Stray Thoughts about “I Kiss a Girl”

• Completely agree with Tom that this song was annoying exhibitionism, and downright retrograde, compared to the Jill Sobule single. It’s like fantasy porn for Christian teens feeling a little rebellious.

• Speaking of which, “You’re So Gay” fits in that category too. She was going for edgy, but it just sounds mean and conservative.

• The production of “I Kiss a Girl” is absolutely awful to me. It makes me feel like I’m trapped inside the plastic casing of a Mattell toy.

• I used to think that Katy Petty had a terrible singing voice. Then my colleague played me some live-in-a-room clips, and I realized that it’s really just that production doing everything it can to sound ugly. Her natural voice is fine.

• I listened again, just to try it. I still don’t like it.

I don’t know what’s more embarrassing, that the actual guy singing for crazy town doesn’t know the lyrics to “butterfly”, or that I do.

Kill copyright laws, but not before giving me 50%

Rink 182!

I just feel a bit bad, and I’m kind of a bit sorry if I’ve offended you. Ice Spice, I’m sorry. It’s not because I’m annoyed that me joking got misconstrued. It’s because I don’t want Ice Spice to think I’m a dick. I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry.

I don’t want anything like that misconstrued to be mean. I don’t mind being a bit of a joker… It’s OK for me to be, like, a trickster or whatever, but I don’t want to be seen as, like, being barmy. Because honestly, I just love you guys, and I love doing this…

The truth is it’s a bit of a problem because I just want to say, “Hello. This is a bit embarrassing. I’m sorry if I get it wrong. We all get it wrong.” I just have to do it in public and then apologize to Ice Spice. My life’s just a bit weird. I am genuinely sorry if I’ve upset her because I fucking love her.

Will be the title of the next 1975 album

Jai Paul laces up his skates. “Music comes and goes. Ice dance is forever.”

A few things:

1) I still think I am Easy to Find, while overlong, is much better than people give it credit for – and a good bit better than Sleep Well Beast. Sorry!

2) I’d argue Dessner’s production is one of the primary things holding the band back right now. His continued muffling of one of the band’s biggest attributes – Devendorf’s drumming – is truly confounding, and his insistence on deferring to twitchy electronics instead of the combo of arpeggios and thorny distortion is really de-fanging the music. This is the reason their live shows (and live versions) seem so much better than the studio singles – because they are, because they are ragged and loose, the way they’re supposed to be.

3) I haven’t been impressed by any of the preview singles yet, but I’m also trying not to hear them too many times so I can listen in context of the album. Still, I’m not optimistic.

4) Despite all of this, I still think The National have some more great music in them — especially as Berninger ages and becomes, potentially, more acerbic, cynical, poetic and/or sad ala his hero Leonard Cohen. As I’ve aged into what he was singing about in the mid-to-late 00’s, I look forward to him previewing life as a drunk who is aging ever more out of the culture. Could be freeing for him as a lyricist.

As a lesbian in my 20s, this is a song I can’t be objective about.

On objective measures, the lyrics of this song are eye-roll worthy. “I Kissed A Girl” comes off as pathologically obsessed with asserting its straightness despite the subject matter and plays just about every 2000s bisexual fetishization cliche in the book.

The important part is that none of those implications reached me as a young girl. I zeroed in the chorus – “the taste of her cherry chapstick”. I wasn’t aware of much at the time. I was two years away from middle school, sitting in my friend’s mom’s minivan, lolling my head against the back seat door. But it was my first brush with a type of romantic encounter that sounded appealing and adventurous. I’m honestly not even sure I was aware of lesbians existing before this track. The song drifted into me like a hazy, distant daydream, and 11 years later, I understood why.

As far as well-produced sapphic pop songs go (a woefully small category), the 2015 Demi Lovato hit “Cool For The Summer” would basically take all the bicurious themes of “I Kissed A Girl” and do them in a sexier, less exploitative manner. But this is my trash, dammit. It’s such a pile of atrocious cliches that it whips right around to perfect material to reuse in queer spaces. It’ll always have a place in drag show set lists. It’ll always kill at karaoke. And it was an awakening for a lot of young women.

With love and bemused scorn, 9/10.

Forget it, Jake. It’s Crazy Town.

What’s a “10/10?”

Is it a good melody, or meaningful lyrics? Maybe it’s a certain riff or hook. Perhaps it’s great production? Or maybe it’s just all in your head: you’re hearing a recording and having an illogical, yet undeniable emotion.

I’d never felt so alone and discouraged as I did in the early summer of 2008. And it was rapidly spiraling. Everything was going wrong, and although I was proactively seeking help for my depression, nothing was helping. I couldn’t sleep and would spend hours doing the precursor to what we now call “doomscrolling:” stepping up and down purposelessly on the remote through 80 channels. The equivalent of eating terrible fast-food, even when you aren’t hungry, and you know it’s doing more harm than good.

But one night, I fortuitously landed at the exact moment when a TV commercial was starting. Some guys from a band that I knew existed but didn’t follow were on screen, belting out a song that I’d never heard before. It jolted me to attention like a cold bucket of water to the face. And after only 30 seconds, it was over.  

Later during the dead quiet hours of the early morning, it replayed over and over in my head. And when I finally drifted off, it was right there again, and for the rest of the day. And the next.  

I could chalk the whole thing all up to a phase, I suppose. But that was around the time when things began to look a little more hopeful. I felt better, and a little more motivated every day. And “Viva La Vida” kept me company all summer, and through the fall, and the winter as well. The oddest of battle cries; I am aware.

And logically: this all means nothing. I was down and began to come out of it. Simple stuff. It’s Occam’s Razor in play. Random, inadvertent intervention from Steve Jobs and some guys from London happened one night, and I’ve managed to convince myself that there is an association.

I don’t care. This record inspires and cheers me up every time I hear it. To this very day. I’m grateful that it exists. It’s a 10/10 for me. I guess I just don’t know exactly why it came to me when it did.

For some reason, I can’t explain, indeed.

Please tell me there will be a Premature Evaluation for GASMS.