Review: Katy Perry – Teenage Dream

Katy Perry works wonderfully in theory, but not on Teenage Dream. There is a place in the pop landscape for someone like her: a party girl who is not trashy as Ke$ha; a character of massive set pieces without Lady Gaga’s pretensions (and I mean that as a compliment to Gaga); a pop star with singles as catchy as Rihanna’s without the dark undercurrents and in their way as sweet as Taylor Swift without any of the innocence. Katy Perry takes pride in being a campy, mega-sized cartoon of a woman, neon colored and direct come-ons disguised as not even double entendres. More like half entendres.

She can do this successfully; her summer jam “California Gurls” is a blast largely on sheer catchiness and simplicity. Who can’t get behind feeling sexy in the summertime? Who can’t get behind Snoop Dogg, now fully consumed by his kind stoner entertainer phase? And don’t get me started on the video. The song’s a hit because it has no other place than the pop charts.

But then we get to the album, and the campy fun time aesthetic simply cannot hold for a 45-minute album. By the second track, “Last Friday Night (TGIF),” everything feels awfully thin. The “partied too hard, woke up in big trouble, can’t remember a thing” thing feels like such a cliche, and indeed, the song is filled with cliches: table dancing, waking up with a stranger, “breaking the law” (but doesn’t specify which), streaking. It feels less like a celebration of debauchery than a list of things someone imagined a wild night might be.

This is probably the biggest problem with Perry’s conceit: her songs reach for such cartoonish strokes, like one of those DTV American Pie movies, that human emotion – even a real feeling of having fun – feels emulated. This is never clearer than on the ballads, of which there are way more than I would expect from someone who does videos featuring Snoop Dogg, Candyland, and whipped cream-shooting bras. But then we get “Firework,” the second auto-tuned to hell, fireworks-as-a-metaphor song this summer (the other was Drake’s). It’s meant to be inspirational, with a chorus that goes “make ‘em go OH OH OH as you shoot from the sky-y-y” (note: somehow “OH OH OH” rhymes with “sky-y-y” and “down-own-own” in the context of this song), but it feels so trite and lightweight. Perry puts what she can into it vocally, but she’s not a great singer and there’s not much to be done with lyrics about plastic bags blowing in the wind, feeling “paper-thin like a house of cards,” and other hits from an inexhaustible cliche bag.

On the other end of the tonal spectrum, a song called “Peacock” (Yes. Oh yes! This should be good!) is bookended by “Firework” and “Circle the Drain,” a ballad about not putting up with a lover’s drug addiction. It’s the kind of tonal shift that occurs all over the album, undercutting the seriousness of its less campy moments and grating up against the fluffy stuff that should be the heart of this thing. “Peacock” is emblematic of a lot of the problems with Katy Perry’s music. It tries to be sexy and provocative, but its shock value comes from how dumb and obvious it gets. The end result is a novelty that is successfully “so bad it’s good,” but unsuccessful at being as sexy as (I think) Katy Perry wants to be. It sounds desperate for attention, which is a reaction she’s gotten ever since “I Kissed a Girl.” Removing all subtlety is not necessarily a bad idea, but it needs stronger hooks than “I wanna see your peacock, cock/your peacock, cock” behind it.

On the bright side, individual moments work well out of context. The second single, and titular track, is sweet if plasticine – it’s at least a lazily convincing pop song. Later in the tracklist, “Hummingbird Heartbeat” makes for another pop gem. It’s a great way to close the album, or it would be, if it wasn’t followed by another stupid fucking “uplifting” ballad.

PS Apparently Russell Brand’s lovin’ is “extra terrestrial.” Let that mental sensation sink in and download the songs I had good things to say about.

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Jere is not from Chicago. Nor is he from Parts Unknown. But he sure loves to hear things. Follow him on Twitter!

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