first round

(13) Electric 6, “Danger! High Voltage!”
shocked
(4) Katy Perry, “Hot N Cold”
179-173
and will play in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/6/24.

CLICK HERE FOR LIVE SCORES

From bell hooks, to Aughts Bop, to Boobs, to Elmo, and the Devil: Megan Culhane Galbraith Exploring the idea of love and self-worth via Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold”

Admit to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we do not know what that means. —bell hooks, all about love

This essay is about love. Or, perhaps, it’s about the search for love (or not): about chasing love (or not); finding love (or not); settling for love (don’t settle); and the lessons learned from doing all these things before ultimately loving ourselves.
Katy Perry’s late aughts dance bop, “Hot N Cold” explores hetero/monogamous romantic love. While there are many beautiful kinds of love, this happens to be the type I choose.
In All About Love, bell hooks writes, “It all started when I began to speak my heart’s desire, to say to friends, lecture audiences, folks sitting next to me on buses and planes and in restaurants that “I was looking for true love. Cynically, almost all my listeners would let me know that I was looking for a myth.”
Like hooks, I believe true love exists. I have felt it for my three children and for their father. I’ve experienced it with my dearest friends, and select family members, and finally and most importantly I have felt it within myself. Now, six years divorced, I’m ready to choose romantic love again.
Instagram tells me finding love is as easy as “putting yourself out there,” while in other corners of the internet “influencers” tell me I must “manifest” love with crystals and spells N shit. Can’t take the ‘man’ out of ‘manifesting,’ a friend jokes. Don’t get me wrong, I love tarot, and crystals N shit, and I’m all for being intentional in my approach to love, but the commodification of romantic and self-love has become big business—swipe left, swipe right; “Want to boost your profile? Click here and pay $4.99.”
Like hooks, the minute I began speaking my heart’s desire, the internet paid attention (our phones are always listening, aren’t they?) and began trying to sell me love solutions. I was pursued on Instagram by ads that offered to “Draw My Soulmate” for $29.95.

For $49.95 I could enroll in a course that promised to tell me the exact thing to say to a man to “get him hooked,” or I could buy a newsletter subscription that, among other things, would let me in on the “100 Magic Phrases That Make Him Chase, Love, And Worship You.”

These exact same phrases have helped hundreds upon hundreds of my private clients turn their [insert astrological sign here] men into the most loving, caring, charming and devoted partners… and all in a matter of just a few short weeks… sometimes in just a few days!” promised a woman writing under the pseudonym of Anna Kovach who offers advice for every astrological sign. “So many of you have flipped seemingly hopeless situations around by using a few of these magic, “remote-control” phrases on your [insert astrological sign here] man.

But before I tell you how to do so, let me ask you a few questions first…

• Does your [insert astrological sign here] guy ever act HOT and COLD, sends mixed signals or simply refusing to commit?”

♥

I’ll admit that I’d never thought that deeply about Katy Perry or her song “Hot N Cold,” but the title of her song means myriad things to me. I’m menopausal and experience infrequent and relatively mild, but annoying hot flashes. Before I started writing this essay, I’d been sick for the holidays; laid-out on my couch like a Victorian tuberculosis patient from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve with a mysterious respiratory illness. My breathing was labored, I’d spike a fever one day and be chilled the next. I threw my back out violently coughing and was so fatigued I felt like I’d lost all muscle tone and my goddamn mind. I live alone and imagined all the ways I’d die alone with no one here to bring me NyQuil or check in by anything other than text.
“Everyone dies alone,” said a practical-minded friend.
About six weeks in, still struggling, I finally saw a doctor who diagnosed me with walking pneumonia. As I lay fitfully in bed one night, I realized I wanted someone to hold my hand. I wanted him to kiss my damp forehead and tell me everything was going to be OK.

