GURLLLLL

2017.07.14

“Girl” gets used in popular music—a lot. Men say “girl.” Women say “girl.” (You get where this is going). Boys say “girl.” Girls say “girl.” The statistical balance of its invocation is mostly age and gender neutral.

The word gets slipped into sultry intro talk, as in: “Girl, this is what I‘m going to do for you.” It gets dropped as a rallying cry: “Uh huh, this my shit. All the girls stomp your feet like this.”  It also gets misappropriated. Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl,” a pillar of the spite genre, wasn’t about a girl at all. It was about Daryl Hall’s girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. Rich girl just sounded better.

This is an admittedly very stupid compendium of music. And I was, at least when I started this exercise, a bit tipsy on a Wednesday night. But here it is, a playlist of songs in which “Girl” appears in the track title.