Less Sassy, more Seventeen..?
Is it just me, or has Katy Perry jumped the shark?
Her two big hits from her "official" first album, One of the Boys -- "I Kissed a Girl" and "Hot n Cold" -- were fun, snappy, snarky dance-pop numbers; the singles from her latest album, Teenage Dream -- the title track and "California Gurls" -- are dull, rote, over-sexualized affairs that have her sounding like every other pop/R&B diva on a "today's hits" radio station.
I never thought that I would describe another song of the performer of "I Kissed a Girl" as "over-sexualized," but there you are; her new singles replace the tongue-in-cheek sass of the aforementioned numbers with a dreary earnestness, particularly "Teenage Dream." The effect of the multiple repetition of the phrase "skintight jeans" on "Teenage Dream" -- aside from driving this listener up the wall -- is to convey an impression of Perry's over-weening narcissism: this would-be adolescent doesn't dream so much of another person as of a more perfect union with herself.
As for "California Gurls," what can you say about the feminist cachet that Snoop Dogg will give a song? (And that stupid refrain -- "Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top" -- has me vaguely remembering a 1970s exploitation flick: 'Gator Bait?) Perry should've just covered The Knack's "Good Girls Don't" and called it good.
Maybe she's saving all of her sass and snark for her fiancé, Russell Brand; I sure as hell don't hear it in the first two singles off her new album. Her music's lost what made it unique and fun to listen to; too bad.
Her two big hits from her "official" first album, One of the Boys -- "I Kissed a Girl" and "Hot n Cold" -- were fun, snappy, snarky dance-pop numbers; the singles from her latest album, Teenage Dream -- the title track and "California Gurls" -- are dull, rote, over-sexualized affairs that have her sounding like every other pop/R&B diva on a "today's hits" radio station.
I never thought that I would describe another song of the performer of "I Kissed a Girl" as "over-sexualized," but there you are; her new singles replace the tongue-in-cheek sass of the aforementioned numbers with a dreary earnestness, particularly "Teenage Dream." The effect of the multiple repetition of the phrase "skintight jeans" on "Teenage Dream" -- aside from driving this listener up the wall -- is to convey an impression of Perry's over-weening narcissism: this would-be adolescent doesn't dream so much of another person as of a more perfect union with herself.
As for "California Gurls," what can you say about the feminist cachet that Snoop Dogg will give a song? (And that stupid refrain -- "Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top" -- has me vaguely remembering a 1970s exploitation flick: 'Gator Bait?) Perry should've just covered The Knack's "Good Girls Don't" and called it good.
Maybe she's saving all of her sass and snark for her fiancé, Russell Brand; I sure as hell don't hear it in the first two singles off her new album. Her music's lost what made it unique and fun to listen to; too bad.