The kind of love I want now would be much different than what I’d settled for in the past. In the context of romantic love and relationships, being hot and cold is otherwise known as “a huge red flag,” a mixed message, a statement of ‘meh’ rather a statement of desire.
Instagram therapists advised me to take mixed messages as a NO, but I’m stubborn. First, like Perry, I had to navigate through a bunch of “regerts.”
I love that her Instagram profile @katyperry features one simple sentence. “Love is the key that unlocks every door.”

I fell quite a bit in love with her while writing this essay.

 ♥

In September 2008, when Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold” hit the charts, I was a young mother of two pre-adolescent boys and a teenage stepdaughter. I rarely listened to music—the time I had in the car on my two-hour round-trip commute was spent listening to NPR because it was one of the only ways I could stay current on the news I needed to do my job as Communications Director for the Chancellor of the 64-campus State University of New York (SUNY) college system.
Honestly, I really could have used an infectious bop like Perry’s to break up the coming crises.

On March 10, I’d just gotten settled at my desk in Albany, NY when I received word that Eliot Spitzer, then Governor of New York had called a last-minute press conference. I’d taken the job with SUNY because of Spitzer (who was known then by his nickname The Sheriff of Wall Street), because I respected his moral compass for rooting out corruption and he’d said he wanted to make public higher education the jewel of his administration.
That morning the First Lady and Harvard lawyer, Silda Wall Spitzer, stood behind her husband at the podium with her head bent and her eyes cast down.

I have acted in a way that violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right and wrong,” Spitzer said. “I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public to whom I promised better. I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself. I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.

Led by a tip from Republican and former Nixon operative, Roger Stone, federal agents investigated Spitzer (now called “Client 9”) and found he’d hired a 22-year-old who went by the name “Kristen” to have sex with him in his room at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. Spitzer paid her $4,300 in cash which included an $1,100 deposit toward “future services.”
We sat stunned in front of the TV during the press conference. “Jesus Christ, that poor woman,” my boss Stacey murmured, and I couldn’t tell if she meant the First Lady or “Kristen.”
I called Spitzer’s communications director, Christine. “How are you doing up there?” I said. I could hear the panic in her voice, “We’re hearing about this at the same time you are,” she said. “I need a new job.”
Word got out that “Kristen” was a pseudonym for a young woman named Ashley Dupré. Two years earlier she’d been worried about how to pay rent in NYC after discovering that her live-in boyfriend had fathered two children with other women during the time they were together. Now, she admitted publicly that she didn’t want people to think she was a monster. She wasn’t the monster, he was. Public opinion set out to immediately cancel them both.
As the Ides of March approached, Spitzer resigned.
By mid-September the stock markets had plunged. Lehman Brothers and other finance bros had issued subprime mortgages they couldn’t back with actual money. Home loans defaulted as investors and the public realized they’d purchased bad faith mortgage-backed securities. Families lost their homes. The housing market fell apart, and the house of cards that was the American and global banking system collapsed. The Big Bank Bailout cost taxpayers $700 billion. We narrowly evaded a world economic collapse.
When “Hot N Cold” debuted on the US Billboard Hot 100 in June of 2008, the song was as prescient about the manic temperature of the country, as it was about immature and emotionally avoidant man-babies.

 ♥

Perry said she wrote “Hot N Cold” about “a relationship” she’d had with someone who was distant and mercurial. It doesn’t take a lot of research to know she was talking about her ex-husband Russell Brand, who was emotionally manipulative, insecure, and controlling during their brief marriage. Look, I don’t mean to comment on anyone’s physical appearance, but the man looks like a knock-off Jesus; a bargain basement cult leader. Compared to Perry’s brains, beauty, and talent, he’s just Ken.

