What This Summer of Girly Pop Means to Me

It wasn’t cool to be a girl when I was a teenager. I have no idea if this is still true but I suspect it is because it’s never been cool to be a girl. But when you’re a teenage girl is when you’re supposed to listen to pop music, or at least discover it. Most pop music is written for teenage girls, and most of it is written by women. Ipso facto, it wasn’t cool to listen to pop music when I was a teenage girl.

To be considered hot and therefore cool as a girl when I was in high school you had to bleach your hair so blonde it broke off your head, and get spray tans, and wear yoga pants and Victoria’s Secret push-up bras. That was never going to be me. I’ve been told I resemble the kinds of women you find in Victorian paintings, the polar opposite of Victoria’s Secret models.

So, you had to look feminine according to the pubescent male gaze to be considered cool but to show any interest in feminine stuff like girly pop music was decidedly uncool. So even I, who was never going to be one of the hot cool girls anyway, knew to hide any interest in Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or Lady Gaga or whomever else. It wasn’t like you knew your were doing it, either, it was like your body and brain just unconsciously abhorred anything considered typically girly for fear of being outed as a…girl. Because being a girl wasn’t cool.

After high school I took an unplanned gap year when I didn’t go to college and I nannied and sat around my childhood bedroom and felt sorry for myself. That year, when I had very few friends of any gender, was when I discovered girly pop music and finally let myself love it, alone in my room or alone in my car driving to my job. I had the drive to my job timed perfectly to 1989, which I listened to every day for about three months. I discovered more about myself, listening to music made for and by women like me, alone, than I did all four years of high school, surrounded by people. This is the genius of girly pop music: it is at its most powerful in the vacuum of every individual girl’s mind—that’s where it’s created, after all—but it is also universal. There’s a lot of discourse about girls and how they relate to each other, and it usually uses words like “catty” and “drama” and “competition.” That has never been my experience. In my experience, we’re all listening to the same music together, and just wanna talk about it. We all contain our collective experience within ourselves.

Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we tapped into that shared consciousness?

This summer, girly pop was cool again. It started with Billie Eilish, and then Chappell Roan, and then Taylor Swift, and then Sabrina Carpenter, and then of course Charli XCX, and it just keeps going on and on and on. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before, except that’s not true, because it’s just like everything else I’ve experienced before in all my girlhood. It was a collective experience of joy and unabashed pleasure seeking and constant winks but also earnestness. It was an acknowledgement that popular music is made by and for girls and women.

When I was in high school, I had a boyfriend who hated girls just like everybody else. He laughed at girl music. He thought Taylor Swift was stupid. Now I have a boyfriend who I quiz about this summer’s pop girlies whenever we’re in the car. We joke about how I’m educating him. He knows more obscure facts about Taylor Swift than I do. He has a favorite Chappell Roan song. “Is this Brat?” he asks me.

This summer, it was cool to be a girl.