Truly we are living in the age of alco-Pop. It tastes sweet and brings on a buzz, but is really a corporate conspiracy to poison our popkids’ minds while simulaneously relieving them of their much coveted tweeny-teenager disposable dollars and cents.
In her way, Katy Perry perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the age. The culture has been infantilised. Radio, TV, mainstream cinema and much of the net hijacked by greasy old spivs touting product designed to second and third guess the 12-18 market, no shot too cheap, no gimmick too crass. Artists are mouthy but apolitical, pornographic but oddly asexual. GaGa’s ‘Telephone’ video represented just one low point. Perry’s ‘I Kissed A Girl’ was another: a premeditated attempt at generating Sapphic fizzle welded to a bog standard tune. And don’t get us started on ‘Ur So Gay’, a song so spiritually radioactive it turned the ears red.
Perry is that peculiarly American phenomenon: a Christian gospel prodigy who has made her name and fame peddling asinine raunch. Forget Norweigian death metallers, occult blues figures or sundry ‘transgressive’ twats – Teenage Dream is the real devil’s music. “You and I will be young forever,” she sings on the title track, sounding like some sort of psychic drug dealer.
One could give Perry the benefit of the doubt and consider her merely another lithe body for the meat grinder, or maybe some genetically engineered American Idol researcher’s version of Lily Allen. But real point worth is that Teenage Dream could have been written by Wall Street executives, played by nanobots and sung by an autotune android and it wouldn’t have sounded any different. It’s full of tunes that attempt to channel the soda-fountain fuzzy-sweatered spirit of classic teen pop through Pink-ish production values but every note sounds vetted, sterilised, market tested and demographically proofed. Pop was always contrived. Rarely has it sounded this cynical.
Worse, it’s corny. ‘California Gurls’, with its toe-curling Snoop cameo, is the kind of froth an adolescent Cyndi Lauper would’ve rejected as insubstantial. ‘ET’ is TATU revisited. There’s a rewrite of Toni Basil’s ‘Mickey’ entitled ‘Peacock’ (“I wanna see your peacock-cock-cock-cock”) which wants to be Peaches but sounds to me like a bingo-winged hen party harridan after one too many vodkas.
The best thing here is ‘Firework’, which hitches Alan Warner’s opening images from The Man Who Walks to Kerouac’s famous On The Road elegy to The Wild Ones... Aw, just kidding. It’s bilge too.
Call me an old curmudgeon. Tell me Katy Perry is ill-deserving of such ire. Maybe you’re right. But I really don’t want to hear this record ever again.