Other incidents related in the song: table dancing, maxing out a credit card, having a ménage a trois, and getting kicked out of a bar, not to mention dodging cops who are out to arrest her. On Pop Dust, Katherine St Asaph points out that the song begins with Perry waking up in bed with a stranger, having no memory of what happened, which strongly implies date rape. So many terrible Katy Perry songs to choose from-the bubblegum banality and gratuitous use of Snoop Dogg in “California Gurls”? The blatant Sara Bareilles rip-off “Roar” (whose lyrics are themselves stolen from Helen Reddy and Survivor)? What puts “Last Friday Night” over the top is the story it tells, which becomes creepier and creepier the more you think about it. My musical fever finally broke in high school when I began hanging out with people whose palates were significantly more developed than my own, but to this day I confess to a guilty pleasure in disposable pop songs by such eminent musicians as Avril Lavigne, Ke$ha, Britney Spears, and Lady Gaga. My first CD was Ace of Base’s The Sign (which I’m still willing to defend), followed shortly by, if I’m not mistaken, John Michael Montgomery’s Kickin’ it Up (which I am not).īy the time I hit middle school, I was deep into Oasis, a band that seemed to arouse irrational loathing in all of my friends, but whose first two albums I still listen to on occasion. When I say that I owned every Garth Brooks, Brooks and Dunn, and Clint Black tape, you’ll understand how long ago this was, and yet the memory of that embarrassing failure of taste haunts me to this day.
Hard as it is for me to admit, I used to love- love-modern country music. I like to consider myself something of a connoisseur of bad music.