Cobra Starship was a pop-punk band — they had built an audience through the late 2000s with energetic, slightly ironic pop music that occupied a specific niche in the genre landscape of that era. “Good Girls Go Bad” was a bright, hook-driven pop song about the appeal of bad behavior, and it was not a vehicle for the musical identity that Meester has since described as her actual one. It was a commercially logical move for a major network actress at the height of her show’s popularity: the kind of track that could capitalize on the existing audience’s awareness of her while introducing her to the music market.
It worked commercially. The song peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100. It was one of the more successful singles of the summer of 2009 and remained in regular rotation for a significant period after its peak. By the measure of commercial reach, it was more successful than anything she has released since.
She followed it with “Somebody to Love” (2009), a pop track featuring Robin Thicke, and “Your Love’s a Drug” (2010), both released through Universal Republic. These releases positioned her as a pop artist in a way that aligned with the visual register of Blair Waldorf — the glamour, the sophistication, the careful presentation — but that sat awkwardly alongside what she has described as her actual musical sensibility.
The pop phase was, in her retrospective account, a detour rather than a direction. She told Vice in 2014: “I’m not that pop person and I don’t know that I ever was.” She described the process of releasing the pop singles as an experience that felt external to what she understood herself to be as a musician. The songs were there, they charted, people heard them — and they were not, in her account, the music she had been working toward.