Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl"

Katy Perry blindsided us with her prophetic genius and soaring, angelic voice in the Summer of 2008 with "I Kissed a Girl." Never before has one single song so powerfully disrupted the paradigms of human sexuality as much as this legendary tune. First off, Perry introduced the mainstream masses--in other words, people like myself--to the notion of girls kissing each other. Stop it! That is unthinkable. Mind-blowing. It was so unthinkable, in fact, that groups like Focus on the Family, the Heritage Foundation, and the Flat Earth Society protested its popularity because it promoted homosexual values. Homosexuality? What is this? I did some research and it turns out that, as it pertains to this song, women have been kissing other women for years. In fact, I discovered that girls have been kissing girls to impress guys--to re-enforce heterosexist values--for years as well. These women are sometimes referred to as "lipstick lesbians." I was shocked to find this out. Apparently they have been kissing each other to impress men since the mid-1980s, reportedly because that is when pornography made the transition from film to videotape. I don't see the connection, but I believe everything Wikipedia tells me. There was even a movie that hit the theaters in the late 1990s called Wild Things that celebrated these shenanigans. There was even a song around the same time with the same name. Who knew?

Okay. Despite my original premise of this song's "introduction" of scandalous behavior--which I have, thanks to my own in-depth research, personally debunked--to the pure and chaste citizens that populate our globe, like your humble narrator, this is still a work of vast artistic grandeur, awash with hundreds of miracles of sonic glory, that I cannot believe has been permitted mainstream radio airplay. Perry's voice during the chorus is so pure that it's not even auto-tuned. That's how her voice naturally sounds! Musically, "I Kissed a Girl" is an innovative blend of Soft Cell's version of "Tainted Love" and the vocal styles of Britney Spears and Pink, two seminal performers from pop music's greatest decade. However, the more I think about the revealing lyrics ("I kissed a girl just to try it / I hope my boyfriend don't it / It felt so wrong / It felt so right / Don't mean I'm in love to night"), exposing to the innocent masses (like yours truly) the sexual dynamic already described in the first paragraph of this post, I've come to the conclusion that this song is transcendentally scandalous, but for some reason I can't recall at the moment. If anything, the characterization of this song as advocating "lesbian values" should be protested by lesbians. The song has as much lesbian content as a box of Trojan Magnums.