Super Fun Nihilism

What I hear when I listen to Girly Girl Productions

Is this a celebration or satire of feminism?

I wish I didn’t have to rely on The New York Times to learn about the frontiers of pop culture, but as a non-TikTok user, I have to have to hobble along with the resources at hand. It’s from the paper that I learned about Girly Girl Productions, the mysterious musical act that’s been blowing up the Internet in recent weeks. I say mysterious because it’s not clear who Girly Girl actually is (the mystery is part of the act’s mystique). Or even what it is: apparently much of the music is generated by Artificial Intelligence. Most mysterious of all to me is how to interpret Girly Girl songs like its recent hit “Ten Drunk Cigarettes.”

The Times calls the two-minute-long “Ten Drunk Cigarettes” a country song, which seems to refer to the use of an acoustic guitar. To me, it sounds like pure pop—which I realize is something of a contradiction in terms—going back to the bubble gum of the Archies 1969 hit “Sugar Sugar.” (Calling “Ten Drunk Cigarettes” country is like calling “Sugar Sugar” Caribbean—ethnomusicologically accurate in a hazy way, but not really usefully so.) “Cigarettes” certainly sounds AI, both in terms of the way its melody seems like it was created in a blender and in the generic overdubbed female voices, which amount to cartoon caricature. The driving friction in the music derives from the way the saccharine melody and vocals are juxtaposed against its sharp, even caustic, lyrics, which begin brashly—

Girls don’t need a man

Badbie don’t need Ken

Us Girls are doing fine

So if you’re a man leave us alone

­—and go on to declare a plan to get rich (though it’s not clear how—through sexual barter?). But it’s the chorus that really reveals the variety of emancipation that’s being embraced here:

One new vape, two lines of coke

Free drinks from the bar, four more lines of coke

Five guy fries, six hits of my blunt …

Culminating in the song’s title of ten drunk cigarettes.

Other Girly Girl songs are even more transgressive. We learn that “SDMFH” stands for “Super Duper Mega Fucking High,” a drug that numbs “the pain.” The narrator of the eponymous “Girly Girl” winkingly lets its listeners in on a secret: she just killed a man (“to be honest it kinda felt good”). You get the idea: for the moment at least, Girly Girl Productions is essentially a schtick, a more blunt version of what people like Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX are doing: celebrating nonchalance as a form of empowerment.

What’s a little harder to gauge is how people—like my students, male and female—are hearing it. Flaunting conventional gender norms, from Chrissie Hynde to Liz Phair to Megan Thee Stallion, has long been at the center of youth culture, so I hesitate to simply denounce these songs as misguided feminism or avowed nihilism. That said, Girly Girl sounds like pure decadence to me. Its bright side, such as it is, seems like empowerment: bad-boy assertion wrapped in (disposable) feminine fashion. But its dark side—which, to my old man ears is what I hear most loudly—is a civilization that has lost its way, unmoored from any sense of commitment larger than self-indulgence. All civilizations carve out spaces for such subversion, however furtive. It’s when they become the prevailing common sense that the decay becomes unmistakable. Girly Girl Productions makes me wonder how deep the cavities are.