Katy: I would change ‘I Kissed A Girl’ today
It was the song that catapulted her to fame and became an instant earworm upon release in 2008, but a decade on, Katy Perry has said she would amend the lyrics to I Kissed A Girl. The song has sold 4.7 million digital copies and spent seven weeks at the top of the US charts, but it also angered LGBTQ groups for trivialising bisexuality and its limited view of gender stereotypes.
Now, Perry says, she would edit the song’s lyrics: ‘‘We’ve really changed, conversationally, in the past 10 years. We’ve come a long way. Bisexuality wasn’t as talked about back then. If I had to write that song again, I probably would make an edit on it. Lyrically, it has a couple of stereotypes in it. Your mind changes so much in 10 years, and you grow so much. What’s true for you can evolve.”
While it’s the first time Perry has said she’d change the lyrics, she has been asked to explain I Kissed A Girl in the past. Last March, she said that the song was a reflection of a youth spent in “proconversion camps”. “I’m just a singer and songwriter, honestly,” she told the audience at the Human Rights Campaign’s National Equality Award in Los Angeles. “I speak my truths and I paint my fantasies into these little bite-size pop songs. For instance, ‘I kissed a girl and I liked it’.”
But Perry is yet to address the lyrics of another song from that era, Ur So Gay, a kiss-off that furthered stereotypes and had a chorus consisting of: “You’re so gay and you don’t even like boys.”