He Kissed a Girl and He Liked It

Following from a conversation here and now here, I just want to throw this out to another corner of the interweb:

"I Kissed a Girl" is TWEE.

I mean, it makes sense when you look at the words, which is what was driving Nia nuts about the conversations developing around it. For bi-curiosity, Katy Perry is basically at High School Musical level; I doubt any reasonably open-minded person has had a serious existential crisis about a same-sex kiss since they were...y'know, twee-age. So the only thing really wrong with the song from a Big Idea standpoint is Katy herself, her delivery, and the muscularity of the arrangement, which is basically what her producers -- Max Martin and Dr. Luke Gottwald (along with Cathy Dennis and Katy Perry) -- were hired to do.

It's a colossal mismatch. But take a listen to these cover versions, both linked in the first discussion above:

False Start - I Kissed a Girl

Max Vernon - I Kissed a Girl

The first is from a pop-emo group -- arrangement essentially unchanged, still muscular in that weird steroids & molasses way Fall Out Boy always is, but the gender-bend forces you to come to grips with the fact that this song is actually very cute. Maybe capital-C cute, but certainly not quite as smug or as cynical as the original seems to convince people it inherently is.

The second is even more appropriate, a half-jaunty-piano half-makeshift-electro cover by a singer/songwriter who really sets the song free. It's FEY. It's a little silly. It's kind of adorable. Like puppies.

So I'm pretty tempted to agree with Nia's assessment of the song, and maybe to start to question some (not all) of the attacks Katy Perry's been receiving. This isn't a Paris Hilton all-shit-flies moment or anything, as it's very difficult to separate the performance (and, for me, a few of her other songs) from the other, better songs hiding in "I Kissed a Girl." But I should have known, now that I'm agreeing with people who sound as knee-jerk self-righteous as I often do, that I needed to think a little harder about it. And this also means that I once again can agree with the letter of the Stephen Thomas Erlewine review while cringing at the spirit:

The problem is not with Katy's gender-bending, it's that her heart isn't in it; she's just using it to get her places, so she sinks to crass, craven depths that turn One of the Boys into a grotesque emblem of all the wretched excesses of this decade.

Wait! Which wretched excesses? The problem here is that Katy isn't excessive enough, that she's dipping her toes into controversy and pretending she just did a cannonball on our asses. But if she SOUNDED like she was dipping her toes, at least in "I Kissed a Girl," the song would sound like...well, it would sound like what it is: a song about dipping your toes into something slightly adventurous. It wouldn't be overreaching, it would actually be a little bashful.

I won't go into other stupid signpost style criticism, running the gamut from mildly liberal tut-tutting about lack of follow-through to the expected right-wing reactions about the slippery slope to WHOLESALE LESBIANISM. But understanding the general preciousness of the song, even if it's in pretty stark contrast to the persona of the performer (and her own apparent position to the material in the context of her other songs), has done a lot to help me understand where my own knee-jerks have been premature and somewhat misdirected -- the homophobia, to the extent it's there in the song, is sad, but it belongs to Katy's persona and not the whole song. Unlike Katy herself, I'm starting to realize that the song is actually quite likeable.