“At first when I met him, he wanted an equal,” said Perry, “and I think a lot of times strong men do want an equal, but then they get that equal and they’re like, I can’t handle the equalness.”
Women are acculturated to be nice, to overlook red flags and apologize for men’s behavior. Overlooking red flags reminds me of my early post-divorce dating life. My friend Jim suggested I be careful because I was vulnerable. “Pfffft” I said and proceeded to willingly reject all red flags, mistaking lust and hot chemistry for love. By 2020 I had dated my way through several regrettable decisions and finally sat myself down for a business meeting.
During my post-divorce flailing, I was also trying to finish my first book, a memoir in essays about love, identity, and being adopted. I was “coming out of the fog,” which is a phrase used for adoptees who are confronting the grief of being separated from their mothers at birth and being raised by non-biological parents. That grief, compounded by shame, is also referred to as “the primal wound” and it can negatively affect romantic relationships.
Psychologist John Bowlby pioneered attachment theory in 1969. He found that caregivers who are responsive and emotionally available will instill a sense of security in their babies that enables the child to go out and confidently explore the world. Caregivers who are non-responsive and emotionally unavailable will instill insecurity and fear into their babies. Mary Ainsworth expanded the theory in the 70s by identifying specific attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant and a small subset of people who are anxious-avoidant.
Bowlby’s assertion is that the need to be in a close relationship is embedded in our genes. “Contrary to what many relationship experts today may tell us about the importance of remaining emotionally ‘self-sufficient,’ attachment research shows us that our need to be close to our partner is essential,” wrote Bowlby. “That, in fact, we can’t live without it.”

My therapist recommended a book titled, Attached by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller (Take this quiz and find out your attachment style). As I was thrashing around, confusing the hot and cold of emotional unavailability with chemistry, I was also trying desperately to understand myself and my attachment style in order to heal. I’d spent nearly six months in foster care before I was adopted. I’d not had a close nurturing relationship with my birth mother or my foster mother. My therapist considered me to be “anxiously attached,” which means in romantic relationships, I tended to be the one chasing a paramour; ignoring the red flags that signal tepid interest. Chasing and performing are forms of self-abandonment—I had the twisted idea that the only way for someone to love me back was to abandon myself to crappy half-relationships, like Perry portrays in her song.

 ♥ 

In the aftermath of their divorce after a 14-month marriage, public comments by Brand and Perry amounted to “He said/She said” narratives. He suggested the marriage ended because of Perry’s “unwillingness to have children.” Perry blamed the split on Brand being intimated by her success. Brand ended his marriage to Perry by text on New Year’s Eve. He was later accused of rape and assault by multiple women—allegations that surfaced during their marriage and kept piling up as more women came forward.
Spitzer married his equal, yet power over women was what he seemed to seek. Was buying sex with a 22-year-old woman and cheating on his wife powerful? No. It was cowardice and misogyny. The rumor that Spitzer kept his black socks on during sex dragged him for years. The guy who was once called the Sheriff of Wall Street had become the Laughing Stock of Wall Street and the woman got the blame
“Brought down by a woman” is a common and tired theme, that goes all the way back to the bible, doesn’t it? Lyz Lenz wrote it well in her latest Substack on Feb. 14, “Building a Woman from Scratch: On Pygmalion and Poor Things.” Buy her forthcoming book, “This American Ex-Wife.”

“Women are imperfect: slovenly, ugly, mouthy, slutty, frigid, or otherwise distasteful. Woman must be created again, in man’s reimagining of all that is beautiful and desirable. Each iteration of the story — even the satires — is in a way a warning to women that they have fallen outside of what is acceptable. You women who are fully alive and aware must be less. Do your hair. Fix your attitude. Or the men will build your replacement.”

The apple is the oldest trope.

 ♥

A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers—the experience of knowing we always belong. — bell hooks

The official video for “Hot N Cold” opens with Perry at the altar with her soon-to-be husband, Alexander. The priest asks Katy if she takes him to be her lawfully wedded husband. “I do,” she says wearing a white netted bridal veil, demurely smiling at him wearing hot pink lipstick. Then the priest asks Alexander he hesitates. It’s an uncomfortable pause and a familiar one for many women who have experienced the same type of cold feet either at the altar, or tepid attitude from a date.

