Just when we thought we were out… they pull us back in.
Having spent the past six months humming, singing, lip-syncing, air-guitaring, dancing, gyrating, body-rocking and housecleaning to Taylor Swift’s mega hit “Shake It Off,” we thought we had finally cleansed ourselves of the infectious rays of pop music sunshine that turned our chubby body into a sickening glow of optimism and joy and had us singing the merits of the song to anyone who dared deny its charm.
Then last week, we heard it: the first seemingly innocuous beats of Carly Rae Jepsen’s new single “I Really Like You.”
At first, we brushed it off as an annoying earworm. Like when we heard “Everybody Wang Chung Tonight” at No Frills and couldn’t get it out of our head the rest of the day. After all, Jepsen is best known for her previous easy-breezy song “Call Me Maybe,” and we found it only mildly debilitating in its pervasiveness. Except of course until she performed it with children’s instruments on Jimmy Fallon. Then it was part of our brain’s internal wiring for several weeks and caused us to question our moral fibre.
Slowly but surely, however, Jepsen’s “I Really Like You” has infected us and taken over our DNA. Part of it has to do with its catchy and to-the-point chorus — “I really really really really really really like you/And I want you, do you want me, do you want me, too?”— which pretty much expresses the exact same sentiment of “Call Me Maybe” but in an even more repetitive, 13-year-old friendly way.
There was a time when we were immune to such overt attempts at chart-topping, songwriting-by-committee efforts. We haven’t listened to commercial radio since high school, we can tell you the full names of the three members in Yo La Tengo and we own more Superchunk full-length albums, eps and compilations than pairs of underwear. But something has changed in us. Our resilience to Top 40 sweetness has weakened, leaving us vulnerable to the siren songs of Swift, Jepsen, Gaga, Clarkson, Perry and Beyonce. The old us would have compared our dire circumstance to Hell, but with Jepsen riding shotgun in our head it’s more like prison — if prison was a candy story and we were chained up with velvet handcuffs.
