And This Is Crazy
Carly Rae Jepsen, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and the regulation of female desire and emotions
In 2012, if you listened to the radio, if you worked in retail, or if you were familiar with online memes, the title of this essay might have sparked something in you. You might have heard synthesized disco-style string chords, a melody line that that you cannot get out of your head. If that didn’t happen, how about if I say: “Hey, I just met you…”
“Call Me Maybe” is the breakout single of one of pop music’s most underrated singer-songwriters, Carly Rae Jepsen. It was a monster hit in 2012, and to most people, that is all they know of Carly Rae. But this Canadian siren has quietly released amazing albums ever since, including her latest, 2022’s The Loneliest Time. In honor of 10 years of me knowing and loving Carly Rae Jepsen, I am giving her the deep dive analysis she so rightly deserves.
I have wanted to write a version of this essay ever since reading an online piece about “Call Me Maybe” and its subversive nature that has unfortunately been lost to the sands of time. The common thread between “Call Me Maybe” and the rest of Jepsen’s oeuvre is how her lyrics capture a specific aspect of the cis-straight-female dating experience: a self-consciousness around being viewed as capital-C Crazy if you embrace intense, and sometimes fluctuating, emotions. Her songs tend to ask one of two questions:
Am I coming on too strong too soon?
Why am I so freaked out about commitment?
I think the reason this essay has stayed shelved in the corners of my mind is because I didn’t have a good container for it. Sure, I could write a dissertation on every single Carly Rae Jepsen song, but when would I find the time? Fast-forward to early 2022, when I finally got around to watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a musical dramedy TV show that aired for 4 seasons on The CW, co-created by Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna. Bloom plays the show’s protagonist, Rebecca Bunch, a high-powered New York lawyer who struggles with anxiety and depression. One of her primary symptoms is impulsive decision-making, and in the pilot episode, she turns down a promotion at her prestigious law firm to move across the country to West Covina, California….which just so happens to be where her one-time summer camp boyfriend, Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), lives. Here, the first season theme song will explain it all:
For years, friends and family told me I should watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I don’t precisely know why I resisted this recommendation. I love musicals, and I love musical episodes of TV shows. Why wouldn’t I love a show where every episode was a musical episode? But, going back to the Jepsen theme of being perceived as Capital-C Crazy, I think I was uncomfortable with being told, “you’ll really relate to this” or “she reminds me of you”.
Sidebar: many people had a problem with the show’s title itself, which was not something that I had any issues with. In an interview with Vulture, co-creator and star Bloom said this:
Did you have any apprehensions about the show’s title?
No, because the show is always from the female perspective. The show is always from the perspective of, Here are the times I’ve felt crazy. I’ve felt out of control in my own mind, and kind of laughing at myself. And then people started to call the show My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and I’m like, “No, no, no, that’s not the show.” This is not a man saying, Oh, my crazy bitch ex, she’s so fucking crazy. It was only with that little addition of “my,” I was like, Oh shit, there’s this whole other world where men label women crazy when they’re not being crazy. And that’s not what this is at all. This is how one comes to embody feeling crazy. And the idea that love and infatuation and feeling happy take away the power of your own mind from you. That was always what the show was about. She’s not an SNL character; this isn’t written from a male perspective. We want to welcome women in. (link here)
In a more recent interview with The Guardian, Bloom said this:
When the show debuted in 2015, the title rankled those who didn’t seem to understand its self-awareness. “We didn’t realise that it would turn people off … it’s like calling a show Fat Pig or Women Are Inherently Insane, you know, if we’re being that offensive you know it is going to be a deconstruction of something,” Bloom says. “But too many smart people have said they were turned off by the title for me to be like, ‘You’re all idiots’.” (link here)
Anyways, I watched the entire thing and loved every second of it. The show is everything that Bloom says it is above, and it’s also a satire about musicals, a satire about romantic comedy tropes, and it eventually became an earnest examination of mental health.
Rebecca Bunch’s M.O. is coming on too strong and freaking out about actual commitment that takes actual effort. Does that sound like any Canadian songstress we know?
