4 Recent Pop Hits No One Realizes Are Just Jokes
Every so often, something strange happens with pop music. The artists appear to be actually having fun. This sounds absurd if you grew up being told that singers are abused by their labels and are forced to sing songs they don’t even like, all written by strange men in Sweden.
Yeah, some of these songs now are jokes. So, don’t let those jokes fly over your head.
The New Lady Gaga Song Is Clearly Her Doing Taylor Swift
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Lady Gaga’s new album Mayhem has plenty of songs in her classic style, with all the ooh-eehs, ooh-aah-aahs, etc. Then it ends on “Die With a Smile,” which is different from all the rest, but the album was bound to include it because it’s roughly the biggest song of this century. But there is also one other song, described by some reviewers as the worst of the album and “one of the only songs that doesn’t fit her vision.” It’s called “How Bad Do U Want Me”:
Many other people had their own observation about the song: It sounds a whole lot like Taylor Swift. Fans are insistent about precisely which era of Taylor Swift’s this song rips off, and several videos attempt to prove this by using A.I. to further tweak the vocals into Taylor Swift’s voice. I won’t link those videos here, because that technology is an abomination, but it reached the point that reporters contacted the label asking if Swift had secretly sung the song. The label responded, “No, of course not. If Taylor Swift was on there, we’d have mentioned that.”
The song is Gaga singing about being a bad girl, and her description of what exactly’s so bad about the girl is somewhat vague. She has “hair” (no elaboration provided) and ripped-up jeans. She also did get a tattoo of the two of you recently, but these lyrics are supposed to be silly and humorous, Gaga’s admitted in interviews. Then to sing as this bad girl, which is just a joke persona she made up, she’s adopted a sugary singing style — which is another persona that’s also not her.
There’s exactly one part in the song she does sing in her usual Gaga voice, and it goes, “That girl in your head ain’t real.” Then the song goes on to end with the following line, separate from any larger sentence: “A psychotic love theme.” Not a psychotic love story or a psychotic situation, but a psychotic love theme. The lyrics are calling the song itself psychotic.
Anyway, joke or not, it’s currently one of the most streamed songs on the album. You’re welcome to like it more than any of the others, because there are no laws against that.
Silk Sonic Are Just a More Intense Lonely Island
Earlier this year, we were surprised when Anora won Best Picture at the Oscars because it’s not often that a comedy nabs that award. This was the first comedy to win since — well, since Everything Everywhere All at Once, just two years earlier. Hey, I guess that doesn’t happen so rarely after all.
Rarer is for a comedy song to win Record of the Year at the Grammys. Sure, if a rap song wins, it’ll have some punchlines, but a satirical song is probably not going to win that award. “Jizz in My Pants” by the Lonely Island didn’t even get a nomination, sadly. But in 2022, the Recording Academy did give Record of the Year to “Leave the Door Open” by Silk Sonic.
Silk Sonic was Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak assuming the roles of some sort of crooners of yesteryear, with critics not being able to agree on the precise type of crooner. Whatever the pastiche is, it’s so perfect that the song needn’t come off as parody at all, except for when they suddenly throw in one completely absurd line, without ever breaking.
“What you doing? (What you doing?)” sings the song. “Where you at? (Where you at?) / Oh, you got plans? (You got plans?) / Don't say that (Shut your trap).” And the first time you hear “shut your trap,” you might spit out your drink because that’s not something you sing in the opening lines of a romantic song.
“You’re so sweet, so tight,” also hits that level of something you can’t sing in this style of song. And then come a couple lines that would only be at home in a Lonely Island romantic spoof. “If you smoke (what you smoke?)/ I got the haze (Purple Haze) / And if you’re hungry, girl, I got the Lay’s.”
A couple years after first hearing the song, I learned that I’d got those lyrics wrong. The words to that last line are really, “If you’re hungry, girl, I got filets.”
“Filets?” I said. “My god. That’s... even funnier than the Lay’s!”
But despite all this comedy perfection, you can go to a bar and listen to someone doing covers live, and they’ll be singing “Leave the Door Open” without cracking a smile.
Then again, it’s really hard to hit those notes while smiling. It’s really hard to hit those notes, period. Maybe that bar singer should try something a little less ambitious.
No Sabrina Carpenter Song Can Be Sung With a Straight Face
We could have gotten another comedic Record of the Year this year, if nominee “Espresso” had won. It, too, possibly parodies some unclear target, and when the lyrics include such intentional nonsense as the line “I know I Mountain Dew it for ya,” it had Sabrina Carpenter herself muttering, “So stupid,” as an aside while recording it. They left that aside on the released track, and they highlighted it in the music video.
Speaking of nonsense, her other song “Nonsense” ends with a series of ad libs. After a bunch of these rhymes (“This song catchier than chickenpox is / I bet your house is where my other sock is... / How quickly can you take your clothes off, pop quiz?”), she says, “That one’s not gonna make it. Most of these aren’t gonna make it.” And they left that in the recording as well, to make it very clear that you shouldn’t be taking this too seriously.
So, this is a singer who does a lot of comedy. Practically including a laugh track on the songs should have clued everyone in on this, if her doing literal physical comedy routines at award shows did not. And yet, there is a contingent online who are either very religious or very political and are calling out Sabrina Carpenter as a corrupting influence, for her deeply sexual ways.
It’s true that every time she performs “Juno” live, she makes it a point to stop and mime a new sexual position. But pop singers have been doing that explicitly for the past 40 years, and more subtly for longer than that. The only difference is that when Sabrina Carpenter does it, she always bursts out laughing afterward.
People Heard a Joke in ‘Houdini’ But Not the Target
Eminem’s “Houdini” had the honor of being the second-biggest song last year named “Houdini.” It’s also one song that no one mistook for serious. It’s full of silliness, just like Eminem’s songs of old. Then over in the music video (which features cameos from multiple comedians), he and Dr. Dre don knockoff Batman and Robin costumes, a move that was a joke even when they did it two decades ago and Eminem wasn’t yet in his 50s.
If you believe some of the conversation about this song, this comedic single was Eminem delivering a much-needed blow against wokeness. Why, he makes a joke about his confused transgender cat and calls his manager a bitch for being a cross-dresser. Some other songs on the album lean into that even more. But before that album’s release, Eminem posted a statement that sounded oddly serious for such jokey songs. “The Death of Slim Shady is a conceptual album,” he wrote. “Therefore, if you listen to songs out of order they might not make sense. Enjoy.”
The album starts with several songs in which his Slim Shady persona complains about this sensitive new generation, while offering up jokes about Christopher Reeve, dead babies and other such stuff. Then come interludes in which this guy from years ago and the current Eminem interact. This leads to a song where the two of them argue, with Eminem scolding Shady for his immature bullying and Shady scolding Eminem for creating and using him. It ends with Shady dying by a bullet to the head. Hence the name of the album.
All this context wouldn’t do much to change the minds of the people offended by the album’s humor. “I was only joking ironically” is just an excuse to have it both ways, they’d say. But for the people who took the humor at face value and interpreted it as proof that Eminem was fighting for them, that context makes them the butt of the joke.
Those were hardly the only indications that these insults weren’t serious. For example, when he calls his manager a cross-dresser, Eminem in the video holds up a photo with multiple examples of himself cross-dressing. His wailing at the younger generation and their pronouns feels a little unserious when the video features his three children showing up with delighted expressions of mock horror at what he’s saying — including his kid Stevie, whose pronouns are they/he/she. Oh, and Eminem is also the guy who released an anti-Trump anthem, where the one concrete policy objection was Trump’s trans military ban.
The last few songs on the album are more serious than “Houdini.” In one of them, he bemoans what a terrible father he’s been, how he missed his daughter’s first podcast (an important milestone for any child) and also wasn’t there to walk her down the aisle on her wedding day. But then he followed that up by releasing a music video featuring footage of that wedding that shows, actually, he really was there.
Hey, maybe that song, too, wasn’t so serious after all.
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