Alexander looks down. The camera moves in for a closeup of his sweaty neck and his Adam’s apple. He swallows deeply and looks from the priest to the assembled family members in the church. His eyes are big as a cornered animal. The flower girl rolls her eyes. Katy’s Maid of Honor throws shade—his face saying, “Oh no, girl.” The sassy bop begins, and the entire wedding party starts to bounce their shoulders in unison. The priest clutches his bible to his chest and purses his lips, looking at Alexander with an expression that says, “Seriously?”

You change your mind/like a girl changes clothes
Yeah, you PMS/Like a bitch, I would know
And you overthink/Always speak cryptically
I should know/that you’re no good for me

The song has a campy/glam vibe, and a cat-and-mouse game chorus as Perry and her wedding entourage chase the runaway groom.

Cause you’re hot, then you’re cold /You’re yes, then you’re no
You’re in, then you’re out / You’re up, then you’re down
You’re wrong when it’s right /It’s black and it’s white

After her divorce from Brand, Perry said she began to work on her sense of self. She seemed to also be mistaking hot and cold chemistry for long-term love: 

Unfortunately, although I had the outward self-identity, I didn't have the inner kind, I hadn't built that up,” Perry said. “My self-worth was in someone else's hands which is never a good idea, because it can be taken from you at any time. And it was, and it was shattered.

In the lead up to her breakout hit, Perry was asked where her inspiration for her songs came from:

It’s really easy for me to write about heartache, really easy,” she said in a 2008 interview with The Star Scoop. “I don’t know why. I think that’s how I get through it is writing about the heartache that I’m having about a relationship, or a boy, or you know, someone I was in love with or hurt by or whatever.

♥

Perry’s parents were Pentecostal pastors who helped set up churches around the country. She was raised with strict, pious rules and was not allowed to celebrate Halloween and said she thought her Christmas gifts were delivered by Jesus. As a born-again Christian she could not even speak of the devil. According to an article in Vanity Fair, certain words were off-limits including “deviled eggs” (which were renamed “angeled eggs”) and Dirt Devil.
“I started actually singing in church my whole life, from like nine to sixteen,” Perry told The Star Scoop. “Then ultimately, I sold my soul to the devil [laughs]. But I started in Nashville, Tennessee kind of just doing some demos, and working with a producer. Growing up I wasn’t really allowed to listen to a whole lot of what my mom would call secular music …”
As her star shot further away from her Pentecostal roots­­—the religion in which she unwittingly participated in “pray the gay away” ceremonies––her father referred to her as a “devil child”:

“I was at a concert of Katy's where there were 20,000 people,” he told Fox News Entertainment. “I'm watching this generation and they were going at it. It almost looked like church. I stood there and wept and kept on weeping and weeping. They're loving and worshipping the wrong thing.”
Fans adored Perry, rocketing her to the top of the music charts. “Hot N Cold” reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and becoming Perry's second consecutive top-five single, following “I Kissed a Girl” which were both on her second album, One of the Boys, on which she wrote most of the songs. It remains one of Perry's highest-selling singles in the U.S. She is one of the bestselling musical artists of all time, selling more than 43 million albums worldwide. Her songs have been streamed more than 30 billion times.
Her album was nominated for two Grammy Awards and has sold seven million copies. Perry was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 52nd Grammy Awards, losing to Beyonce’s “Halo.” “Hot N Cold,” sold 5.8 million copies in the United States and is an eight-time platinum single.
After listening to it on repeat for this essay I can attest that it's the danciest of dance bops. It’s a song that makes want to sing it loud in the shower. It makes my bare shoulders shimmy.

♥ 

In 2010 Perry recorded a segment for Sesame Street that was set to premiere the show’s 41st season in. In it, she has a play date with America’s beloved Muppet, Elmo and sings a sweet version of “Hot N Cold” that was intended to teach children about antonyms.

