The Singles Jukebox

WE’RE SO BACK THAT WE’RE EVEN DOING AMNESTY. We begin with a recommendation from Jackie…

[Video]
[6.19]

Jackie Powell: Justin Tranter has a rule he uses in songwriting. He encourages the artists he works with to make their verses as truthful and detailed as possible and follow them with a chorus that’s broader, saying that this will hit the more “aggressive” listeners and more attentive fans where they are, while the passive listeners connect to something much more rhythmic. It’s obvious that he provided this directive to Reneé Rapp for “Pretty Girls,” one of four songs they wrote together for Rapp’s debut album Snow Angel. There’s an intentionality in the arrangement. The instrumentation in the first verse begins with a softness, a gentle guitar plucking. Rapp begins singing in piano as well. The story that Rapp is trying to tell can’t be overshadowed by any ostentatious production quirks. It is personal and much more sincere than the much more melodic “Too Well,” which Rapp now loathes performing. (I get it — there are multiple runs in each chorus.) Her tale is as old as time: how frustrating it is to be a queer woman and have other women want to experiment with you while under the influence of alcohol because they know you are queer. It isn’t just relatable but embarrassing as well. But once she hits the kicker of that first verse, “You think that I’d be flattered/It’s pathetic ’cause you’re right,” she realizes so quickly that no, she’s not in the wrong. It’s embarrassing, but there’s no need to be bashful for too long. By the hook, she turns the story on her foil, and the bass line amps up in a way where it’s also lecturing the drunk bicurious girl that frustrated her. When Rapp performs “Pretty Girls” live, she alters the completely staccato chorus. The second half of the hook, when she addresses what the “straight” girls proceed to do in the morning, is taken up the octave and performed slurred. While she might have made this change purely for an easier live performance, the more legato and louder second half of the hook asserts Rapp’s frustration over the situation. The song ends without a resolution, but rather acceptance: this sucks, but it is what it is. She knows that she’s not in the wrong for simultaneously enjoying and loathing the situation. “Pretty Girls” proves that Rapp has matured, and that she knows that writing a song that tells a really uncomfortable and frustrating story is much more effective than vaguely singing about how she can’t get over someone. And the more Rapp tells stories that haven’t often been told, the more she discovers her own character. She’s not pretending to know who she is anymore, pretty girl.
[9]

Alex Ostroff: My brain has mentally grouped this together with Troye Sivan’s “One of Your Girls” and Hayley Kiyoko’s “Curious” (which I described almost six years ago as “cheekily subvert[ing] the titular adjective that’s too often deployed to undermine queer women’s sexuality“). All three tracks are queer pop songs 10-to-15 years post-“I Kissed a Girl” that explore the perspectives of those who Katy Perry’s narrator/protagonist used while claiming to celebrate them. Hayley’s approach was pissed and snide and assertive and wounded but still confident. Troye’s is entranced, enamoured, seductive, desperate, and more than a little pathetic — but riding the high of how good lowering yourself like that can still feel. Reneé splits the difference — mostly taking Troye’s kind-of-pathetic-but-I-can’t-help-myself attitude in the verses and Hayley’s calling-you-out-on-your-bullshit approach in the chorus — but her verses are still self-aware and the chorus is still deflated by the inevitability of it all. The biggest problem is that the very nature of the tone and emotion Rapp is trying to capture means that the chorus of “Pretty Girls” was never going to rival either the double-time Mustard-wave joys of “Curious” or the synth-smeared multitracker vocoder romance of “One of Your Girls.” Resignation isn’t the stuff of soaring pop songs, you know?
[7]

Michael Hong: It differs in two ways from Troye Sivan’s “One of Your Girls”: 1) the object of Rapp’s affection isn’t just straight but taken, and 2) she understands the pathetic misery of pursuing her. Think I’d be more interested in this if her chorus wasn’t just her being a wistful onlooker but felt as liberating as its instrumental.
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: An entry-level investigation into heteronormativity, which is exactly what some listeners will need. That’s no bad thing, but if the scenario is predictable, the song doesn’t need to be. Aim higher than cliché, and you might even clear it — the endorsement of straitjackets gives the sense that beyond a Shazam of Savage Garden, this was not the most thorough exercise.
[5]

