Katy Perry's Ridiculous Remix "Single" For "UR So Gay."

The Good: ? It's short?
The Bad: Short, Lame remixes, Horrendous lyrics, Terribly repetitive, Unimaginative.
The Basics: Shocking the world with the word "penis" on her single, "UR So Gay" is an insulting, rage-filled single remixed far too many times for anyone who likes quality music.


When it comes to flash-in-the-pan musical artists, there have been few in recent times I have hoped would take a dive the way I hope Katy Perry might. When Perry hit it big with "I Kissed A Girl," I did a lyrical analysis to try to expose her for exactly what she was saying. Nevertheless, her debut album One Of The Boys has continued to sell remarkably well after a few years and Perry still has the ability to get on magazine covers.

No song from her first album is arguably more offensive than "UR So Gay," a song which almost immediately led to a backlash in the LGBT community and led Perry to issue one of the most lame backpedals in contemporary pop music. As a c.d. single, "UR So Gay" is the album cut of the song with 4 remixes of the song and the track "Use Your Love." This is immediately problematic because "UR So Gay" was incredibly overproduced to begin with, so the remixes take a track which was already worked over to the point of sounding unnatural and pushes the pop envelope beyond anything sounding human.

"UR So Gay" is a railing from a female protagonist against a boy who is too effeminate for her. Using "gay" as an insult, Perry sings "I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf / While jacking off listening to Mozart / You b!tch and moan about L.A. / Wishing you were in the rain reading Hemingway / You don't eat meat / And drive electrical cars ... You need SPF 45 just to stay alive / You're so gay and you don't even like boys" and the best defense she has is that she is not using "gay" as "homosexual."

It's hard for anyone not to listen to this song and feel insulted, even her audience - which, one assumes, she figures wasn't smart enough to know what "fey" meant when she wrote the song, which would have allowed her to use that instead of "gay." The song is repetitive with the title and adjacent line being repeated over thirty times in the explicit versions (more in the first remix). In fact, the most enjoyable portion of the EP are tracks four and five, which strips away the banal and insulting lyrics and plays two different instrumental only versions.

"UR So Gay" in all of its incarnations is a very obvious pop song with loud guitars, thumping drums and excessive keyboards. Perry's vocals are so produced as to make it questionable how many times she actually sings any of the lyrics and wonder how many times they just looped her vocals. The overproduced instrumental pop-dance sound only gets worse when looped, as it is on the first remix and final one.

Broken up only by the equally singsong and overproduced "Use Your Love," the "UR So Gay" single may safely be avoided by anyone looking for good music.

For other works by and about Katy Perry, be sure to visit:
Why “I Kissed A Girl” Is Utterly Demeaning And Homophobic
One Of The Boys
Katy Perry Unplugged
One Of The Boys (2009 reissue)
Teenage Dream

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© 2012, 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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