| Pretty Girl | |
| Cover: | Pretty Girl - Clairo.jpg |
| Type: | single |
| Artist: | Clairo |
| Ep: | Diary 001 |
| Genre: |
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| Length: | 2:58 |
| Label: | Fader |
| Producer: | Clairo |
| Prev Title: | Flaming Hot Cheetos |
| Prev Year: | 2017 |
| Next Title: | 4Ever |
| Next Year: | 2018 |
"Pretty Girl" is a song by American singer-songwriter Clairo. It was first included on the compilation album The Le Sigh Vol. III, which was released through Father/Daughter Records in August 2017, and it was released as a single on August 4, 2017. It was later featured on her debut extended play, Diary 001, which was released in May of the following year through Fader Label. Its lyrics are about a past relationship in which Clairo felt compelled to alter and silence herself to be considered attractive; its lo-fi GarageBand production, consisting of a drum machine and synths, led to the song being deemed bedroom pop.
"Pretty Girl" became Clairo's breakout song after its music video, which she filmed on her laptop camera and uploaded to YouTube in August 2017, went viral. She soon signed to Fader Label with the help of her father, whom Reddit users accused of covertly engineering the song's success after discovering that he was a marketing executive, which led to her being criticized online as an "industry plant". Critics reviewed the song positively for its cheap, homemade sound and it was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, certified silver by the British Phonographic Industry, and certified gold by Music Canada.
Before releasing "Pretty Girl", American singer-songwriter Claire Cottrill uploaded her first song online, a cover of a Maroon 5 song, to her Facebook account. She began performing under the name Clairo as a teenager, performing other covers and uploading her own mixes to SoundCloud and Bandcamp.[1] She initially recorded "Pretty Girl" as a senior in high school for The Le Sigh Vol. III, the third volume of a collection of cassette compilations highlighting female and non-binary indie rock acts by the blog The Le Sigh whose proceeds went toward the Transgender Law Center, which was released on August 4, 2017 through Father/Daughter Records and limited to 250 copies.[2] It was later included on her debut six-song extended play (EP), Diary 001, which was released in May 2018.[3]
Clairo wrote and produced "Pretty Girl" using GarageBand and a small keyboard in about two hours. It is a bedroom pop,[4] [5] [6] and synth-pop[7] song inspired by 1980s pop music and written by Clairo about her feeling pressured to change her identity, silence herself, and conform to societal beauty standards for a past lover.[8] It begins with a four-count from a metronome, and its instrumentation consists of a "cheap" drum machine[9] and "rudimentary" synths, over which Clairo sings in a deadpan tone.[10] She has stated that the song's lo-fi sound was unintentional and was a result of her resources for making the song being "pretty shitty", and has also described "Pretty Girl" as her "first original pop song". It was described by Joe Coscarelli of The New York Times as "coy" and "understated" and by Olivia Horn, also of The New York Times, as "simple" and "deceptively peppy".[11] Aimee Cliff of Dazed wrote that the lyrics "I could be a pretty girl/Shut up when you want me to" were "daintily scathing", while the Los Angeles Times Mikael Wood called them "arch but tender" and Pitchforks Katherine St. Asaph identified the lines as having "a sardonic popular-feminist message".[12] Chris DeVille of Stereogum noted that "Pretty Girl" "rejected the male gaze".[13]
After emailing Father/Daughter Records for permission to film a music video for "Pretty Girl", Clairo filmed one in her childhood bedroom in about 30 minutes using Photo Booth on her MacBook laptop, which she uploaded to YouTube in August 2017.[14] It features her dancing in her bed and lip syncing to the song, including to a plastic toy of Gizmo from the 1984 film Gremlins and while drinking iced coffee from Dunkin' Donuts,[15] while variously wearing white earbuds, sweatshirts, sunglasses, pigtails, and no makeup, displaying her acne. She described her appearance in the video as an effort "to portray that I don't need [my looks] to make myself who I am".[16] The song's lyrics also appear in bright pink closed captions at the bottom of the screen.[17] For The Ringer, Lindsay Zoladz wrote that Clairo exhibited an "an undeniable everygirl charisma" in the video and Pitchforks Sasha Geffen compared the video's aesthetic to that of artist Molly Soda; Lindsay Zoladz, for The New York Times, likened the video's "vibe" to being "proto-TikTok.[18] [19] It quickly went viral on YouTube and, through her father's connection with Jon Cohen, she soon signed a 12-song deal with Fader Label.[20] The video had over 17 million views on YouTube by 2018, over 40 million by 2019, and over 75 million by 2021.[21] The video's virality led to the song becoming her breakout hit.[22] [23]
Elle Palmer of Far Out wrote that "Pretty Girl" had a "quiet genius". For The New Yorker, Carrie Battan called "Pretty Girl" "part teen fantasy and part meta-commentary on teen fantasies". Robert Barry of The Quietus praised "Pretty Girl" as having a "homespun charm" and "sound[ing] – winningly, wonderfully – cheap"; Pitchforks Alex Frank similarly complimented the song as "charmingly homemade".[24] While Katherine St. Asaph, for Pitchfork, commended the song's opening verse, in which she sings, "Polaroid of you dancing in my room/I think it was about noon/It's getting hard to understand how you felt in my hands", as "a precisely observed snapshot of the moment one notices there’s nothing anymore where heartbreak used to be" and "an early indicator that Claire Cottrill's heart lay in songwriting, not content production". In a review of Diary 001, Sasha Geffen also wrote for Pitchfork that "Pretty Girl" and other songs on the EP "exhibit the kind of subtle charms that only arise after years of careful labor", adding, "'Pretty Girl' taps into the same bitter irony wielded by PC Music's Hannah Diamond and, on certain songs, Drake." Ben Beaumont-Thomas, in a review of Clairo's 2019 album Immunity for The Guardian, called "Pretty Girl" "the sort of thing that indie artists churn out year on year" and wrote that its "bruised naivety was charming but would have grated over numerous similar tracks". On Billboards list of the best LGBTQ songs of the 2010s, Stephen Daw wrote of "Pretty Girl" that Clairo "pairs her seemingly flippant style with poignant lyrics" and has "a wry, tongue-in-cheek sense of self" about gender roles.[25] In 2021, Stereogums Chris DeVille called the song a "bedroom-pop staple".[26]
Following the viral success of "Pretty Girl", music fans on Reddit theorized that the virality and authenticity of "Pretty Girl" had been manufactured by her father, Geoff Cottrill, after discovering that he had worked as a marketing executive for Coca-Cola and Converse, where he ran the company's Rubber Tracks recording studio, and further described her as an industry plant. In 2018, Lindsay Zoladz of The Ringer pushed back against the accusations, writing that "to believe that Geoff Cottrill was the mastermind behind 'Pretty Girl'" was "to give the Olds, and maybe even the advertising industry, more credit than they deserve".