Started out, hey cutie where're you from?

[koganbot]

Jukebox tracks coming too fast and furious. Katy Perry's "Waking Up In Vegas" is already done and reviewed, while I've only listened twice and haven't even gotten to the point of finding out if it's my hoped-for elaboration on Betty Hutton in The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek and Carrie Underwood in "Last Name." But the Jukebox blurbs reminded me that I've long since abandoned my original revulsion towards Katy. Haven't necessarily changed my opinion of her music: which I knew right off on first listen - or third, anyway - was good, was catchy but would be more powerful if less blaring and I still don't know if the harshness of her voice is going to end up as a plus or minus. "I kissed a girl and I liked it... I hope my boyfriend don't mind it" was a great, complicated premise for a song (though I needed the poptimists discussion by girlboymusic et al. to help me recognize this). In the Jukebox, Doug Robertson calls Katy's backstory "flimsy," damned if I know why, since the backstory explains why for her and a hunk of her audience there's actually something at risk: Her singing was just as raw and her impulses just as rebellious back when she was an evangelical Christian girl calling on God's help amidst her sin, temptation, and terror. This ramps up the meaning of "I kissed a girl and I liked it." Hope my God don't mind it! And she wouldn't have been singing "I know my faith won't fail" - as she did back in her CCM days - unless there was the possibility that faith could fail.

"I kissed a girl and I liked it... I hope my boyfriend don't mind it" is self-congratulation and fear, the congratulation trying to beat down the fear. "I kissed a girl and I liked it" is thrown at us like a challenge, "I hope my boyfriend don't mind it" is offhand - the casualness trying to make a point: maybe she doesn't have to care. But without that line there's no dilemma, no song.

As for the new single, it hasn't hit me yet, which is a sign that likely it won't, and obviously I haven't made my way to the album, one year on. But the Jukebox discussion makes me think that in "Vegas" the chutzpah-versus-fear conundrum is still needling her. Sometimes Jukebox just pisses me off (like in the reviews of "Cowgirls Don't Cry," where the Jukeboxers came off as a bunch of frightened youngsters trying to convince themselves that they were smarter than a song that was smarter than they were), but when it's working well the different voices give you different angles, a cubist collage. On this one I like how Alfred Soto and Jonathan Bradley play off each other. Alfred's saying, "A Taylor Swift or Ashlee Simpson might wring some real pathos or humor from this worn scenario, but with Perry at the mic, 'That's what you get for waking up in Vegas' isn't the comedown from a midsummer night's dream, but the teasing of a shrew." While Jonathan says, "But if Vegas is a real tough world, Perry is a real tough girl, and her hook soars with an inspired abandon. 'Shut up and put your money where your mouth is,' is ostensibly directed at her man, but she delivers it like a self-motivational pep-talk, willing herself to make one last effort to salvage something from the mess in which she's landed herself." For me, Jonathan wins the argument, because I've already got every Taylor and Ashlee record (and every demo and leak and remix I could scrape up, and the same from Aly & AJ) and anyday can comfortably hear them acknowledge the fear and vulnerability that they're trying to brave out. Meanwhile, Katy gets to be Katy, burying the fear in the lyrics while sticking her mouth in our face.

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I think, having heard the entire album, that I simply can't rid myself of the impression that Katy is trolling those with ungodly liberal sensibilities. But maybe this is a choice, you're taking her on better faith than I would, and I assign her more knowing subtlety than you would. ^^;

[koganbot]

Strange, I get the impression that conservatives think she's trolling them. My assumption (but without having heard a lot or concentrated on what I'd heard) is that she's acting out like crazy while hardly having a firm position of her own. And obviously one purpose of the act is to make money, but it's an act to plays to people (including me, apparently).

[koganbot]

an act THAT plays to people, that is.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm sure it cuts both ways. Assuming Katy's consciousness-raising process heads in my direction, though, I just want her to come back once she's past the stage of thinking she's ooh-la-la outré for kissing a girl, or has learnt to spell "systemic homophobia". I just don't have patience for it, yanno? :P And yes, on one level the fact that I react to her persona as to a real person (as per Lily Allen) is interesting, as is the fact that she's got ten variations on this infuriating theme on her album so there is definitely some meta-thought gone into it somewhere. But bottom line is I would go down the pub with Lily as the Brits say but would not do the same with Katy.

[(Anonymous)]

This is as good a place and time as any to apologize for not having said at the time that I was seriously called up short by your comment on "Cowgirls Don't Cry." I'd like to blame the video director for my lack of subtlety; I usually watch the video repeatedly before writing my blurb about a song, and that smile on Reba's face in the last shot made me forget all about the ambiguity of the first verse. --Martin K.

[koganbot]

Hey Martin! Welcome to my lj!

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I worry about "frightened youngster" tone, which is maybe another way of saying worrying about the zing first and the song second, but for the most part I've been fair. If anything, my dismissive numerical scores don't quite do justice to what I've actually written, e.g. a retarded The-Dream (and I meant that more literally than it probably came across, which might make me cringe more at having written it at all) is almost by definition more interesting than a 3. It's a 6 song, I think.

But when I'm out of my element (or just not trying hard enough) I can still write things that feel arbitrary and, worse, arbitrarily mean. In part it's the format (gunning for aphorisms frequently overlaps with gunning for zingers) but in part it's also just laziness. It's actually quite hard to write a good review that's dead-on in so little space, but it's a nice challenge and I tend to like the results in general. (I've also forgotten what it was like not to have the Jukebox in my life, just in terms of what I read every day. I wouldn't have ever heard, or heard of, probably 70% of these songs otherwise.)

[koganbot]

Well, there are plenty ways to be frightened as a critic - I'm someone who's often terrified of the reader - but what was on my mind with the Brooks & Dunn reviews was "Here's a way of living and a sensibility that isn't ours, so let's assume it has no value."* This is more likely to come from a young person's fear because young people's sensibilities and ways of living are still under construction, therefore countersensibilities are more of a threat.

I suppose if at some point it looks as if my sensibility is going six feet under, then I'll adopt the fear as an old person and become a curmudgeon.

*I don't mean one shouldn't judge other sensibilities, but you already know that.