Summer 2025. A female singer of abbreviated stature has cued up a submissive, retrograde aesthetic for the promotion of a new album, and everyone is upset. It’s like a game of Clue, only with pop-star outrage instead of British-mansion murder mystery: Sabrina Carpenter with the hair pull on the album cover? No, Jessie Murph with the anti-feminist lyrics on the late-night talk show!
It’s a day that ends in Y, so we have a micro-controversy about pop music supposedly setting feminism back X number of years to discuss. Ms. Murph—a 20-year-old Alabaman singer-songwriter who just released her second album, the hilariously titled Sex Hysteria—is in a bit of hot water after a clip of her performing on The Tonight Show circulated on social media. In the clip, Murph warbles her current single “1965,” wearing a polyester brocade minidress, lace tights, no shoes, and a hairdo that looks like it was purchased at Party City with the label “Troubled British Soul Singer Wig.” A single male backup dancer cavorts behind her, serving the energy I wish Harry Styles had brought to his role in Don’t Worry Darling. The controversial lyrics: “I think I’d give up a few rights/If you would just love me like it’s 1965.”
This clip, understandably, is not hitting with feminist-minded folks in the year 2025. “Call me too woke but ‘i would give up rights if you love me like it’s 1965’ at a time where women are actually losing rights is so insane???” goes one tweet reflecting the general sentiment. Taken at face value, that segment of “1965” does sound like a Sexual Oppression at the Soda Fountain anthem, which at a time of dire abortion-protection rollbacks and tradwife propaganda, is going down as smoothly as a spoiled (raw) milkshake. One might be forgiven for scrolling through X, seeing Jessie Murph woozily gyrate to an ersatz Holland-Dozier-Holland song about taking away women’s rights, and treating it as part and parcel with the other varietals of regressive content polluting the algorithm. What’s next, a ballad about the benefits of quitting office work and turning to subsistence farming?
Of course, Jessie Murph is a casualty of classic PopCrave content curation, in that the clip contains the 30 seconds of her performance most likely to enrage the most people when shared out of context. The full-length song at least attempts to deploy some satire within the overarching theme of Mid-Century Relationships Were Better, Somehow—I truly don’t believe Murph believes the Equal Pay Act was a mistake, for example— but still, it’s a lyrical mess. Murph rasps about a fantasy relationship where she and her beloved attend church, go to “diners and movies and such,” and exchange flowers and hand-written letters. The downsides of old-fashioned heterosexuality are waved off in bizarre fashion: “I might get a little slap-slap, but you wouldn’t hit me on Snapchat,” sings Murph, who I guess prefers the experience of intimate partner violence to the experience of receiving booty texts on an ephemeral chat app.
The official music video for “1965” is similarly disjointed, with lots of film-grain-drenched unhappy housewife scenes that escalate into absurdity. Murph reads in bed with a bottle of wine, dances in a haunted living room, and at one point watches her dour husband—vaguely reminiscent of Joaquin Phoenix at the beginning of The Master—fully bone some other lady. This last event doesn’t disrupt her Valium-glazed stare, though she later decides to shove a gun in his mouth as he reclines in bed. The song’s muffled outro patter, which is so ridiculous that the purported satire finally, kind of, maybe sorta works (“I guess Bud Light didn’t exist…fuck, and I guess movies didn’t exist…maybe they did, I’m not sure about that timeline”), plays out as the camera scales Murph’s ludicrously vertiginous beehive. Ultimately, this is an attempt at irony made by someone whose aesthetic understanding of the 1960s feels like it came from a ChatGPT hallucination of a Mad Men recap —it’s the song version of that TikTok where a guy in a suit says “I just had six martinis for lunch, and I wonder what the fuck my bitch-ass wife made me for dinner” before a lady in an evening dress swoops in and coos “…Jello ham.”