Jeffrey Brister: Yeah, patter choruses are good, bisexual anguish is good, Rapp’s voice is good if not incredible (there are more dynamite vocal performances elsewhere on her album), but I HATE the whole “let the arrangement do all of the heavy lifting in the chorus” trope. It’s lazy songwriting, it robs songs of any energy gathered up during the verse, it’s plodding and repetitive, it’s irritating because I have to sit through 146 seconds that go absolutely nowhere, and then angrily hit repeat so I can listen to it because I write about a song best when I’m actually listening to it, which can also make me hate a song more than it deserves, so I try to be a bit diplomatic about it, and yes I am fully aware I am saying too much but WE’RE SO BACK (for a little while at least) so you bet your ass I’m going to try to hold your attention more than this limp and boring song by also mentioning that I Have Written At Least One song and I know at least the basics about the subject so I believe that should lend me a little credibility. It’s not great and it irritates me! Give me something!!!
[4]

Kayla Beardslee: First time listening, and I can see why this release made noise: it’s a surprisingly good Pop Girl Song from an artist whose acting and theater background wasn’t guaranteed to translate well to pop music. Of course, once you get past the “oh, it’s good” phase, it just sounds like a run-of-the-mill pop single: nice chorus, but there are a thousand other songs that do the same thing.
[5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Selena Gomez whisper-pop finally gets its day back in the sun — and now it’s gay! 
[8]

Aaron Bergstrom: In a nearby parallel universe, this is the summer’s smash hit entitled “Bad Idea Right?”
[8]

Will Adams: Dagny’s legacy lives on! Anything else going on in the song? No? Okay then.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: A Katy Perry rejoinder with a Katy Perry chorus (which itself was already a Dagny chorus).
[5]

Dorian Sinclair: Reneé Rapp was eight when Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” came out, so I would be mildly surprised if “Pretty Girls” was meant to be a direct response — but as someone who was in my late teens at the time, I can’t help but read it as one, despite my general efforts to ignore that the Perry track ever happened. Regardless of whether it was intended, Rapp’s crafted a strong rejoinder, helped along by some great musical touches on the chorus: stuttery syncopation, but also and especially the pitch-shifting and chaotic intrusions that intrude the last time through as the party’s winding down. It’s a shame that the verses aren’t musically distinctive whatsoever, deflating both the energy from that chorus and the jagged observations of their lyrics.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: I’m glad that I get to be a lesbian in the open, just because it means I can want more from lesbian dynamics in songs and it doesn’t come off crass all the time. Because I’m always kind of warded off by a certain chivalry that comes through in desiring women by women in songs, the kind of energy that I recognize is hard-won to be so open but simultaneously emanates dull passive-aggression all the same. Maybe to be brazen and vain is a luxury not so easy when your quarry is just a girly who’s skittish and soft but holy shit, just look at the thread of logic here, ok? It doesn’t help that Reneé’s vocal is so sleepy and mealy-mouthed, nor the gimmick shifts of the production never actually provide the song with energy. Congratulations ladies, we’re the “nice girls” who get left behind for bad boys today.
[2]

Taylor Alatorre: You can tell she felt that getting this message out to the world was so important that it didn’t necessitate stringing these two or three song snippets into a seamless whole. It’s not even clear that she’s wrong about that. I remain largely unmoved by pop stars’ attempts to channel the kind of confessional bedroom indie I used to hear at the Empty Bottle and the Beat Kitchen, but as a generational default setting for emotional unloading, you could do worse. And anyway, you’re not here for that snippet, or for the Jepsenesque chorus, or for the fidgety outro where things actually get sonically interesting. You’re here for “yeah, that bitch is gay,” you’re here for Katy Perry answer songs, you’re here for [2015 voice] the Discourse. Well, Reneé Rapp seems to say: have at it. You worked hard this year. You deserve it.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I don’t even go here (in a couple of senses), but can I just say respectfully: fucking oof.
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: The sulky delivery Reneé favors on the verses feels both frustrated and defeated: setting the mood and inhabiting the contempt she feels by having to tolerate the clumsy, cowardly flings by insecure girls with girls like her. The delivery gets bigger by zooming in on it, magnifying the whisper of bitterness over the heavy bass arpeggios of the first chorus. Then, when the second chorus doesn’t let the last line hang in near silence, the power of this magnification fails, since we’re meant to wallow in the frustration. The song switches the drum programming by the outdo and drops a tantalizing synth line, then zaps it out of nowhere, dramatizing the brief spark of excitement and desire that disappears in a flash. Too bad that’s at the end. Could’ve used it on the second verse, tbh.
[6]

