This hot off the press gem was just brought to my attention by Iselin
I can’t resist imagining this conversation going on in my head:
Dr. Luke: You know that “Tik Tok” song I produced for that Kesha girl that sounded a lot like Kylie Minogue’s “Love at First Site”? Let’s write one of those types of songs.
Max Martin: Yes! Oh, and let’s make sure there is some sort of “oh oh oh” thing at the end of the choruses. The kids LOVE that sort of thing.
DL: About this “California Girls” song title. Isn’t that a Beach Boys song? We don’t want to confuse the world AGAIN with a catchy original song title ["I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry (2008) and "I Kissed a Girl" by Jill Sobule (1995)] so let’s change the spelling of “Girls” to something fun and goofy like “Gurls”. Let’s also claim the name change was in tribute to the band Big Star.
MM: Your’re a genius! So when I Google it or search for it in iTunes it’ll come up on top! But what about building some cred in the hip hop community? Our numbers are down.
DL: Oh oh oh oh! This will be a great time to pull out clips from that session we did last year with Snoop Dogg.
MM: You mean the one where we had him record random hip hop phrases and things like “California” and “West Coast” that we thought we would need to use later on if we needed to add additional hip hop cred to a new song?
DL: You got it Max. I think there’s a rap about California on there too. Oh, and we might as well also pretend the album is leaked so we hit the blog community. That’ll make them think they’re posts are HOT and FRESH.
MM: Done! Let’s not alienate those east coasters either. Make sure we tell everyone in the behind the scenes Rolling Stone shoot that the song’s inspiration came from Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind“.
DL: Genius.
Katy Perry- “California Gurls” (2010)