Katy Perry Teenage Dream

muumuse.com Review:

Katy Perry is probably the only pop star I could ever feel compelled to deem a “guilty pleasure.”

In my opinion, there are two types of catchy in the world: The one with pop hooks so well-crafted you’ll want them replaying in your head until the end of time (“Umbrella,” “Just Dance”), and then there’s the obvious, derivative kind of catchy that cause you to itch and burn like an STD.

Perry’s productions are often in the latter category. In fact, they sort of like the music equivalent of herpes: Wildly contagious, annoying, and ultimately likely to lead to an intense awkwardness when revealing your condition to lovers and friends.

Take for instance one of the summer’s biggest singles, “California Gurls.” The track is little more than a direct rip of BFFKe$ha‘s superior drunk-pop anthem, “Tik Tok,” yet it’s managed to thrive nonetheless.

It isn’t always the songs–usually the product of a suite of Swedish pop masterminds–that cause such pangs of guilt and anguish, but rather Perry herself, whose doe-eyed, potty-mouthed persona leaves much to be desired.

Perry’s shtick is obnoxious and, at times, hypocritical. Bolstered by a devoutly religious upbringing (and short-lived run as a Christian rock artist), she has the gall to criticize her fellow pop stars for being blasphemous sluts while simultaneously shooting whipped cream out of her tits and posing topless for Rolling Stone and Esquire.

For me, she’s a hard one to like–let alone to outwardly enjoy in public.

But good pop is good pop, and every now and then, Katy Perry delivers good pop.

This week sees the release of Teenage Dream, Katy Perry’s follow-up to her massively successful 2008 debut, One of The Boys. The album, like the one before, is a veritable “who’s who” of the top pop producers in the game, including Max Martin, Tricky Stewart, Greg Wells, Benny Blanco, Dr. Luke, and Stargate.

The album begins with its title track, which also happens best song of the bunch in terms of songcraft. “Teenage Dream” is not only a masterfully crafted pop tune with a smart hook, but a rare moment of tenderness for the otherwise bratty bombshell: “You think I’m pretty without any makeup on / You think I’m funny when I tell the punchline wrong,” Perry whispers on top of the song’s setting sun guitar strums.

Sure, the lyrics offer a cornucopia of only the most stereotypical lovesick vagueries, but “Teenage Dream” is still an amazing and evocative pop song. At the risk of massacring my reputation (what reputation?), it simply must be said: Listening to this song just makes you want to feel that way about someone.

“Last Friday (T.G.I.F.),” in contrast, feels entirely inauthentic. Much as with Perry’s summer smash, the song is almost a direct lift of everything you’ve already heard off of Ke$ha’s debut released earlier this year, Animal. Say what you will about Ke$ha’s aesthetic (or what she probably smells like), but any and all talk of drunken hook-ups and glitter on the floor are strictly within her domain at the moment. Any other attempt to emulate her drunk-pop revelry? Well, it just comes off sounding cheap.

The slap-happy silliness is pervasive throughout Perry’s record, including the stomping ode to the penis, “Peacock.” Scribed by one of the naughtiest names in popular songwriting at the moment, Ester Dean (“Rude Boy”; “Drop It Low”), “Peacock” is a most infectious, cheer-tastic celebration of the male member hidden behind the thinnest of veils: “Are you brave enough to let me see your peacock? / Don’t be a chicken boy, stop acting like a beeotch.” It’s the most fun offered on the record, even if the schtick wears stale after a few days.

It’s not all cotton candy and cocks, though. In interviews leading up to the release of Teenage Dream, Perry expressed her desire to fill the void of an Alanis Morrissette-like figure in today’s pop market on her next release.

“Circle the Drain” is the result of such desire, one of the album’s most impressive numbers. The song contains the best, most biting lines of the entire record: “Wanna be your lover, not your fucking mother,” Perry explodes with a vitriolic, shaking-with-anger kind of enunciation while exorcising her ex-flame’s demons.

“E.T.” and “Who Am I Living For?” follow along a similarly angst-ridden path. Still, Perry’s self-searching offerings are a bit too modern/major production (excessive instrumentation; squeaky-clean studio sounds) to be dubbed worthy of a Morrissette comparison–even if they dare to bare their teeth more than your standard Kelly Clarkson vengeance-seeking smash.

At best, Teenage Dream is a top heavy collection of party pop anthems and occasionally good, often schmaltzy slow numbers. Perhaps if she left the glitter act to Ke$ha and nixed the soggy ballads clogging up the second half of this record, Perry might have stood to offer something as tasty as her album’s cotton-candy scent. (No, really…the albumsmells.)

