I read this review on rhapsody:
Katy Perry may or may not actually be gay, but she's certainly made her young career with coy, playful references to sexuality -- her own and her paramours'. The young Californian singer-songwriter first generated a heaping helping of online buzz in 2007 with "Ur So Gay," in which she accuses a disappointing boyfriend who "doesn't even like boys" of being, well, take a guess. Then, in 2008, she shot up the charts with the Sapphic sweet-talker "I Kissed a Girl." Kind of a surprising turn of events for the daughter of two pastors who wasn't allowed to listen to secular music as a kid and got her start in Christian music, releasing a 2001 album under then name Katy Hudson. Or maybe not -- if you believe the old saw about preacher's daughters and once you learn that Perry says her life changed when she discovered Queen as a teenager. By 2004, she'd worked with Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette) and the Matrix (Avril Lavigne), been signed to Columbia and been hailed by the likes of Blender as the Next Big Thing! But nothing really clicked until she released her debut, One of the Boys, on Capitol in 2008 and got her gay on.hm.
-Rachel Devitt
Well, her music is exactly what you'd expect it to be--a cross between Alanis Morissette and Avril Lavigne.
Lyrics:
"I kissed a girl and I liked it/The taste of her cherry chapstick/I kissed a girl just to try it"
and
" I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf/While jacking off listening to Mozart/You bitch and moan about LA/Wishing you were in the rain reading Hemingway/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. (CHORUS: ) You’re so gay and you don’t even like boys/No you don’t even like/No you don’t even like/No you don’t even like boys..."
The perspective of the blog world as far as I have seen can be summed up in three basic perspectives:
1) The gay commmunity is pissed.
2) Rock reviewers reluctantly say, "sure, the lyrics are controversial...but it's so catchy!"
3) Indy rock reviewers are saying, "The lyrics are so edgy! Revolutionary! Isn't it grand?"
Props to these producers for figuring out that musical gender-bending is a topic that everyone from teenagers to cultural theorists fawn over, and for figuring out how to weave these buzz themes into amazingly formulaic songs about ex-boyfriends that everyone will buy. Reviewers, do you have your heads crammed up your asses? These lyrics are annoying and stupid, but they are not edgy. When we all said we liked provocative gender-bendy music, we meant that we liked Bowie, or the Kinks, or the Replacements, or Queen! Don't you remember that stuff? Dammit, blogosphere, ur so gay!
Perry, like the mainstream culture she reflects, appears to have actually no idea what she is saying (surprise). This shit is significant in exactly the opposite way that these reviewers expect. Pop music's one benefit is that it lets us openly admit how stupid we are, it shines a floodlight on the ugliest parts of mainstream culture. For better or for worse, when a song like this becomes a Billboard hit (it did, last week), it signals the beginning of the end of the controversy surrounding its subject.
Now please cleanse your palate with something that doesn't suck:
