Bonnie McKee Releases Her Own Hit

As an Australian, I can tell you all that we have a great sense of nostalgia that we have no right to own, an affinity with faded disposable camera stills from festivals in the 80’s that we somehow relate back to even though (I for one) was born firmly in the 90’s. There’s a sort of attachment to dessert gas stations and road signs and an idealisation of the great American road trip. In a country where driving all day will only put you further away from the city, we seem to look to America with some sort of detached memory that we’re fond of, even if it never belonged to us in the first place.

 That’s where Bonnie McKee comes in with her whirlwind single “American Girl”.American Girl is all about how it’s just plain awesome to be an American and the optimism that comes with it, right from the start when she fell in love in the 7/11 parking lot and talked about her plan to take over the world, whilst drinking alcohol infused Slurpees.

The music is catchy and upbeat and I’m almost certain that I’m going to spend most of my summer driving around in circles singing it at the top of my lungs, and getting strange looks from passing traffic. It’s almost impossible to be sad when listening to American Girl, and unlike Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe (Which may or may not be a guilty pleasure of mine) American Girl works better. The lyrics make more sense, and they tell a meaningful story.

McKee has previously co-written with artists including Katy Perry,  Brittany Spears and Taio Cruz. As a tribute to the work  McKee had done for them, a number of celebrities agreed to help her by appearing, in a video of American girl, all lip-synching to her song, which has now gone viral. The official music video for American Girl has since been released and shows McKee and her friends getting up to all kinds of mischief and having fun in a carefree fashion. The video has since received over a million views. 

American Girl is a song about being proud of where you came from, and being ready to take on your dreams. It’s the kind of song that makes me think I grew up there, going to music festivals and listening to mullet rock even though I quite obviously was a little young for that. It’s probably a song that we’ll be singing when our kids are too cool for us, and secretly, they’ll be singing it to. All the press are calling it a summer hit, but I’mhooked, and it’s the middle of winter.

-Katy Heath