I Don’t Want It At All (Selling My Soul to Bratty Pop Songs)
I want all my clothes designer
I want someone else to buy ‘em
If I cannot get it right now
I don’t want it I don’t want it I don’t want it at all
Each syllable is punctuated with neon-lit, buzzing staccato synth beats that aggressively drive the point of the song home (short of beating you over the head with a Gucci handbag): Kim Petras is a sugar baby available for work, or pleasure, or… what is she available for, anyway? The song is fortified with a voice of authority as Kim tells you what to do, what to buy, how to keep her happy and most importantly, what she wants. Take a quick look back at the first half of the chorus quoted above, she lists down the details of her wants (designer clothes, simple enough) before cutting in with a threat (‘if I cannot get it right now’) and the whiny word vomit of Idon’twantitIdon’twantitIdon’twantitatall —
We know nothing about Kim, or how she’s managed to get into this vague position of power to give us orders. And yet, the song implores us to keep listening. What else does Kim want? How do I satisfy these wants so that I don’t end up facing the wrath of her tantrums?
I won’t lie and tell you that I have a healthy relationship with this song and that it’s one based on plain enjoyment. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’ve only just discovered this song yesterday, probably exactly twenty four hours ago, recommended from a shuffled Spotify radio playlist. I don’t want to find out how many times I’ve played it since. The song slaps, it slaps hard, and I am merely at its mercy.
I can’t even pretend that I haven’t been listening to this song over and over again on an endless loop while writing this, desperately trying to figure out the meter in Kim’s lyrics, the structure of the beats, the layers in the synth-pop production, replaying moments — what did Kim want again? oh yeah, a little bit of this and that, imma have everything on the rack — to find some sort of underlying order beneath all of this material chaos. I even employed two graduate English students to try to figure out the meter of the lines, and this was the best we could come up with:
‘also song is v catchy’
Any attempt to analyze, or dissect into the song further, even to do something as straightforward as counting syllables becomes inevitably railroaded by Kim’s long list of wants, and as the song reminds us over and over again, if you’re not paying attention to what she wants, then you might as well not be listening to it. The point of this futile attempt at analysis is just that. We can never know the method behind Kim’s addictive magic, the only thing that matters is our blind fulfillment of her requests. Does fulfilling them actually matter? Or is listening to her desires more important? Like a little girl talking about her dreams, maybe what Kim really wants is for us to sit and simply lend a patient ear.
If you’ve made it this far and you haven’t started listening to the song yet, what are you doing? Open up a YouTube tab, or your Spotify, and hit play. Join the conveyor belt of people serving up Kim Petras’ wants, where we’ll never be able to get off until every request is fulfilled — or will it ever be? Like my relationship to the song, pressing PLAY every time it ends, Kim’s desires will most likely never end.
I wanted to talk about the way earworms work and how pop songs can be akin to a certain drug, giving you laser focus while you’re walking down the street (nothing can hurt me when every step is in sync with those damning synth claps), going about your daily life imagining you’re the star of Material Girl, punching a boxing bag to the rhythm of Kim’s perfectly autotuned voice commands: ‘give me summer in the Hamptons!’ and then watch, as the sand leaks out of the bag you’ve ripped to shreds (congratulations, you’re shredded) and you drop to your knees to pretend you’ve actually made it onto a beach in the Hamptons. You’ve given her everything, and you actually feel proud of that. It’s a big achievement and not one to be underplayed. You feel a sense of serenity in being wrung dry, and by extension, you don’t care about what Kim wants anymore.
And isn’t that how earworms work? You want more and more and more until you get absolutely sick of it and there’s not a single fiber left in your body that wants to even remember ever knowing that song. Shape of You by Ed Sheeran, anyone? When I was volunteering on a Greek coast last year, we only had one tiny taverna that we would hang out in every day, and guess what song would be played on repeat? It got to the point where every time the tropical-house intro started (you know how it goes) I felt bells ringing in my brain as if someone was clasping my cranium with both hands and violently shaking it, begging me to #GETOUT.
I don’t think I’ve reached that point with I Don’t Want It At All yet, but I know I will. I’ve been through this, like a scorned lover, with a lot of other songs before. The only thing to do is to ride it out, play it as many times as I want until it’s all fizzled out and Idon’twantitIdon’twantitIdon’twantitatall. Like Kim says, you just gotta let yourself go sometimes:
Baby, don’t you fight it
Close your eyes and swipe it
(Also, I got this message just as I was about to post this. Consider it an epilogue, or a warning, to those of you who have so far resisted the temptation to listen to the song.)
