Emily Magazine » Blog Archive » Winning and losing some:
While I’m being peevish: today I was in the car with my cousin Kaylie, who’s in middle school, and her iPod was playing ‘I Kissed A Girl’ by Katy Perry. I guess I am late to the party of hating on this, but in the entire world history of pseudo-lesbian pop things — Britney and Madonna’s VMA kiss, t.A.T.u., every sweeps-week episode of every desperate tv show featuring “a shocking kiss” that will shock absolutely no one who’s ever seen a sweeps-week episode of a desperate tv show before — it is by far the lamest. It’s lame not just because it is a lame, lame, lame-ass song (”the taste of her cherry chapstick” — ok, so Katy is ripping off not only Jill Sobule but also Yo La Tengo), it is also lame because it makes me feel ancient that someone can have a hit song that has the exact same title and theme as a hit song from 1996 and no one will care because no one who’s listening to Katy Perry is old enough to remember 1996. They probably weren’t even born in 1996. One of the things that’s worst about how much faster pop culture is cannibalizing itself these days is how old it makes relatively young people feel. Jill Sobule herself is pretty blase about the whole thing: “Maybe I’ll write a third ‘I Kissed a Girl’ for fun. It will be about how I kissed her, Ieft the dull boyfriend, got gay-married in California, and really no one gave a shit.”
4:42 AM
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