Tag: queer anthems

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.