go back to Garden of Eden’ing it despite being a very long way from paradise? Which the weather of 2002 looks more and more like from this perspective.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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