Katy Perry
“Teenage Dream”
from Teenage Dream
Capitol, August 24, 2010
If Ke$ha is contemporary pop’s bottle-blonde body-glittered spray-tanned walk-of-shame-wardrobed yin, Katy Perry is its raven-haired porcelain-skinned candy-coated Rainbow-Brite yang. Ke$ha’s career is founded on obnoxiousness; Perry aims to please with the dead-eyed accuracy of a trained sharpshooter and the force of a shotgun. Indeed, with her enormous eyes, enormous breasts, enormously loud voice, crowd-pleasing patina of residual Christianity, and the lipstick lesbianism of her pleased-to-meet-you opening-salvo single “I Kissed a Girl” (one of two smashes whose titles she swiped from earlier hits), Perry is practically pop self-parody–she’s everything culture considers pleasurable cranked up to a ludicrous, this-goes-to-11 degree. As Ann Powers points out, Lady Gaga’s costume bra features machine guns–Perry’s shoots whipped cream. True, the other day I mentioned her occasionally bullfroggy croak, especially evident when she flips down past that atrocious break between her upper and lower registers, as one of Pop 2010’s annoying-earworm tricks, but it really strikes me as something she can’t help rather than something she hones. Put it this way: Ke$ha stabs into your brain like a parasite–Katy Perry steamrolls you. Or as my wife put it, our summer got measurably more tolerable when we decided to stop fighting it and just go along with “California Gurls.” She’s the juggernaut, bitch.
Needless to say, this inspires resistance just as surely as insidiousness does, because anything so clearly calculated to be appealing going to become almost impossible to like. So even though I kind of dig the sleazy Goldfrappian squirm-stomp of “I Kissed a Girl,”–even though it’s halfway between the Glitter Band and the Revolting Cocks version of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, two of my favorite things in the world–I could never just suck it up and enjoy it. The song’s ludicrously problematic sexual politics, its cynical titillation…whatever the music’s pleasures, on some level it’s just “ugh, gimme a break.” Similarly, for a dude like me there’s pretty much no resisting the candyland camp of the video for “California Gurls,” or the album cover above with which it shares imagery (best cover of the year that I’ve seen, in all seriousness), or even the ersatz Discovery-era Daft Punkisms of the song itself. But everything about it–the easy-peasy subject matter of having a good time with sexy people in California; the stated goal of being a response to the equally jingoistic, far more annoying “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys; the “Snoop Dogg needs a new pair of shoes” cameo to ensure crossover appeal with hip-hop-friendly ears–screams “I AM 2010’S SUMMER JAM!!!” to such a degree that even though you can enjoy the song, you can’t really like it. On an even more lizard-brain level, anyone who’s as into pale brunettes as I am is gonna think she’s absolutely stunning-looking–I mean, Jesus–but that only makes me even more suspicious of the Katy Perry enterprise, if you follow me. Like, do I prefer her music to Ke$ha’s partly or simply because I’m not as into blondes?
Into this mix comes “Teenage Dream”. It’s the title track of her record. It was quite strategically released as a single to soundtrack the end of summer. As Mike Barthel notes, the video for the song has the washed-out look of a teenage girl’s Tumblr photo posts, or the polaroid/instamatic vibe Eric Harvey chronicles as having taken over indie rock album covers. It’s a look of instant, enjoyable nostalgia, which of course is also the basic idea of the lyrics–the same forever-young Molly Young describes in her essay on Hollister’s prefab SoCal experience. It’s as shrewd as anything else Katy Perry has ever done.
So why does it work for me? Why is it possible for me to like, really like this song, listen to it on repeat and everything, in a way that I can’t do with her other songs? I think it’s just a better-written and recorded piece of music, mostly because it’s not trying so hard. Alright, I know that’s a weird thing to say about a song called fucking “Teenage Dream,” but stick with me. After the no-holds-barred attacks of all her other hits, I really appreciate how this song’s chorus doesn’t pound you in the skull–musically, it just does the exact same thing the rest of the song does, only a bit louder, with guitarish synth stabs tracking the not-really-a-bassline. It sounds to me, of all things, like the happy cousin of Daft Punk’s “Television Rules the Nation.” It’s not the usual onslaught of tricks and hooks. It kind of glides.
Lyrically, I’ll admit it has a lot in common with all the “let’s have a good time” songs by Perry and Ke$ha I don’t like in that it’s a stream-of-consciousness onslaught of unspecific, undercooked cliches, though these ones are mostly about romance rather than partying. “You think I’m pretty without any makeup on,” “Now every February you’ll be my valentine,” “I’m complete,” et cetera et alia–we’re not going to be winning an Pulitzers. But! But but but, there’s something so damn disarmingly direct about that lead-in to the chorus: “Let’s go all the way tonight–no regrets, just love.” Well, how about that? A straightforward expression of the desire to have sex in the expectation that it’ll be a fun, memorable, worthwhile, pleasurable experience for two young people in love? More of this, please! Somehow this makes the two following lines, “We can dance until we die” and “You and I, we’ll be young forever,” come across not as the staple sentiments of the over-the-top emotions of pop music since forever that they are, but almost like the intense, perhaps slightly embarrassing in retrospect, utterly sincere things you might say during lovemaking. It’s like the song tips you off balance and makes you more receptive to what it’s doing–the opposite effect of what Perry’s pandering usually does.
But I think the lines that really stick with me come toward the end. Over the inimitable wistful-joyful melodic progression of the glam descend, Perry all but shouts: “I’m’a get your heart racing in my skintight jeans / Be your teenage dream tonight / Let you put your hands on me in my skintight jeans / Be your teenage dream tonight.” There’s something actually poignant about that, and dead-on too! The repetition communicates a sense of involuntary urgency and expectation, a desperation, almost, that’s really endearing. I remember writing about the sex scenes in Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #18 about how Ware captured young lovers’ “raw, almost manic hunger to have and give and demonstrate pleasure.” And that’s the teenage dream, or a big part of it–putting on skintight jeans to get someone’s heart racing and hands moving–or, your heart racing, putting your hands on someone wearing skintight jeans. The song captures a feeling I once loved feeling. Katy Perry’s music is a job, that’s impossible ever to lose sight of–but I call that a job well done.
Hum, I mean, seriously, whatever Mark E Smith says about them being the best live band in the world c. 1972-4, you should take the thing about liking the Glitter Band down. You just should.
Liking “I Love You Love Me Love” is not an endorsement of pederasty!
But seriously, I still like music by Phil Spector and Ike Turner, I still really enjoy Robert Blake’s performance in Lost Highway, I still think Rosemary’s Baby is a brilliant movie. That’s not me standing foursquare in support of anything that those scumbags did. Same with Gary Glitter–he’s just a horrible person who helped make some wonderful music at one point.
Yeah I know, an old argument with an easy answer. Weird though, to these eyes, there’s been total media blackout in every imaginable form of promotion for The Leader for about fifteen years. He’s been very very convincingly monsterised – like, we wouldn’t-couldn’t put up the link in your post round our way, because there’s a very real taboo against it (a taboo I’m v. comfortable with). A shame because The Human League’s version of Rock’n’Roll is one of my favourite recordings, but you’re never going to hear it on the radio these days.
Yeah, I think I’ll stick to my guns: You just should.