She was in a costume to play dress-up with Elmo wearing a princess veil festooned with yellow flowers, a bustier top trimmed in silver with mesh up to her neck, golden fuzz-feathers at her shoulders and a yellow gauzy cape down her back. The lyrics to “Hot N Cold” had been re-written to reflect the childlike audience … and they’re adorable: 

You wanna play/so I wore dress-up clothes
Then you ran away / left me here in this pose
How am I supposed to play with youuuuuu
Cause you’re up and you’re down/you’re running around
You’re fast and you’re slow / You’re hot and your cold
You’re yes then you’re no / You’re in then you’re out
I’m starting to doubt
You don’t really want to play, no
You just really want to go, oh 

The clip was originally scheduled to run as the 41st-season premiere on September 27, 2010 and was uploaded to YouTube prior to its airing. Controversy immediately ensued. Parents and critics from across the Internet shamed Perry for a “risqué” costume and Sesame Street for allowing such a segment to air. They said her “bare chest” and “bouncing” might be offensive to their precious children’s psyche.
The producers caved to the perceived public pressure and pulled the segment which went into the history books as one of Sesame Street’s top ten internet “controversies.” Other controversies included: parents criticizing Cookie Monster for promoting cookie eating during a time of rising childhood obesity; accusations of poking fun at Fox News in a skit featuring Oscar the Grouch as the news anchor of the GNN, the Grouchy News Network; and the Sesame Street YouTube channel being hacked and replaced with porn.
Perry took it in stride, tweeting:

Perry called the invitation to appear on Sesame Street “the highlight of her career.”
“I love that 'Hot N Cold' could translate to Sesame Street. I just love that. I'm gonna have kids someday, and I love that some pop star out there is gonna change their lyrics to make my kids bounce in their diapers.”
In canceling her segment, Sesame Street caved to another fake public controversy designed to police women’s bodies. Why must pious adults ruin everything?
Meanwhile, let’s pause here to appreciate what Elmo looks like without his fur.

Elmo, what’s the antonym for hypocrisy?

♥

That weekend, Perry appeared on Saturday Night Live wearing pigtails, glasses, and snapping her gum, in a tight, low-cut red sweater and push-up bra that maximized her cleavage. The front of the sweater showed Elmo’s astonished face: his eyes were positioned at her nipples, and I remember scream/laughing and saying aloud “My eyes are up here!”
Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler played talk show hosts Betty and Jodi on the fictional talk show, “Bronx Beat with Betty and Jodi.” Perry’s character was a teenaged children’s library volunteer named Maureen who had been reprimanded for her revealing attire. Perry bounced on the interview couch, twirled her pigtails, and giggled nervously in her smart-girl glasses. Betty and Jodi feigned shock, repeating “Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa” and “Ba-Ba Boobie!” as she bounced and jiggled.
“Looks like today’s show is brought to you by the number 38 and the letter double D,” said Poehler. “They come for the boobs, they stay for the books, everybody wins.”
Then, Rudolph changed tact:
“Who cares if kids are looking at boobs?" Rudolph said. "Boobs feed babies…I turned on CSI the other night, and there's a dead guy with a worm in his eye. But we can't look at the tops of boobs?”
The SNL skit poked brilliant fun at men who infantilize women and girls as sex objects and mocked the worn stereotype that smart girls can’t also be sexy. Perry’s sexy librarian-meets-Lolita outfit was specifically for the male gaze and while my hope was that men heard the message, they were most likely simply hypnotized by her boobs. GIFs of Perry bouncing became an exasperating meme––her jiggling a fantasy of “red-blooded men” everywhere who don’t see that what they’re fantasizing about is the pornographic trope of an underage schoolgirl in a pleated skirt and tube socks.

In retrospect, “Hot N Cold” seems to be an anthem and a turning point for a society that is frequently at odds with itself about women and “a woman’s place.” Imagine if Sesame Street had delivered a positive message by airing Perry’s segment. How many young girls need to hear “Never be embarrassed about your body. You’re beautiful,” as Poehler said in the SNL skit?
Fast forward to 2024 and women continue to live in an upside-down world of antonyms. America Ferrera’s monologue (written by Greta Gerwig) in the Barbie movie caught fire as an elevator speech describing the existential crisis for women living under patriarchy:

It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.

