Pop Music Scene

6 opinions for ‘I Kissed A Girl and I Liked It’

• Scott
  May 23, 2008 at 1:08 pm

  I wan’t pictures or atleast a video, DAMNIT! I want proof that she kissed a girl like Britney and madonna at the MTV Music awards. These days that thought it kind of gross though…

• Video : I Kissed A Girl By Katy Perry
  May 26, 2008 at 7:38 pm

  […] Lyrics and Audio of I Kissed A Girl by Katy Perry were posted last week, now here’s the music video. […]

• Travis
  Jun 17, 2008 at 11:38 pm

  I just heard this song on the radio for the first time about an hour ago, and it is one of the most clever songs ever made. Lesbianism and Experimenting is popular…but how many songs have been made about it? About trying it out? The music isn’t the greatest, but it doesn’t matter. The lyrics are great and had me hooked.

• Emily Miller
  Jun 18, 2008 at 1:26 am

  When I first heard Katy Perry’s song “I Kissed a Girl,” I was driving in the car with my little sister, and I was about to change the radio station from the “pop channel” to the oldies, when she said, “Wait, wait, listen to this one!” I complied, indulging her love of gooey pop beats.
  What struck me most, after having listened to the song, is how unfortunately it does have substance. As an ally of the GBLT community, I became immediately curious to see what that community’s reaction to the song actually was. A quick Google search turned up with nothing—no one on the Internet had ventured to comment on the song, save the inane responses found tagged to the end of fan blogs. I’m almost positive, however, that somewhere, a gender studies Ph.D. candidate is working the song into a dissertation, but I’ll leave that to them, and possibly say it first: I find the song to exude homophobia, among other things. Sure, the song is about a girl kissing another girl, (“how is that anti-gay?”), but from the actual content of the work, I believe there is legitimate reason for concern.
  I’ll begin where my training begins—let’s take a close look at the text—for the song, that means the lyrics (I have read excellent close readings of musical theory– check out Adam Krims’ “Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity”, but I can’t begin to go in-depth on the musical theory behind this song). The song begins with a qualifier (a theme repeated throughout the song): “this was never the way I planned/ not my intention”. It is made immediately clear that the singer did not mean to engage in homosocial behavior—it was an accident. A mention of drinking is made, followed by a “loss of discretion”. What strikes me so powerfully in these opening lines is the reinforcement of the situation’s accidental nature. Such lyrics seem to highlight a certain point: a girl cannot legitimately desire another girl without the influence of alcohol or some other “loss of discretion”, or… she’s a lesbian. There’s something of degradation hanging about these lines—the song makes it seem as if a “normal” female would never choose to kiss another girl, or, it seems to me to be implying—albeit on the very far end of these lyric’s interpretive power– that lesbians lack a certain ability to discern between “right” and “wrong”. Indeed, Perry notes such confusion in moral terms in the chorus and later—“it felt so wrong/ it felt so right” and “it’s not what, good girls do”—but, Perry makes it clear she’s drunk, so is it okay for a “good girl” to desire another woman in any other capacity? Perry certainly doesn’t offer that up as a possibility.
  True, while these first lines caught me off guard, I wasn’t too surprised–I could analyze the content of many pop songs today and find them duplicating heteronormative values, but I feel this song goes beyond the mere replication of certain values–it degrades others. Is a woman (sober or otherwise) who happens to desire (or desire to be desired by) another woman, the song offers, not a “good girl”?
  The next lines, “No, I don’t even know your name/ It doesn’t matter” scream not only of belittlement on the part of the nameless girl, but of callous objectification. Case in point: I’ve seen several movies in which men are belittled for not knowing their “object of affection’s ” name (I can’t think of them now, but it’s a rather common trope)—and here, in this song, Katy Perry is replicating a certain type of behavior for which males are normally lampooned. In a sense, Katy Perry assumes a macho-male identity and objectifies her “object”. Her vocabulary replicates the male-perspective of the situation, (which she assumes) and does not take into account her partner. At this point, one might say, “men do it; good for her; she’s turning the tables”, but the mediation of such behavior in this song’s current form (in movies, the woman’s feelings at being thus treated are often shown), fails to account for the other girl, period. The singer’s partner is established through the lyrics (or lack of lyrics; as I’ve learned in studying Henry James, sometimes what’s not said is more important than what is) as a non-entity—we are not given any insight into her desires or her feelings on the situation.
  Again, this isn’t uncommon in pop songs, but this isn’t just a pop song, acknowledging to an extent, its own ridiculousness—what I did come across in my search for answers on the Internet was that many people felt that this song was supportive of GBLT movements, and I feel that such a reading needs to be exposed for its utter insensitivity to the words being sung.
  The next lines, “You’re my experimental game/ Just human nature” are at once telling and empty. One can get into a very long argument about the composition of something as vague as human nature, but the fact that Perry refers to her object as both an “experiment” and a “game” further supports points noted above. Males who are good at attracting women are sometimes said to “have game,” and for some, the whole process of engaging girls at all becomes “the game,” but…rarely have I ever heard, personally or in cultural use, men refer to women as “experiments”. That type of terminology rings of beakers, dissection, medical sterility and abortive results. We already know the singer has no intention of taking her relationship any further (“don’t mean I’m in love tonight” and, ironically playing into the phenomenon of some males being intrigued by lesbian activity, “I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it”), so certainly, this “experiment” will end, like a Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in heteronormativity swooping in to “make things right” in the morning. The “staging” of this song, whereby I mean the imagined setting, favors both the boyfriend in the background, who gets to watch an impromptu “spectacle” put on for his pleasure, and the singer, who objectifies and derives pleasure from her nameless partner. Everyone wins to some extent, except for the “object”. Like Antonio in “Twelfth Night,” the unnamed partner will, it appears, inevitably be cut out of the equation when morning comes.
  Certainly, the singer’s partner could be just another drunk girl, with her boyfriend also watching in the background, or… her partner could be a lesbian looking for love in the tumult of a dominant heteronormative world. There are many options for what the “object” might or not be—such categorization doesn’t even need to occur, because the point is clear—the objectified partner doesn’t matter—we don’t even need to know her name. With Katy Perry’s song “I Kissed a Girl” we’re left with the superficial taste of cherry chapstick, but that’s it, and for me, that taste smacks of disappointment—disappointment that today a song with such implications can be played over airwaves, let alone become a hit.

• DEXIE
  Jun 18, 2008 at 6:18 am

  Travis, it’s definitely not the greatest song but the lyrics and beat will your catch attention.

• DEXIE
  Jun 18, 2008 at 6:24 am

  Emily, I appreciate your dissection of the song but really now, it’s just a song. Every one of them can be dissected to suit and support one’s cause. Metal genre has been blamed for every school shooting that happens in America. I haven’t heard anything against Katy Perry’s lyrics until you posted yours. Maybe people are finally getting it that songs are songs. ‘I Kissed A girl…’ is a typical pop song that has a beat to it that happens to be cheeky as well. That’s why it’s a hit.

  Let’s try to see it as it is, a funny and boppin’ song. We can all write long winded articles with cogent analysis of every lyrics from every song from different music genres but we have enough problems in the world to worry about than Katy Perry singing about kissing a girl.

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