“Do you listen to girl in red?” is not really a question about this songwriter, which I only know because I watched way too many #wlw tiktoks* during quarantine.
I really love how teenagers invent inscrutable culture for themselves, especially when they don’t seem to realize how inscrutable it is. I can’t seem to track it down, but I watched one video where someone played out roughly the following dialogue:
Grandma: do you have a boyfriend yet, sweetie? Me: *gestures furiously at my SLIT EYEBROW and CUFFED JEANS, c’mon grandma*
I’m sorry, but how is your grandmother supposed to know that cuffing your jeans is basically equivalent to coming out? I am an Overly Online person and I barely know this.
While I don’t love the relationship I have cultivated with my phone and the endless-flick of videos available on it, it’s really fun to scroll past young queers joyfully goofing around together. Like, people use the girl in red song "I wanna be your girlfriend” to confess their crushes and it’s adorable. "two queens in a king sized bed" is a very sweet ode to Christmas cuddling, so my gratitude to creative teens and masterful Chinese algorithm design for introducing me to it.
—Tessa
*On YouTube; like a respectable millennial, I consume tiktoks entirely through retweets and youtube compilations.