Katy Perry’s new album is wonderful. A masterpiece. Right up my street. As someone who breaks down and clubs his head like an ape when a musician attempts to sing strings of notes rather than monotonous groans; as someone who prefers breathy grunting sounds to anything more difficult to wrap my head around (like words), I am just so grateful to Katy Perry for staying committed to not attempting to challenge me. Her thumpingly dull tracks actually help me to feel like I’m reconnecting with my ancestors, who lived in the lovely simple era I pine for where slapping your fist rhythmically against your chin and grunting passed for music. Bliss!
Oh, how I so very wanted to get on with Mrs Perry. When she was first pitched to me as a guitar-strumming young indie starlet who appeared in the tiny ‘Watch Out For’ columns in the NME on the back of her own apparently credible music rather than her reputation, I really did try to give her a shot. After the first few dire singles, I still held out hope that she would repay lovers of clever pop for giving her the benefit of the doubt by trying to at least refine and tweak her sound until, having matured a little, she would blossom like a less abrasive and abhorrent Kate Nash into a nice, healthy, guilty pleasure.
It was when that dream failed to materialize and Perry diluted her sound to a gazpacho-thin consistency on her first album that I realized what an utter, utter fool I’d been for not trusting my vitriolic instincts from the off. Katy simply cashed in with a string of tracks so unrelentingly crap that even the hilarity of the claims I’d read in promotional interviews that her debut would feature “lots of storytelling” and the showing off of “many different sides” very soon turned sour. Something bloated and ugly had staggered onto the airwaves and collapsed there and it was clear that it wasn’t going to be shifted for some time.
So why, when Katy Perry’s second single Teenage Dream can be described by comparison as an upgrade from literally abhorrent to simply dull, do I find myself hating it even more? Because, quite simply, it’s just so dull. So painfully, car-crashingly boring that I feel my desire to be alive drain out of me every time the obligatory airings of ‘Firework’ are trundled out during nights out. The tracks are, I can honestly say, the most insipid and poorly thought-out cuts I think I’ve ever heard flop out of the radio in all my years on this earth – even the fundamentals like lyrics have been largely cast aside in the wake of Mrs Perry’s apparent realization that the sound of her breathy moaning alone is enough. Amelodic, stabbing little cries appear to be basis for her entire approach now, as illustrated on ‘Teenage Dream’ (YOU! MAKE! ME! FEEL LIKE I’M LIVING…) to ‘E.T.’ (KISS! ME! KI-KI-KISS ME!) – it’s like Einsturzende Neubaten’s drone-rock classic Kollaps as reconceptualised by a jaded android struggling with a nasty bout of PTSS. Even Ke$ha has the decency to peddle similarly ropey material with a tongue firmly wedged in the cheek – and there’s something, I feel, to appreciate in that. Katy’s flat non-music doesn’t even come packaged with that pre-warning, and it’s a damn sight more traumatizing for it.