Girly Pop

What I've Been Listening to This Summer

The art scene in Houston in the depths of summer slows down a lot, so I’m going to write about something completely different today.

I first became aware of the musical genre that I call “girly pop” when I took at blind date to see the Barbie movie. I liked the songs from the soundtrack like "Dance the Night" by Dua Lipa and "Speed Drive" by Charli XCX, but the song I really liked best was "Pink" by Lizzo. I liked “Pink” so much (and the overall esthetic of Barbie) that I ended up buying a pink dress shirt and a pink hoodie. However, I made no particular effort to learn more about Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, or any of the other hitmakers on the Barbie¹ soundtrack for some reason.

The Barbie soundtrack made me think there is a somewhat distinct style of American pop music that I call ‘girly pop.’ It seems to have always been a part of American pop music—the first pop star that made me think about the genre as something distinct was Brittney Spears. When she burst onto the scene wearing sexy schoolgirl outfits, I was a little repelled—that made me ignore the genre as a whole until recently.

This excuse for not listening to girly pop sounds pretty lame and defensive to me now. What changed my mind? Two musical performers and their many appearances on Saturday Night Live—a television show that I now experience exclusively through YouTube videos. The two performers are Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter. In SNL sketches and humorous songs, Charli XCX almost always plays a mean girl, while Sabrina Carpenter plays a cute and sweet character, roles that suit each of them well.

But what really changed my mind was a decision to stop being the last American to use iTunes and open a Spotify account. I found a station there called “Girly Pop Summer” and started listening and building my own personal my own Spotify playlist called Girly Pop favorites. Here are some of them.

Sabrina Carpenter is a tiny, outrageously appealing 27-year-old former Disney television star. My favorite Carpenter song is “House Tour,” in which Carpenter is being dropped off from her dinner date and invites her date in for a house tour because “some say it's a place where your dreams come true.” She coyly tells her date:

And I promise none of this is a metaphor
I just want you to come inside

Sure sounds like a metaphor to me. Other funny sexy Sabrina Carpenter songs are “Espresso,” “Bad Chem,” and “Manchild.”

Charli XCX is a British songwriter who became a hitmaker after giving her song “I Love It” to Swedish duo Icona Pop. This funny, danceable song has lines like “you're from the '70s, but I'm a '90s bitch.” It is almost as if a young sugarbaby is telling off her much older boyfriend. The solo Charli XCX song I would recommend is “Boom Clap,” which was written for The Fault In Our Stars. It is a little less sexy than I Love It, but equally anthemic.

Olivia Rodrigo is another former child star who has appeared on Saturday Night Live in a bunch of very funny skits. Compared to Sabrina Carpenter or Charli XCX, Rodrigo rocks much harder—her songs feature surprisingly heavy guitar riffs. This is especially true in the aptly named “Brutal.” She also rocks on “Bad Idea Right?,” in which she contemplates getting back together with an ex.

During the time that Taylor Swift was becoming the idol of 11-year-old girls all over the USA and a hate figure among the American ultra-right, I managed to completely ignore her music. Now that I have given her songs a listen, I rank the bitter “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” as my favorite, with the equally bitter “Karma” just behind it. Kesha demonstrates a bad girl vibe with songs like “Take It Off.” Swedish sex-goddess Zara Larsson adds a somewhat on-the-nose song “Midnight Sun” to Girly Pop favorites. Lizzo who did my favorite Barbie movie song “Pink” is also on my Spotify playlist with “Good as Hell.” Like Taylor Swift, she got on the wrong side of the ultra-right for ridiculous, trivial things.

My favorite girly pop performer is Chappell Roan. She is a funny singer-songwriter whose songs have a strong bent towards personal liberation. She was born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz to a very religious family in Missouri and was from the start an excellent musician and performer, winning a talent contest at 13 where she declared her goal was to win a Grammy. When she in summer camp at Interlochen at the age of 16, she uploaded an emotional song she wrote to YouTube called Die Young. This attracted attention to her by record labels and helped her get signed by Atlantic Records. While she started out writing moody piano-based songs like Die Young, after she turned 21, her music took a turn towards dance music and a budding queer sensibility. This was demonstrated dramatically in “Pink Pony Club,” where she writes about going to a gay nightclub in West Hollywood “where boys and girls can all be queens every single day.” I also recommend “Femininomenon,” “HOT TO GO!,” and “Red Wine Supernova” as excellent high-energy dance pop.

At first, Chappell Roan as just another name floating out there in the cultural conversation, but the thing that made me pay closer attention to her music was researching Jeffrey Epstein’s disgusting connection to the Interlochen Center for the Arts. She was one of the many future stars of music and screen who passed through Interlochen, and it had a huge impact on her career as a singer/songwriter. Epstein’s interest in the camp came out of his lust for girls and very young women, which makes me feel a little uncomfortable about being a fan of girly pop. All of these performers are in their 20s and many are quite beautiful. It makes me realize that my fandom is only partly based on their music—and the other part being sexual attraction. But a good thing about the girly pop genre is that you don’t have to be a 20-something hottie to be a hitmaker—neither Lizzo, Charli XCX, nor Chappell Roan look like supermodels. So my enjoyment of the genre is only partly based on my late-in-life horniness.

That this music can feel plastic and contrived is a real argument against the genre. But as I’m struggling on the horizontal leg-press machine at the YMCA, “HOT TO GO!” is good background music.

Furthermore, I am of the opinion that for the good of America, Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend Donald Trump must release everything related to the Epstein case (unredacted), disband ICE, and resign!

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1. I maintain a good memory of Barbie and its songs in part because I got a one-night stand out of it—an rare occurrence for the author of The Great God Pan Is Dead, to be honest. Pan is still single, if any readers are interested!