I heard Katy Perry's "California Gurls" for the first time on a drive down to Cape Cod last week on a somewhat bleak day, which may account for my somewhat tepid reaction to it. But over the weekend, the fab Aylin Zafar told me she'd had it on repeat, and I knew I had to give it another go:
I still can't decide if I love it, although it seems blessedly free of the weirdly anti-gay or anti-woman sentiments that jarred some songs on her debut album (I still can't get over "you PMS like a bitch / I should know" in "Hot 'N' Cold" which is otherwise a solid piece of pop.). And I can't decide what causes me more cognitive dissonance: Perry declaring "West Coast Represent," or Snoop Dogg channeling his inner Beach Boy to intone: "I wish they all could be California girls. I really wish you all could be California girls," the latter sentence of which is, even if he doesn't realize it, an homage to the Live in London album. We live in the grand implosion of pop and hip-hop, though, and in these particularly pleasant end-times, I'm happy to let Snoop channel Brian Wilson--especially since "California Girls" was the result of an LSD trip.