You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.

But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line.

It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.

I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don't even know.” 

♥

Believing women has been a ubiquitous societal challenge and the memes are spot-on. The narratives become a veritable “He Said/She Said” of women who were never believed:

He Said

She (Perry) looks great after losing all that baby weight. —male friend

I cannot allow for my private failings to disrupt the people's work. —“Sheriff of Wall Street”

You’re smart and funny. I don’t want to fuck you, but maybe we could be friends. —random guy from Bumble

Grab her by the pussy. —45th President

She’s not my type. It never happened, OK? —45th President

She Said

Men are scared that women will laugh at them. Women are scared that men will kill them. —Margaret Atwood

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. —Virginia Woolf 

I like a lot of things about being a woman, but there are times and ways it’s a prison, and sometimes I daydream about being out of that prison. —Rebecca Solnit

Men don’t protect you anymore. —Jenny Holzer

If you keep writing essays like this, no man is going to want to date you. —my birthmother

 ♥

A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers—the experience of knowing we always belong. —bell hooks

After my divorce was formalized in 2018, my friends, Instagram, and greater society kept up the drumbeat that I should “put myself out there.” I wasn’t sure where “there” was, but at that point it was in the direction of a lot of shitty half-situationships I crashed through like a demented teenager.
As the saying goes; “When you don’t know what you want, you find it.”
After her marriage ended with Brand, Perry dated John Mayer, that hot-mess of a bad-boy crooner. She called him a “tortured soul” and said, “I do have to figure out why I am attracted to these broken birds.”
Yes, girl. Do 👏 the 👏 work! I did. As I began working on myself, I noticed red flags and hot messes much earlier.

As I began to “put myself out there,” I joked to my cousin’s daughter that I was going to buy one of the soulmate drawings in the interest of research for this essay, but really I was half-curious to see if it would match someone I might meet. By the time I’d finished my sentence she held her phone up and said, “Look Megan, I drew you your soulmate,” and we died laughing:

After breaking up with Mayer, Perry said: “I’m not in a relationship, I’m just on my own—I am myself in my own bed. I have to be happy being alone, and I am happy ... I believe that I will be loved again, in the right way ... I know I’m worth it.”
That same year, Perry met Orlando Jonathan Blanchard Copeland Bloom (aka her fiancé, aka the “Sexiest Man Alive”; aka Legolas) when he swiped her In N Out burger at the Golden Globes ceremony.
Three years later they were engaged. “It was Valentine’s Day,” Perry said. “We went to dinner and I thought we were going to see some art after dinner but we pulled up to a helicopter.” Bloom had organized a party with her friends and family on an L.A. rooftop for his proposal.
If that is the result of her Lord of the Rings relationship journey, then that’s the ring to grasp for.

♥

Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. —bell hooks

Perry has spread love across the globe. She’s been a champion for LGBTQ+ equality and received the Trevor Project’s Hero Award in 2012.
 ♥In 2013, Perry became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassadors (Bloom is also a Goodwill Ambassador.) Hillary Clinton presented Perry with UNICEF's Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award and she also received the Human Right Commission's 2017 National Equality Award and amfAR’s Award of Courage in 2018.

“I speak my truths and I paint my fantasies into these little bite-sized pop songs,” Perry said in her acceptance speech.

♥ 

Romantic love means something quite different to me now. I’m not chasing it or pining for it. I don’t “need” it, but I want it. I feel a deep sense of peace within myself and choose to share that with someone who chooses it too. I’m surrounded by platonic nurturing love. I am not alone. I forgive my adult self for abandoning my younger self. I forgive myself for allowing the ‘meh,’ the situationships; the half efforts, the hot n cold.
Here’s how you [insert astrological sign here] can win my heart:

That’ll be $29.95.

♥ ♥ ♥

PS: In doing research for this essay, I discovered my FAVORITE COVER of “Hot N Cold.” This is a 2010 version by Atlanta-based metalcore band Woe, Is Me. Cue it up and roll down your car windows. Trust me, you can’t unhear this one (click below and crank up the volume.)

