Songfacts®:

• Many White Stripes songs from this era have a gritty blues feel, but "You're Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)" is a throwback to pop songs of the '50s and '60s. It runs just 1:49 and finds frontman Jack White letting a girl know she can do better than the boys she's been dating. After all, she's pretty good looking... for a girl.
  
  White claims he didn't put too much thought into it. "I didn't sit down and figure it all out," he said. "I don't think it can be faked."
• The line, "And this feeling's still gonna linger on until the year 2525 now," is a reference to the song "In the Year 2525," a #1 hit for Zager & Evans in 1969.
• The song was used in 2002 movie The Hot Chick, starring Rob Schneider as a guy who switches bodies with a girl. This was the first time a White Stripes song was used in a movie, although it wasn't included on the soundtrack. The next movie with a White Stripes song was Napoleon Dynamite in 2004, which is about a jillion times better. Their song "We're Going To Be Friends" plays under the opening credits.
• White Stripes opened their second album, De Stijl, with this song. Ben Swank, who formed Third Man Records with Jack White, told Uncut magazine it represented a "turning point" for the band:
  
  "This song felt like a real moment for me at the time. I'd heard Jack play it before it ended up on De Stijl and that's when I realized holy s--t! We've got an f---ing pop song writer on our hands. There'd been glimpses of that 'Sugar Never Tasted So Good' and more mellow things, but this was a full-on straight up pop tune for a band that was being constantly described as a garage rock band. I knew the White Stripes were special from the first time I saw them, but this was a very real turning point and a huge benchmark for a small weirdo garage rock band from Detroit."
• Jack White set out to write this track the way Michael Jackson penned his hits. "He would just hum the music to himself and write the song around that," White explained to Mojo magazine. "I made up that song while I was driving in the van, vocal melody and lyrics, then came home and put guitar chords and drum beat underneath it. It was melodic bubblegum pop and I remember people hearing that track and saying, 'Wow, that band got bad really fast.' I wanted to show people if we only make a couple of records we are not just a one-trick-pony garage rock band. We could be multi-directional."