Vikram Joseph: The dimly lit opening verse is the best part of this; thereafter it just morphs into a “Now I’m In It”/”Supercut” mashup without the jittery dynamism of the former or the breathless intensity of the latter. As a call-out of queer-baiting behaviour it’s halfway interesting but no more than that; “You think that I’d be be flattered/it’s pathetic cos you’re right,” cuts nicely, but the awkwardly delivered “It’s a blessing and it’s a curse,” is a piss-weak conclusion to draw. As ever, Self Esteem did it better.
[5]

Alfred Soto: “I like the straitjacket,” she offers, not a sentiment one hears these days: the freedom within form, freedom within constraints. Fussing over the details of a friend’s relationship while the beats pull at her elbow, reminding her there’s other prey.
[7]

Brad Shoup: For a short track, they didn’t spare the details: the movie-trailer detuning of that lonesome acoustic figure, the breakbeat at the end (with something close enough to live drums). And there’s the fade-in that starts ominous, then shifts to cinematic just before it peaks. I think it’s supposed to foreshadow the chorus, which really is good and also reframes the verses as sort of a weird, lamentable fact of life. Which is an interesting way to frame things!
[7]

Frank Falisi: Do you know what can happen in less than three minutes? What are the totems you carry around with worry, with desire? When is repeating retreating? Aren’t you second-guessing yourself now? Why do we gather words from daily life and corral them into a chorus? When a word jumps out of the mouth, can someone else catch it, want to utter its want? And what do you catch in that process? How does it feel getting caught? Is discovering another language to pronounce “I want” an elision of “and I can’t have”? When we say “pretty girls” are we remembering faces? Imagining them? What is it about a refrain: the way it assures or the ways it dares? What if the parts of a chorus that we keep singing are something else entirely, halfway between a fantasy and a feeling? And have you ever thought how many times in your life you have less than three minutes to sing something?
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Every time I listen to “Pretty Girls” I get stuck on one word, sung almost in passing in the song’s first verse: “pathetic.” It’s a hard word for a pop song — it almost feels like too much, a too-early shift from subtext to text. But from that one word Reneé Rapp manages to conjure up a short story’s worth of ambiguous feeling — of self-awareness, of joy, of desperation, of regret, of nihilism, of hope. It’s the single point from which the rest of “Pretty Girls” springs from — even the production choices, which drawn from the same post-Melodrama-and–MUNA well that lite-alt-pop albums in the 2020s are seemingly obliged to draw from, make sense in its light, in the curdled daydream that word implies. 
[8]

Hannah Jocelyn: If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the last few years of being out, it’s that straightness as a concept is insufficient to describe the complex, intense relationships people have with one another regardless of orientation or gender. So we wind up with these catch-22 scenarios, where alcohol gets someone bi-curious, and the mixed messages leave Reneé Rapp bi-furious. (I use that term exclusively to shoehorn in a Scott Pilgrim reference; come on, she even looks like Envy Adams!) The chorus chord progression is both too busy and oddly melancholy, almost capturing Rapp’s conflicted feelings by accident: If the lyrics are bitter, she’s still sympathetic towards those “Pretty Girls.” The short length is disappointing — I could listen to the chopped vocals and distorted drum kit for another minute at least — but it makes sense because there isn’t more to say, is there? I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault these things happen; I think we’re all trapped in comphet, regardless of how we identify. We keep on pretending, to each other and to ourselves, denying our desire for one another. That’s why I admire this class of messy sapphic artists like Rapp, Fletcher, and Baby Queen even when I don’t always like their music — they know desire’s a terrible thing, but you know, they really don’t mind.
[7]