Aside from the occasional moment of sugary sweet brilliance however (“Teenage Dream”; “Firework”), the party balloons deflate rather quickly, resulting in a record that feels about as fluffy as the pink cotton candy swirled around Perry’s naughty bits on the cover.

Puntuacion:3/5

Slankmagazine.com Review:

Inciting a minor shit storm with her 80-character review of Lady Gaga's "Alejandro" video in June, Katy Perry tweeted: "Using blasphemy as entertainment is as cheap as a comedian telling a fart joke." Having declared flatulence beneath her, Ms. Perry's instead churns out maladjusted sleaze. On her latest release, she finds humor in drunken make-out sessions and single-entendre sex talk, finds that being a celebrity isn't always a walk in the Candyland porno park, and through it all, finds maybe two or three songs to justify her album's existence. From Ke$ha's Animal to Christina's Bionic, pop music in 2010 already looks like a trainwreck of over-produced bad-girl debauchery, and Teenage Dream only adds to the pileup. That anyone managed to make a pop album worse than Animal this year is both perversely impressive and hard to believe, but Ms. Perry has found a way to lower the bar.

At that, it's hard to imagine a song crasser or more aggravating than "Peacock." Every review of Teenage Dream will mention this track, and that's because it's potentially historic in its badness, to the point that, once you've heard it, you too will have to describe it to other people just to convince yourself that it really exists. The short of it is that Perry wants to see some guy's peacock, and by peacock, she, of course, means penis; she says the word "cock" somewhere around 100 times, and the only thing she successfully rhymes it with is "cock" (some of the misses include "biatch," "payoff," and "shoot it off"). It's one of those viscerally embarrassing musical moments where you start to feel ashamed of yourself just for witnessing it, like Fergie rapping on "My Humps," or that YouTube video where Fergie pees herself on stage, or Fergie misspelling "tasty" ("T to the A to the S-T-E-Y") in "Fergalicious."

And Teenage Dream doesn't come off much better when discussed in terms of its highlights. "California Gurls" became a summer anthem by force of will: As a frothy club track about beaches and babes with a high-budget video and a big-name guest spot, the song's inevitable rise to the top of the charts was pretty well bought and paid for. But the chorus lacks a strong hook, the verses lack melodies, and Perry's vocals aren't any closer to on-key than they've ever been. Second single "Teenage Dream" is much better. It realizes the Cardigans-meets-Madonna sound that Perry talked up in pre-release interviews, and, as a genuinely enjoyable track in the company of so many unmitigated disasters, suggests that the intermittently pious Perry may have earned herself a small miracle by choosing God over Gaga.

"Firework" will probably be a single at some point too, on the grounds that it's not an actively painful listen. Sure, the would-be inspirational lyrics ("Baby you're a firework/Come on show them what you're worth") are nonsensical, and the vocal lines, which sound like they were written for someone like Leona Lewis, are well beyond Perry's capabilities, but the chorus gains some momentum and the song would work well enough in a club setting that you could forgive its otherwise glaring weaknesses. And with that, we have concluded our brief tour of the listenable songs on this album.

The remainder of Teenage Dream is a raunchy pop nightmare, with A-list producers lining up to churn out some of the worst work of their careers. Over the last decade, DJ Luke's production has gone from brilliant ("Since U Been Gone") to serviceable (Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend") to nearly unlistenable (every Ke$ha song you know). The god-awful "Tik Tok" signaled that his metamorphosis into an artless industry hack was nearly complete, and onTeenage Dream he bursts out of his cocoon like a horrifying electro-pop Mothra. "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" is a lifeless roller-rink jam with a "T! G! I! F!" shout-along that will no doubt provide the soundtrack to any number of trashy sorority parties this semester, and on the inscrutable "E.T." Perry compares her lover (favorably?) to a space alien and Dr. Luke nabs the backing track from t.A.T.u.'s "All the Things She Said," presumably as a tribute to his forbears in the field of exploitative dance-floor schlock.

