There’s much to be said about a young woman whose artistic existence is based on pop songs with sugary shake-it-til-you-break-it beats that strive to have a much deeper message such as kissing girls and enjoying it or dreaming like teenagers whatever that means. Katy Perry has not only mastered the art of the top 40 pop song, she owns the persona of a pop artist. Ms. Perry has branded herself, intentionally or unintentionally, the queen of bedazzled fashionz. With a “z” not an “s” because things that can be replicated at, or were replicated from, the board game Candyland do not fall into the category of fashion.
Honestly, what is happening here? Why is perfectly good whipped cream being WASTED?!
What can I credit Katy for? Well, she owns the crap out of wearing it loud and proud and not apologizing for it and I guess I can appreciate that. What she should be apologizing for is her consistent inability to sing well in a live arena. Her performance on SNL was roughly three minutes of my life that I can’t get back. Why did you keep watching, you ask? Because just as you don’t look away when you see vagrants fighting in the park, when someone is shattering the last shred of any sort of respect you had for them on national television, you don’t change the channel to Iron Chef, you keep watching.
Her music is essentially the mexican hot dog of many folks’ mental musical dictionary- fun to partake of in groups, but sad and borderline disturbing to enjoy alone. Perry’s music is laced with the kind of audial crack that forces your hand in a poltergeist-type manner to turn your car radio up, because that is the only place you can listen to her music without judgment, and start to let your body involuntarily jerk to the beat because that’s the only way you can accept that you do in fact, enjoy dancing to her music.
Of all of the songs that have been irresponsibly unleashed onto the airwaves, I find California Girls the single most emotionally polarizing song to have pummeled the delicate structure of my ear canal. I hate it yet, here I am shimmying my shoulders and doing that side to side head dance in which your neck stays stationary. You’ve done it, so don’t scoff at my confession as if you haven’t been caught doing the same thing at a stoplight during your afternoon commute.
Why does it grate my nerves so much to hear Katy singing about drinking gin and juice on the beach, getting your stilettos sandy, and wearing jorts disguised as underroos? I’m not quite sure. It’s hard to be irritated at a song that is so full of bubble that it bursts with confidence at every chorus: California girls are undeniable. They’re fine. They’re fresh. They’re fierce. They’ve got it on fucking lock. But. Katy isn’t talking about all California girls. She’s talking about the ones who live south of the 661 area code and west of the San Andreas fault. Have you been to a beach north of San Luis Obispo? The bottle bleach blonde girl per capita drops significantly north of Santa Barbara. So does beach partying and driving Jeeps with the top down which is almost exclusively a thing to do in Southern California anyway. It’s fucking cold in Northern California, so people wear more clothes out of necessity. The beaches up there make for more of a “127 Hours” type experience than say, “Gidget”. Sure, folks up there are running on the beach….but not because they’re running towards someone who’s just arrive to the party with a cooler of Boone’s Farm.
Like any good pop song, legitimization comes in the form of a hip hop legend looking to mix it up with what he calls good business but what I see as somewhat of a mid-life crisis. Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr. (or Snoop Dogg as you peasants refer to him), your kids could go to college on the royalties from this song, but how are we supposed to reconcile you singing about tankinis and martinis? It can’t be done! To his credit though, I don’t think Snoop has ever really taken himself seriously enough to not jazz hands it up with the likes of someone like Perry.
Not to say that Northern California isn’t fun-they have wine country! More importantly in wine country there are not one but two Thomas Keller restaurants. But Northern California isn’t really represented in the song and the inhabitants would sooner burn down Cal Berkeley than lay claim to the bimbos Perry has immortalized in the mother of all summer anthems.
Yet.
I can’t help but sing. And dance. Not just dancing, but actually taking my hands off of the steering wheel to do the Carlton dance, risking the lives of drivers around me by diverting their attention from traffic and into my car. When no one is looking, that song is my JAM. I don’t just know the lyrics, I know them and can even fumble my way through the Snoop bits. And should someone catch me, I quickly change the channel to NPR and pretend I’m understanding anything Terry Gross is saying.