Megan Culhane Galbraith is the author of “The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book” and the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Here she is in shoulder pads in 2008 making a weird face at Eliot Spitzer. Find her on Instagram @m.galbraith or at www.megangalbraith.com.

This is the job description for her ideal man.

Andrea Panzeca on electric six’s Danger! High Voltage

Don't you wanna know how we keep startin' fires?
The lyrics to Electric Six’s “Danger! High Voltage” are sung by two voices. That one contributor’s identity could remain a secret for years is a relic of the pre-stan (verb, not song), pre-fancam, pre-dox era. The secret contributor, Jack White, himself kept the nature of his relationship with bandmate Meg White a secret. Can you imagine, in 2023, two people claiming to be siblings when at any moment someone could post receipts of their marriage (at least one witness, right) and put them on blast? This was pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-smartphone. This was the age of LiveJournal and MySpace.
The closest maybe one can come to keeping a secret today is Orville Peck, obscuring his face with a fringed eye mask. (Within seconds one can look it up, but that’s research—a word I’ve recently qualified with “not the Trump-voter, anti-vax kind”). 
Each rotating member of Electric Six adopts a sort of drag name—an alter ego like in roller-derby or wrestling or American Gladiators. The gender-bending duet reminds me of Peck and Trixie Mattel’s cover of Johnny Cash and June Carter’s “Jackson,” itself about a fire-seeking couple.
It’s my desire!
In the “Danger! High Voltage” video, White’s voice, like Mattel’s, is female-embodied, bra-clad and tits ablaze. Having recently rewatched 2001: A Space Odyssey (though obviously the on-the-go edit: fast-forwarding the space-opera shots to get to the dialogue), I thought: Hal looks boob-like (like how Nope’s Jean Jacket’s vagina-coded).
Or Hal (singular) is more crotch. Singer Dick Valentine (Tyler Spencer)’s codpiece glows, the mound of a male ballet dancer. I did want to see the pussy! on! fire!, a phrase thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race that’s been in the lexicon for a decade. I wanted to see it lit for representation. Female gaze. 
When they make out—“when we touch, when we kiss, when we touch”—it’s not exactly sexy. It is in that oh-yeah-I-have-genitals sorta way. Feeling that vasovagal nerve connection from brain to lungs to heart to gut and yes to genitals, now aflame with another’s touch. The costumes signal the campiness: the making-out overlong like maybe they are siblings. Elbow sex with sibs Magenta and Riff Raff.
It’s Janet and Frank-N-Furter in “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me,” though musically closer to “Hot Patootie.” Surrounding the two, canoodling in the creepy parlor (easily an interior in the “Frankenstein Place”) the sad portraits portend, like the tombstones and skeletons at the queue of the “Haunted Mansion” ride: you’ll die.
Danger! Danger!
It’s a choice to remind a dancing crowd of death when certainly some had not forgotten. But that’s why it’s important to dance—to suspend thoughts of mortality for a night (or at least a few minutes a time).
Learning my great-grandfather died in a fire, when my grandmother was 16, only deepened my ancient fear. Epigenetic. I remember seeing my dad fall asleep with a cigarette in his hand, the very thing that took out the grandfather he never met. When I was 24, my dad died of a heart attack—a surprise but not really, since he always “ran hot.” His own grandson, my nephew, never got to meet him. 
I moved to New Orleans, site of these traumas, in 2008, comforted by the higher likelihood of flood than inferno (though increasingly marsh fires are common, and for dozens of days this summer temps topped 100).
High Voltage!
I’m a fire sign—one friend said I even kinda look like a lion—but my rising and moons signs are water. I’m drawn to it physically—I like to swim—because I too “run hot.” I’m prone to fainting. Once in a yoga/meditation circle, an athlete noted the warmth radiating from my hands, said I “could charge for that.” I burned these same hands, at five, when I grabbed too close to a sparkler’s fire.