Perry's ironic persona—all gum-smacking, eye-rolling sarcasm—signals that those tracks are, if nothing else, shallow by design; it's the album's second half, when Perry dons her serious artist face, that Teenage Dream transcends its own middling crappiness and becomes truly, remarkably shitty. "Circle the Drain" finds Perry telling off a self-destructive ex, but she's almost less sympathetic than the pill-popping object of her scorn. Her put-downs are alternately pedantic ("Wanna be your lover, not your fucking mother") and hypocritical (she's offended that he takes drugs before foreplay, but wasn't she the one blacking out and hooking up "Last Friday Night"?). Tricky Stewart's "Who Am I Living For?" is a one-note wallow in self-pity, weighed down by clichéd lyrics, a leaden beat, and a tone-deaf vocal turn from Perry.

That track is intended as a stark confessional, but if Perry is indeed baring it all, it's only because she gets off on you watching. Her career has been one voyeuristic stunt after another, and at this point, it's hard to read self-exposure as anything but another surface—just like the "California Gurls" video, where she sheds her cutesy Zooey Deschanel dresses to reveal a spray-on tan and a pair of synthetic foam-spouting tits.

Puntuacion:1.5/5

sunsonbleeker review:

I know what you’re probably thinking – “WTF? Is Sam seriously reviewing a Katy Perry album?!”Yes, it’s true.  While my iPod is chock full of all manner of heavy metal, for that is my musical bread and butter, I like to dabble in other genres from time to time.  It helps to keep things from becoming too staid or boring, and it keeps me open-minded as a listener.  And this dabbling certainly does not preclude mainstream pop music.  I’ll even let you in on a little secret – I used to like the Spice Girls.  I’m not proud of that, but it’s true.  But the genre of mainstream pop music, while plenty full of trite, insincere music designed solely to separate impressionable young kids from their money, does indeed maintain some substance of worth.

Sadly, that worth is rarely ever found on the album level.  Pop is based around huge hit singles that can be snatched up individually on iTunes and played on every Top 40 radio station in the country.  It’s usually pretty easy to immediately identify which songs are the hits and which ones are the dime-a-dozen subpar filler, and with some exceptions that remains the case on Katy Perry’s third album, Teenage Dream.

The album starts off strongly with the hit “Teenage Dream” – a track that pulls off the difficult feat of being an unpretentious look back at a hot and heavy adolescent romance.  But any goodwill and momentum that is built up with the first song is just as quickly destroyed with the second one.  “Last Friday Night [T.G.I.F.]” is exactly the opposite.  It’s the definition of contrived, bland bubblegum pop with Perry singing “I smell like a mini-bar/DJ’s passed out in the yard/Barbies on the barbecue/This a hickey or a bruise?”

It’s this division that toes the line between sweet believability and downright trashiness that defines much of this record and makes it very difficult to reconcile as a coherent piece.  Case in point: She extols the virtues of getting black-out drunk on one song and then decries the fact that her ex-boyfriend is addicted to pills (“Circle The Drain”) on another.  And then you have the ultimate skanky anthem “Peacock,” where Perry musters up all of her elegance to chant “I wanna see your peacock, -cock, -cock/Your peacock, -cock.”  That song also includes this classy refrain: “Oh my God, no exaggeration/Boy, all this time was worth the waiting/I just shed a tear/I am so unprepared/You got the finest architecture/End of the rainbow-looking treasure.”  I’m sure there is some way to present that as a playfully sexy romp, but this is not that way.

All of that being said, I’m not suggesting that all pop should be focused on deep, mature matters.  Perry’s included her fair share of that here on tracks like “Pearl” and “Who Am I Living For?,” the latter of which references the story of Esther.  Perhaps more than anything, pop is about catchy hooks and having fun.  I’m much more open to enjoying the sugary-sweet sassiness of an anthem like “California Gurls” because it sounds effortlessly playful whereas some of these other songs sound like Perry is trying too hard to come off as the edgy party girl.

And while the content and delivery of the subject matter makes for an up and down listening experience, the beats are more or less plain and expected.  Like I said, the hits are easy to pick out, but the executive producers, Dr. Luke and Max Martin, seem to be aiming for safe, lowest common denominator stuff.  The songs are easy to listen to but hard to remember, and too often Perry’s voice is over-processed.  She’s got decent enough pipes, and I’d be interested to hear them in their natural state more often.

The bottom line is that Teenage Dream is a perfectly acceptable bunch of pop songs, but it lacks the experimentation or courage to try anything new.  Perry makes some admirable strides towards being more than just a pretty face with a naughty mouth, but that’s still her comfort zone and she goes to that well often.  I wouldn’t exactly call this bubblegum pop, but it’s kinda hard not to when the packaging literally smells like cotton candy and Smarties.

Puntuacion: 2.5/5