It’s not a TV tie-in, it’s HBO…

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Katherine St Asaph: As a soundtrack to my RSS feed, this is up there with “Donna Summer on the Radio.” As a song? It’s a TV tie-in, so the answer should be obvious, but still: there’s more substance in most recap GIFs.
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Jonathan Bogart: Who run the world? Not Lena Dunham.
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Brad Shoup: “(Girls!) To write the sitcoms/(Girls!) To post the recaps/(Girls!) To craft the think-piece/(Girls!) And flag concern trolls…”  
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Crystal Leww: “Girls”, the song, came about when Santigold was asked to do something for Girls the TV show’s soundtrack. This creation story is problematic; the song came about as a missing-the-point gesture towards the women of color that are not represented by the show. However, in a weird way, Santigold is kind of one of the best people to be making a lady anthem. She’s a woman of color known for regularly inviting all sorts of people on stage with her to dance and have a good time. More importantly, the song’s really good. The many layered beats provide different rhythms so that everyone can find something constant to get down to. Santigold delivers the verses at a rapid-fire rate, emulating the fast-talking New York ladies that are the subject of the song. Finally, there’s a lot of great mutual lady love without necessarily claiming there to be one lady voice. Yes, Santigold talks about how “all my girls make up an army,” but she’s also the “cat’s meow, ain’t afraid of y’all.” It speaks volumes that “Girls” the song is better able to tell stories relevant to more real-life girls in less than two and a half minutes than Lena Dunham was able to in the entire first season of show.
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Alfred Soto: With “The Keepers” and “Disparate Youth” she proved that the M.I.A. comparisons were nonsense: buzzing electrobeats and lyrics composed of complete sentences proved consistent pleasures. Now the electrobeat stutters, provoking her into drawling like the competition circa Arular. She approaches the subject “girls” as if they were an exotic protozoa worth a scientific journal article.
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Anthony Easton: As much as I love Santigold, and as much as I love Beyoncé, the remix and intersection reworks a kind of pop feminism that seems to be more tautological than almost anything I’ve read recently. 
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Will Adams: There’s an essay lurking somewhere in the fact that below the music video’s pan-demographic depiction of “girls” in New York is a link to purchase the soundtrack to the HBO show of the same name (on which this song appears). The video is actually quite powerful, if only for the amount of diversity on display. The song, however, has a difficult time standing alone. It’s not long enough, the hook not sticky enough, to make as much impact as its video.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Where “Master of My Make Believe” found her firing with inside-baseball industry scorn and deceptively gentle torch-songs, she still has the power to pull it all together to present herself as a lady of the people: notice the chant goes “girls” and not “women”. You’re okay playing young and unsettled, it reminds you, especially when you’re the baddest on the block. Santi White is the best.
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