There is a song from Season 1 that I could not get out of my head after first hearing it. It is called “Oh My God I Think I Like You”, and unlike most of the songs throughout all four seasons, I could not place what it was parodying. Bloom and the late, great Adam Schlesinger composed songs that parodied specific artists, musical theatre composers, and genres, some played straighter than others. “Do You Hear The People Sing” from Les Misérables becomes “Flooded With Justice”, Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” becomes “Let’s Have Intercourse”. But what begat “Oh My God I Think I Like You”?
It wasn’t until perusing reputable internet website TVTropes that I got my answer:
"Oh My God I Think I Like You": A Carly Rae Jepsen style parody.
….how could I not see it?!?
In an audio commentary track for the Season 1 soundtrack, Bloom describes the song as going for a “kind of poppy, lite, sweet, Carly Rae Jepsen-y feel.” While Bloom and Schlesinger don’t claim any more direct inspiration than that, “Oh My God I Think I Like You” feels pretty directly inspired by “I Really Like You”, Carly Rae Jepsen’s lead single from her 2015 album Emotion.
Sorry to anyone who wanted to see the Tom Hanks-starring music video - Carly Rae deserves to be seen in all her glory!
Both songs are about how intense the I Like You phase of a relationship can be, albeit from slightly different angles. Let’s look at “Oh My God I Think I Like You” first.
Something we should consider is how much Crazy Ex-Girlfriend loves musical theatre song tropes. By its very nature of subverting musical and romantic comedies, the show has its fair share of parodies of the Conditional Love Song. Generally considered to have been perfected, if not invented, by Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Conditional Love Song was a way to get a show-stopping duet into Act One without losing the love story’s tension. Instead of a song where the couple declares their love for one another, the Conditional Love Song is always about the couple singing about love, but not love with each other, of course not, leaving room for somewhere to go in Act Two.
Amanda Prahl, in an essay for HowlRound called “If I Loved You: The Evolution of the Conditional Love Song in Musical Theatre”, writes:
Although popular in Golden Age musicals, this straightforward conditional song is rarely found today…Much of this has to do with the onward march of culture: the conditional love song relies on a resistance to admitting attraction, but we don’t really do coy anymore. Perhaps this is why, when this song does show up in modern musicals, it’s colored with a tinge of cynicism. (link here)
Put a pin in “we don’t really do coy anymore”; I will be coming back to that when I get to Carly Rae. I do think Prahl is generally correct, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s first conditional love song, “Settle For Me”, is certainly tinged with cynicism. Sung by Greg (Santino Fontana), Josh’s best friend who has immediate, if belligerent, chemistry with Rebecca, “Settle For Me” is a classic 1930s musical theatre pastiche (think Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, or Jerome Kern) about settling for second best. Greg and Rebecca only begin hooking up several episodes later, and “Oh My God I Think I Like You” is sort of an Answer Song to “Settle For Me”. However, where “Settle for Me” is cynical, “Oh My God I Think I Like You” is sincere—at least, as sincere as a comedy song describing raunchy sex can be.
In that same audio commentary track, Bloom mentions that the idea for the song came from how modern dating often means sex comes before an emotional bond, but sex itself is “a tunnel into emotion” (*cough* Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2015 album title *cough*). Rebecca, who struggles with regulating her emotions, wants to compartmentalize:
But I say, "No no no! This is just about sex!"
And "No no no! Don't be such a girl, Becks!"
But then I feel the oxytocin creeping back to my brain
And all I can do is sing it again
Oh my god, I think I like you
In the last stanza of the song, we see that this goes beyond realizing you like someone as more than a casual hookup:
Are there condoms that can prevent these feelings?
Is there spermicidal lubricant that can kill
The fluttering in my heart?
Is there an IUD
That can stop the image of you and me
Getting married on a hillside, surrounded by ducks
And then we get into a rowboat?
Oh my god! I think I like you
Oh my god, I think I like you
But I say, "No no no"
No no no
No no no
Instead of this being a coy conditional love song in the old-fashioned way—a woman cannot be too forward about her attraction to a man before he proposes—this is a conditional love song where, after a woman has sex, she has to be coy around the idea of love. She can’t even “like” him, that would make her too vulnerable.
