Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Boy Problems,” a song that is ostensibly about annoying your girlfriends with too much boy talk but is actually (according to me) a beautiful treatise on the frisson of gay self-discovery, almost didn’t make it onto CRJ’s album but immediately declared itself as a crowd favorite upon Emotion’s release. Now “Boy Problems” has a video, directed by the unmistakably dreamy artist Petra Collins—and it’s good enough to make you want to fire up the old time machine, cut those bangs into a mullet, make “Run Away With Me” the lead single off Emotion, have Collins direct the video instead of CRJ’s boyfriend, please, and watch our favorite pop star ascend to the Swiftian heights that have been denied her as if by ancient decree. Anyway, to the point:
“Boy Problems” premiered today at Rookie, where Collins’s sensibility has been definitive (Tavi makes a cameo in the video, too), but it went up accidentally, somehow, on Stereogum on Tuesday, which is why Rookie’s writeup calls the premiere “**official** (ahem).”
However, before the video was pulled, I ripped it, prompted by the sexual command Collins has with these colors, and a shot of a girl taking selfies in a coffin—an easy joke! Nonetheless, iconic—and so now I leave you with these gifs today.
Here is a shot I like to call “Reading My Email.”
Here is “Answering My Email At Midnight After 3-4 Wines.”
One more from this funeral setup—don’t tell me the up-and-down of that blonde girl’s head is totally innocent.
Here’s Carly Rae having “boy problems”/refusing to acknowledge the subtext:
Here’s a good shot of you:
And a good shot of Tavi:
And last, our queen herself, with the grayscale here representing heteronormativity or what have you.
Thanks for playing, and enjoy this video, it’s a gift.