"Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" by Katy Perry, March 12, 2021

When I sat down to write, I was going to pick Katy Perry's "Hot 'N' Cold," which is kind of become a mantra at school along with the old song "Fever," as it's hot in the classrooms until the central office turns of the heat, then it's freezing. I'm sweating and then freezing. That being said, I watched the "Hot 'N' Cold" music video and was starting my research, when the "Last Friday Night" video autoplayed. This was another song that was one of my college jams, but this one was more of a guilty pleasure for two reasons: one, I was an anti-pop hipster who only liked cool bands, and two, Katy Perry, and this song in particular, stood against everything I believed in.

THINK WE KISSED, BUT I FORGOT. Growing up Seventh-day Adventist, my mom taught my sisters and I to keep the Sabbath. Seventh-day Adventists worship on Saturday rather than Sunday, like most Christians. The church teaches the Old Testament practices of not doing any work from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. That translated to millions of Adventists not watching television on Friday night and no Saturday morning cartoons. As I grew up, I learned that Adventists believed that keeping the Sabbath was a covenant of salvation, and that the end times would be triggered by forcing members to work on Saturdays and go to church on Sundays. That being said, there were very few times when I was allowed "to break the Sabbath" when I was growing up. That meant no sports. That meant no hanging out with friends who weren't Adventist because they would tempt you to do something to break the Sabbath like watch movies or play games that didn't make you think of God. So, Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night" describes a phenomena I could only judge as sin. But it sure looked fun. 

IT'S A BLACKED OUT BLUR, BUT I'M PRETTY SURE IT RULED. Teenage Dream is Katy Perry's best album, and maybe really only good one. I talked about the title track last month, but I didn't talk much about my experience listening to this album. It was my summer of '10 album. I listened to it track by track, which I hadn't done with Perry's previous album. I was in the middle of a literature degree and slowly expanding my musical horizons to include pop music again. I started listening to Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, and Katy Perry and was trying to pass moral judgment from my Christian school with the tools I learned in Bible and literature course for evaluating "whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable" (Philippians 4:8). I could enjoy this album as long as I reminded myself that everything about it was wrong. But I was wrong, too. In college I really felt I was on the path to figuring out the world. But I overlooked something crucial: human relationships and love and how I fit into that, not just theoretically. When I understood that in my late 20s, I watched as Teenage Dream judged me, rather than me judging it. Damn.

https://genius.com/Katy-perry-last-friday-night-tgif-lyrics