Perry! Perry! Katy Perry!

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sus

Moderator
When it’s on it’s on: Teenage Dream has the endless promise of summer vacation. It lives in suspended animation, always excited for the weekend, never clocking into work. Katy Perry’s second album is ostentatious, off-color, fearlessly optimistic even when the music isn’t great. It is forever young, but—as teenagers often do—still loudly announces its age. And it was a smash: Its five No. 1 hits tied a record set by Michael Jackson’s 1987 album Bad. Half of the tracklist went Top 10. Teenage Dream was the last gasp for guitar-powered bubblegum; the following year, Adele’s 21 would shatter sales records and kick off a moody new era in pop. To look back on it now is to realize just how fast it all changed.
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Who's in?
 
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Moderator
If Perry seems like she’s really trying, it’s because she was an unlikely success. She grew up in Santa Barbara, California, the middle child of Pentecostal preachers who sent her to private religious schools. She dropped out after freshman year and released her first music, as Katy Hudson, on a small Nashville Christian label. Her eventual pivot to Katy Perry, flirtatious and foul-mouthed pop star, made for a contrast as bold as her outfits, and she had to try the whole time: years in major-label purgatory, entering and exiting contracts with Def Jam and then Columbia with no album, no single, nothing except a soundtrack cut for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
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Here's that track:



You're such a poet
I wish I could be Wesley Willis
My words would flow like honey, sweet and laid on thick
You're so edgy
You don't even need a rhyming dictionary
I wipe my hands on your jeans, cause they are more distressed
So they say, you got O.C.D
And they claim you can barely read
But you say "Don't bother me with all of your reality"

Look at her: messy post-emo bangs, a Queen three-quarter sleeve on in black and pink. Does it get more Hot Topic?
 
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Moderator
At age 15, she heard "Killer Queen" by Queen, which inspired her to pursue a music career.[251] She cites the band's frontman, Freddie Mercury, as her biggest influence and expressed how the "combination of his sarcastic approach to writing lyrics and his 'I don't give a fuck' attitude" inspired her music.[252] She paid homage to the band by naming her third fragrance Killer Queen.[182] Perry described the Beach Boys and their album Pet Sounds as having a considerable influence on her music: "Pet Sounds is one of my favorite records and it influenced pretty much all of my songwriting. All of the melody choices that I make are because of Pet Sounds."... "Firework" was inspired by a passage in the book On the Road by Jack Kerouac in which the author compares people who are full of life to fireworks that shoot across the sky and make people watch in awe.
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And you can see all over her unreleased 2004 album how important Alanis Morissette is for her sound:

 
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Moderator
The singles that broke through for her are something else—unbelievable how big these hooks are



 
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Moderator
Anyone here have a good enough cultural memory to know what this shot's referencing?

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line b

Well-known member
Katy Perry was one of the last pop starts of her era. I don't know exactly what that era is or what the new on is either but I think this is correct.
 
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I think guitar-based bubblegum anthem is a decent description of the previous Top 40 regime, which went from maybe early 2000s (beginning of autotune, Black Eyed Peas, Scandinavian songwriters like Max Martin and Dr Luke).

Tom Ewing called this "I'm So Fucking Special" music, concerned with self-empowerment, liberation: Gaga, Perry, "you were born this way," Perry's "you're a firework," Pink's "raise your glass."

And James Murphy mocked the general mode: Everybody's singing the same song / It goes "tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight
 
hmg

hmg

Victory lap
TI - Live Your Life needs deepfakin' with Katy Perry instead of Rihanna. Missed a trick there, could have had a real hit.
 
sus

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Moderator
OK after listening through the album, I think "The One That Got Away," "Teenage Dream" are the album stand-outs.

"Peacock" is unbelievably bad—its hook is "Let me see your peacock-cock-cock-cock." The whole point of the song seems to be that saying "cock" on a major label record is funny.

"California Gurls" I could really care less about, Snoop's presence is never welcome IMO, he is one of the worst products of 90s/2000s music industry, and ruined an otherwise great Robyn song.

To be fair to Snoop, the only pop song a rap bridge hasn't managed to ruin is Jesse McCartney's "How Do You Sleep," because "How Do You Sleep" is the greatest pop song ever written, its chorus is undeniable, and even if Ludacris's verses are pure garbage, we still wanna hit repeat all day.

 
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Moderator
Look at him sitting in the backseat with his bitch, casually striding between cars. He's the driver, he's in control, but he's not gripping too tight—he can sit in the backseat, kick it, the show goes on, he's in total effortless control.
 
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Moderator
He sounds so dumb. Literally so dumb. I cannot think of anyone who sounds dumber, not even James Franco, not even in Pineapple Express.
 
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