“I Really Like You”, in contrast, is a song from the perspective of a woman who is completely unabashed about her feelings for the other person, even as the level of physical intimacy between them is ambiguous. Everything about this person makes Carly Rae swoon with desire, with lines like:
I feel like I could fly with the boy on the moon
I feel like I could die walking up to the room
Yeah we could stay alone, you and me, in this temptation
Sipping on your lips, hanging on by a thread, baby
While we don’t know the length of the relationship, the narrator hints we are still in the early stages:
It's way too soon, I know this isn't love
But I need to tell you something
That “something” is the monster chorus:
I really really really really really really like you
And I want you. Do you want me? Do you want me too?
Part of the joy of a Carly Rae Jepsen song is her ability to validate feelings outside of the love-love-me-not binary. It’s not love, it’s not simply like, it’s a “really x 6” level-like. But her confident articulation doesn’t mean she’s not vulnerable:
Oh, did I say too much?
I'm so in my head
When we're out of touch
This self-awareness about being “too much” is the key to much of Jepsen’s work, including her breakout hit, “Call Me Maybe”. Let’s pick up that thread about “we don’t really do coy anymore”.
“Call Me Maybe”, for all its meme-ability, is a brilliant pop song. What tends to get overlooked is how clever and subversive its lyrics are, which tell a story about how women are expected to be coy around men, and that any deviation from this norm could be seen as crazy.
Most people would probably categorize “Call Me Maybe” as a silly song about a girl falling head over heels for a cute guy. It’s not not that, but something that is easily missed is that the protagonist is not overjoyed about it. Each verse ends with Carly Rae singing that the cute guy “is in [her] way”, prefaced by lines like “I wasn’t looking for this” and “I didn’t know I would feel it”, indicating that this sudden infatuation is unexpected and even a bit unwelcome. It gets in the way of her normal existence. How can this be resolved?
Well, the coy girl who would let the boy chase her will be stuck with this distracting infatuation until he makes a move. What does Carly Rae Jepsen do?
Hey, I just met you
And this is crazy
But here's my number
So call me, maybe?
Here we get the classic Jepsen self-awareness (this is crazy, right?), and a commitment to coyness (the maybe heard round the world). She can’t be forward, even as she’s being forward. The question of how she will be perceived is further explored in the next part of the chorus:
It's hard to look right
At you baby
But here's my number
So call me, maybe?
On the surface, this lyric is saying that she’s too embarrassed to look at him, or maybe just too attracted to him to not be blushing profusely. But the use of enjambment—incomplete syntax at the end of a line—means we could hear the line as, “It’s hard to look right”, to look normal in this moment. Think about that the next time you hear it at karaoke.1
In an interview with The FADER, Jepsen talks about what she wants her music to be for people:
I always thought music was for escapism, but what if it’s also a safe place to come and feel whatever you need to? That was the night I went home and started to write the script for my moon mascot, this ambassador of love. She’ll give permission to the audience — in case you need to be hit over the head with it — that if you want to come here to escape tonight, you can. But if you want to come here to feel, that’s what tonight’s for. It’s for whatever it is you need. (link here)
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show that similarly serves both purposes. While much of Rebecca’s journey is Too Real, there’s a strange way in which the show can also be an escapist fantasy. Most of us don’t get to work through our psychological demons through song. We don’t always get to say the funny zinger to our boss or our ex. We don’t always look as hot as Rachel Bloom, or any of her paramours. The show gets dark, and Rebecca’s suffering is real, but in the way that all long-running TV shows protect their protagonists, we know she’s going to be okay.
There are so many Carly Rae Jepsen songs that remind me of moments in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. “Boy Problems”, which is about neglecting your friendships while stuck in a bad relationship, could be about Rebecca and Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin) when the focus on Josh gets to be too much. “I’ll Be Your Girl”, a song of obsession and jealousy, could be about Rebecca stalking Nathaniel (Scott Michael Foster) and his new girlfriend. And “Surrender My Heart”, the opening track from The Loneliest Time, has a lyric that could sum up Rebecca’s mental health journey:
I paid to toughen up in therapy
She said to me, "Soften up"
May all my readers, but especially the femmes, who have been called crazy or been told to toughen up, treat themselves to a little softness this year.
Shout out to two incredible sources I had for over-analyzing “Call Me Maybe”: Call Me Maybe Deconstructed and the comments section on this now-lost video, The Musical Talmud – “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen.