I Kissed a Girl
by Katy Perry
Capitol Records
THE SAPPHIC HIT SONG of last summer, “I Kissed a Girl,” is sung by Katy Perry, a minister’s daughter and Santa Barbara native whose debut song, “One of the Boys,” continues to inhabit the charts. No other straight songstress has so clearly captured the arousing unease that follows one’s first same-sex kiss. Of this paradoxical pleasure she observes: “It felt so wrong/ It felt so right”; and adds defiantly: “I kissed a girl and I liked it.” The off-rhyme of “I liked it” and the “taste of her cherry ChapStick” literalizes such forbidden fruit.
“I Kissed a Girl” has generated controversy from both predictable and unexpected quarters. Not surprisingly, its bi-curious theme was roundly denounced by FoxNews and church groups, while Rolling Stone (9/18/2008) dubbed Perry a “faux lesbian.” In an interview with the magazine, Perry confessed that the chorus came to her in her sleep: “I woke up [and]was like, I love this! This is so taboo!” But, one might ask, does the act in question originate from a real fantasy that she harbors—or even a desire acted upon?—or is Perry just faking it?
“One of the Boys” kicks off with a similar declaration of gender nonconformity (“I can belch the alphabet” and “I chose guitar over ballet”), but soon takes a conventional turn for the worse: “I started reading Seventeen and shaving my legs [and studying]Lolita religiously.” Accordingly, the album’s artwork is steeped in Nabokovian imagery (heart-shaped glasses, lollipops, and lots of pink), and, while eroticizing the schoolgirl figure is hardly new—Britney “I’m Not That Innocent” Spears made a career of it—it’s the lyricist in Katy Perry that can be lethal. In “Waking Up In Vegas,” she reflects on a wild night out (“Did we get hitched last night? Dressed up like Elvis. Why am I wearing your class ring?”).
“Hot N Cold” is another act of sonic sabotage—“You’re in then you’re out”—in which Perry’s airy vocals belie the vitriol in lines like “You change your mind like a girl changes clothes,” or “You P.M.S. like a bitch I would know.” And if it weren’t for the additional guilty pleasure of Perry’s other single, “UR So Gay”—the nastiest poison pen to an ex-boyfriend since “You Oughta Know” (1995) by Perry’s idol, Alanis Morissette—the album as a whole might be more easily dismissed as having all the heft and substance of angel food cake. “I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf,” she snarls, “While jacking off listening to Mozart.” At first listen, the song (raucous horn section and all) seems merely to recycle some cultural clichés: “You don’t eat meat and drive electrical cars, you’re so indie rock it’s almost an art. You need SPF 45 just to stay alive” because “UR so gay and you don’t even like boys.”
Translation: real men don’t eat quiche, hug trees, nor do they—according to Katy Perry—listen to Mozart, read Hemingway, maintain a MySpace page, or wear scarves. Adding insult to injury, she quips on “UR So Gay” that the true measure of a man lies below the belt, as in “You walk around like you’re oh so debonair, you pull ’em down and there’s really nothing there.” An un-well endowed man, in other words, is no man at all. Is that what makes him gay? Proudly one of the girls, Perry sings her sex’s praises again and again: “Soft skin, red lips, so kissable, hard to resist, so touchable, too good to deny it” in “I Kissed a Girl.” In the end, it’s all about boy-bashing rather than gay-bashing as such. “You’re not a man, you’re just a mannequin,” she despairs in “Mannequin.”
Colin Carman just received his PhD in English literature from UC-Santa Barbara, and currently teaches at Santa Barbara City College.
