Kiss Me Not

You know what bothers me about Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl—now officially the song of the summer, after spending five weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100? Not the auto-erotic tease of the lyrics. Not her groaning vocal delivery, which is kind of sexy, with the luscious word hook “cherry Chapstick”. I don’t think she’s a hypocrite, either, despite being a former Christian artist who’s semi-engaged at age 23. A little frisson of guilt, which Perry adds in by worrying about her boyfriend’s reaction to her Sapphic lip lock, is ever-potent in pop.

What bothers me about I Kissed a Girl is that, in the song’s video, Perry never actually kisses a girl. She lounges around in some kind of spa environment, showing off terrific gams in her trademark pinup-girl outfits. She raises her eyebrows and pouts. Her sensual experiments include petting a kitten and fingering some frosting on a pink cake. Then voila—it’s all a dream, and she wakes up next to her buddy DJ Skeet, playing her video boyfriend.
Now, Jill Sobule didn’t kiss the girl either in the video for her 1995 song of the same title, which Perry cheerfully ripped off. Sobule’s song came during a time of economic strength and social experimentation. Now, American culture is retracting. People are terrified by the crashing economy and our slipping status in the world. In such times, fantasies go backward too.
Katy Perry, with her potty mouth, is an early 1960s-style bad girl. Her daring statements contain the hint of an assurance that she’ll come around in the end. Like Carrie Underwood lamenting a quickie Vegas marriage in Last Name, or Miley Cyrus raging at her boyfriend only to tell him he’s adorable in 7 Things, Perry is all about mistakes that are reversible, experiments that never go too far.
Perry’s taken heat for carelessly appropriating gay culture in her songs, and it’s deserved. But it’s also par for the course in a conservative moment, when decadent party-circuit role-playing replaces open-minded experiments in sex and love. As far as popular images of bi-curiosity go, I have more hope for Lindsay Lohan. At least she’s been seen kissing a girl.
-Ann Powers, LATWP