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“I don’t know how you did it, Kim. You took a classic and actually made it better!” Zane Lowe exclaims obsequiously in an interview with Kim Petras about her latest single, “Alone.” Reality check: she did not make it better at all, but that’s interviewer pandering for you. If anything, she took something exceptional and turned it into a par, TikTok-ready number. One that features Nicki Minaj and dares to frivolously repurpose Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone,” released in the summer of 1999. At that time, Petras would have been a pre-op seven-year-old boy named Tim, living in Germany—one of the many European countries where the song was an instant hit. Undoubtedly, the earworm infected Tim Petras’ brain, sinking in somewhere deep within the recesses of his mind and getting filed away for some later date. That date, unfortunately, arrived on April 21, 2023, with the official release of the single.
The song wastes no time in bastardizing “Better Off Alone” as Minaj babbles, “It’s Barbie and it’s Kim Petras” while the signature notes to the sample are then forever ruined. Not just because when one decides to use a dance floor classic such as this, they better damn well come up with something mind-blowing as opposed to flaccid, but because the lyrics completely negate the sologamist defiance of the subject in the original track. One in which vocalist Judith Pronk repeatedly demands of said subject, “Do you think you’re better off alone?” Clearly, the person in question, who initiated the breakup implicit in this track, must—in contrast to the needy, codependent tone displayed in Petras and Minaj’s rendition. A tone that reinforces the capitalist message (relationship milestones make up billions of dollars in various industries, not the least of which is weddings) that no one is better off alone. You should always find somebody. Anybody. Even when you’re committed to the “single lifestyle” but still pursue the last remaining dregs on the dance floor after two a.m., rather than “endure” going home alone.
So it is that a lonely Petras sings, “I just want you here by my side/I don’t wanna be here, baby, on my own.” Overly attached at an erotomaniac level much? Because whereas Alice Deejay’s version seems to infer that the “narrator” was in a deeply-connected long-term relationship with someone, Petras’ pivots to making it about a “physical attraction” sort of vibe—that moment when you see someone at the club and immediately you know you have to bang them tonight (even if such a phenomenon smacks of a bygone era wherein hookup apps didn’t yet exist).
Elsewhere, the rapey quality of the repetitive lyrics (songs are all chorus now) commences right away with Petras announcing, “I been tryna give it to ya all night/What’s it gonna take to get ya all alone.” If you’re wondering why it sounds especially rapey, look no further than the co-writing and co-production credits, once again going to Dr. Luke—a man Petras has remained staunchly committed to in the face of every outcry explaining to her why this is problematic and downright disrespectful to other women (not just Kesha). But no matter, she seems to think his “sick beats” are well-worth the flak (even when said beats are actually taken from someone else in this instance).
At the thirty-five second mark, the rhythm changes to accommodate a more “hip hop-oriented” sound as Petras varies up her lyrics. Ones that prove Alice Deejay’s ostensible belief that sometimes saying less is more. Petras is not an adherent of that philosophy as she commands, “Oh, look at me/Like what you see?/I’ve been feelin’ lonely/Baby, you got what I need/Give me what I like/Tryna, uh, tonight/Got an appetite that only you can satisfy/I could ride it, ride it, ride it, ride it all night/Watch me ride it, ride it, ride it, ride it all night.” Pandering to the male fantasy of sycophantic sluttery combined with undying devotion that doesn’t befit a one-night stand conquest, Petras strips the original “Better Off Alone” of all its yearning purity. And when she says, “I just want you here by my side,” even Gigi D’Agostino’s “L’Amour Toujours” might not be inclined to respond with, “Baby, I’ll always be here by your side.”
Things don’t much improve when Nicki jumps on to sing her non sequitur verse, obviously bearing no sense of “Better Off Alone”-esque romance or unrequited love as she raps such lines as, “I-i-it’s Barbie and it’s Kim Petras/Main character syndrome, they extras.” But no, in this case, they’re the extras in Alice Deejay’s sonic world, who themselves can perhaps be blamed more than anyone for conceding to letting their song be sampled. At one point, Nicki also cautions, “I send shots, get ready, they may sting”—but if she has any faith in the intelligence of music listeners and “Better Off Alone” purists, she ought to know that the only stinging shots about to be taken are at her and “Kim Petty.”
In the 2000 edition of Alice Deejay’s music video for the single, Judith Pronk and Alice Deejay members Mila Levesque and Angelique Versnel appear in a room bedecked with Oriental rugs (with Pronk also inexplicably dressing in varying Indian-inspired garb) to dance to the beat as crosscuts of the footage from director Olaf van Gerwen’s original video are wielded by Michael Alperowitz, the “2.0” director for the updated visual. Pronk keeps repeating her question as we’re shown the object of her desire (or sense of vindication, depending on how you look at it) getting stuck with car trouble in the middle of the desert. Yes, it’s a pointed situation in which one is definitely not better off alone.
As he wanders through that desert frustrated and aimless, Alperowitz cuts to scenes of Pronk dancing with a huge smile on her face (almost as though relishing his misfortune from afar) as she urges, “Talk to me/Oooo, talk to me.” This itself a testament to the average male’s notoriously bad skills when it comes to open communication, instead choosing to repress all emotions until they boil to the surface in a fit of rage. By the end of the video, it seems the intended takeaway is that a man will end up dead—buried in the sand by his own pride—because he refuses to heed the simple instruction, “Talk to me” (indeed, in the original, he keeps having heat-induced hallucinations of the lover he refused to talk to…apparently, regretting it now). His fate is an answer to the question repeated throughout the song. What’s more, the track’s misleadingly upbeat sound is betrayed by the melancholic intonation of Pronk’s lyrics, sparse though they may be.
Per Junkee’s Jared Richards (who deems the single as “the best of all-time”), a song like “Better Off Alone” “[repeats] lyrics or arpeggiator loops to express an emotion so severe it can’t actually be expressed. It can only be repeated and mindlessly gestured towards in our attempt to move past it—which we will, eventually…maybe once we’ve danced it out.” In contrast, “Alone,” despite its repetitiveness (albeit to a lesser extent), conveys none of that strained emotion that struggles to be expressed in words as opposed to “feelings” (i.e., musical rhythms). Wanting to burst forth to the surface in a way that “Better Off Alone” encapsulates sublimely.
In another article for MTV that touts the brilliance of “Better Off Alone,” Meaghan Garvey notes that “the thing that tied these [90s Eurodance] songs together—and that made them resonate so deeply in my lonesome preteen heart—wasn’t really their gratuitous rave stabs… All of them were desperately preoccupied with something just out of reach, and presented with an irrational optimism that twisted the knife even deeper.”
Petras follows the trend of pulling these sounds out of their place and time (hear also: Black Eyed Peas and J Balvin’s “Ritmo,” David Guetta and Bebe Rexha’s “I’m Good [Blue],” Charli XCX and Rina Sawayama’s “Beg For You,” Charli XCX’s “Used to Know Me” or Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” [which uses the same sample as “Used to Know Me” via Robin S’ “Show Me Love”]). Alas, like everything people have tried to co-opt and remake in the present, it lacks that sort of genuineness and earnestness referred to by Garvey. “Alone” is yet another pinnacle of such artifice, the attempt to “manufacture” something that can’t be. And yet, it would appear that “TikTokers” (a euphemism for Gen Z) are none the wiser to the offensiveness of the ersatz imitations they embrace without question. From their perspective, they are better off alone—independent of minds that know with every fiber of their being that the original song is unparalleled.
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Genna Rivieccio
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