Pretty Vacant
Katy Perry's fake could be good, but it's exhaustingly vapid instead
BY STEVE HARUCH
Katy Perry is probably the only person who can make a three-way involving Katy Perry sound boring. The way she mentions the "oops-I-had-a-menage-à-trois" moment in "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" comes with all the seduction of someone reading a menu over a drive-thru speaker. (Is it only a matter of time before she writes a song about anal sex called "Let's Go Outback Tonight"?) "T.G.I.F.," with its forced giddiness and oh-so-debauched romping, is just a vehicle for producer Dr. Luke to tow his resident bombshell through a Ke$ha-style trash pile, and Perry is more than happy to shit-eating-grin her way through it. If nothing else, Katy Perry is good at being whatever someone wants her to be: "naughty" faux lesbian; teenager who still builds forts out of sheets; Daisy Dukes, bikini on top.
And then there's the song "Peacock." Taken on their own, these lyrics aren't so much bad as they are forgettable: "I just shed a tear / I am so unprepared." But they're about seeing a penis. Subtlety is a handicap in pop music, for sure — that's why Bon Jovi still plays bigger rooms than Bon Iver — but "I wanna see your peacock, cock, cock" has got to be a new low.
At a recent L.A. show, Perry brought actual teenager Rebecca Black onstage for a rendition of Black's online meme-hit/punchline "Friday." As Black exited the stage, Perry exclaimed, "Dammit, I love the Internet!" It was as if Black herself — to someone as studiously fake as Perry — could only be a refraction of the zeitgeist, not an actual person. But this isn't about authenticity, because authenticity doesn't matter in pop music or any other. The problem with Katy Perry is not that her songs are dumb. It's that they don't have to be. Katy Perry doesn't have to make that blow-up doll face and gasp when Snoop Dogg says "squeeze their buns" (on "California Gurls") like some randy stoner grandpa.
It's unfair that all female pop stars eventually get compared to Madonna — speaking of the exquisitely fabricated — but in Perry's case, the comparison works to her advantage: She is a much better singer, technically speaking, than Madge. And Perry can really wail, like a low-flying Pat Benatar. Pat Benatar is awesome. And Katy Perry, when she sounds like an actual person — as she does on "Circle the Drain," growling, "I wanna be your lover, not your fuckin' mother" — is awesome, too. But that's pretty seldom.
In the artwork for Teenage Dream, there's a photo of Perry sitting with a stack of cakes on her head and a lollipop hanging from a frosting choker around her neck. Her crumpled silver dress is designed to look like a cupcake wrapper, as if Perry herself is just something to be consumed. Her eyes look vacant, dead — empty calories. Girls may not run the world the way Beyoncé claims, but in Perry's teenage wasteland, it's never even crossed their minds.
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
No Vacancy
Katy Perry's fake may be vapid, but that's kinda the point
BY SEAN L. MALONEY
Anyone who tells you they don't like Katy Perry's music is lying — to you, to themselves, to the world. Taking issue with her media persona, that's fine. She's everywhere all the time, and some folks don't get into it. But the person who denies the perfect-pop brilliance of "Teenage Dream" or "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" is just kidding him- or her- damn delusional self. And pulling the ironic-listening/guilty-pleasure card is just bullshit. The second you feel guilty, the entire point of pop music is lost, and we all know you're just trying to cover your ass so you don't get kicked out of the Cool Kids Club.
Sure, it seems like I'm defending the indefensible here. Pop music — especially its most recent and lyrically debauched crop — is not the sort of thing that stands up to intense critical analysis. In fact, you might say that contemporary pop music is so shallow it actually defies analysis. It's like the laws of nature have said, "Nope, analyzing this will be about as easy as finding the Higgs boson particle" — which is exactly what people who spend too much time pouring over Peruvian psych-folk and Punjab disco-jazz records need in their lives. The entire purpose of pop music is to provide release and escape from the real world, to create a fantasy world and allow listeners to live in it for three minutes at a time — and there is nobody doing that better than Katy Perry.
Granted, a lot of the fantasies to be fulfilled are of the binge-drinking-and-Skinemax-shenanigans variety, but, you know, they're fantasies. They shouldn't be bound by Victorian principles like taste and class. There are no pleas for world peace or jams about our nation's inability to have a reasonable adult conversation about our national debt and the need to raise revenues, and thank God for that. After a long summer of scraping our collective head on the debt ceiling, watching the entire world riot from the sidelines while Nancy Grace pops veins in her head over some tabloid bullshit, do we really need our music to remind us how fucked-up everything is? Probably not.
Even the most vehement activists and ardent intellectuals have dreams about love and fun and, you know, not being completely fucking freaked out that world is ripping apart at the seams. Yep, binge drinking and Skinemax shenanigans are just what the doctor ordered to drown out all the screaming heads on cable news, knuckle-dragging ideologues in our Facebook feed and all the other overserious bullshit that we get bombarded with on the daily. And Katy Perry knows this. Hell, she's made a career of distilling that need into three-minute nuggets of pure pop bliss. Guilt-free, irony-free, pure-pop bliss. And that's no lie.
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