In 2001, my friends at the time, junior year of high school, liked to do “the hippie trick”: slice a lamp wire, maybe wet your heels (with spit?), squeeze them and the wire together. Hold hands: connect. Plug in. Voltage! Add people to the mix: 10, 12, the current maybe becoming fainter the more circuitry. You might hear, “I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid.” 
A friend asked an electrician coworker if it was safe. Probably. No one ever got singed, fried, burnt, smoked, blown like the Jurassic Park kid from the electrified fence. The hippie-trick-house family’s dad, at NASA, might have been adjacent to the O-ring disaster; the Challenger explosion (Y-shaped flame a reference for Jean Jacket’s final form).
When we touch!
Before the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016, the UpStairs Lounge fire in the French Quarter, in 1973, was the deadliest attack at a gay bar in US history. 32 people died. Although my dad told me about it when I was a kid, only when I moved to New Orleans as an adult, 35 years after the tragedy, did it become widely commemorated. At the time, mere years after Stonewall in 1969, the city government offered no condolences, churches refused burials, and many of the victims’ families didn’t claim their children’s bodies.
So it’s a choice to remind people they could die at any moment, especially while squeezed into a small space, maybe with cheap tinder-like decorations, maybe with obscured doorways, maybe with only one stairway as egress. And did you know your vision fades when oxygen’s low, at least when you’re about to faint. Eyes require a large oxygen load, and when it’s in short supply they’re not strictly necessary (though certainly advantageous when trying to flee). Body pulls the system’s plug like Dave methodically (spoiler alert) disconnecting Hal’s higher capacities: “I can feel it. I’m afraid.”
In 2023, since a pandemic, panting and sweating in a ventless space with so many bodies hits different. But maybe you learn to stop worrying and love the bomb; you maybe give yourself over, to absolute pleasure.
Fire in the disco! 
Those opening riffs of “Danger!”High Voltage” beep (beat) like a funky smoke detector. I think of Talking Head’s “Psycho Killer” and Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks,” also lyrically anxiety-minded, maybe more with talk of running. “Danger!” claims the space. Like Beyonce’s “Freedom,” it inspires me to move manically (as I’m inclined) and yet there’s little movement in the video, a contrast both appealing and instructive. The couple in the “Danger!” barely move. They make out. One room. 
The song was released in the US three days before Bush declared war on Iraq. The last generation with internetless adolescence had a taste of chaos with 9/11. But the federal assault weapons ban wouldn’t expire until 2004, so mass shootings weren’t yet on the reg. 2003 was four years post-Columbine, four years pre-Virginia Tech. 
[Sax solo]
“Danger!” lore wasn’t limited to (ultimately-confirmed) Jack White vocals: it was also rumored Bill Clinton played sax. Early-internet hijinks! Maybe a music biz thing: Kate Bush was rumored to have vocals on “Hilly Fields (1892)” in 1982. Turns out, nick nicely (Nickolas Laurien) couldn’t remember the real Kate (Jackson)’s last name, only credited “Kate.” 
The sax in this song isn’t tacked on like in “Baker Street,” or obligatory like in “I Will Always Love You.” It’s more integrated, closer to X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage Up Yours” or Tupac’s “Shorty Wanna Be a Thug,” maybe the first to sample Hank Crawford’s “Wildflower.” I honestly even like bad sax; like pizza they say. 
Fire in the Taco Bell!
In New Orleans, a few years post-Katrina, there was a blighted building, once a Taco Bell. One day from the ground sprouted contractor signs. In response a warning, spray painted on the building: If this isn’t a Taco Bell, “expect arson.” It became a bakery, famous for adjacency with the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. One night, some years later, a grease flame, though extinguished at 9 pm, reignited at 3 am. The spray-painter relented: “This was better than a Taco Bell.” Today the building, again a Taco Bell, reminds us like “Danger!” and many a dance song: live más. 

Andrea Panzeca is a writer and teaching artist in New Orleans.