I, 9 years old at the time when “California Gurls” came out, had an iTunes gift card, a much bigger deal back then than it is now, and there was a procedure in my household for downloading songs off iTunes that involved my parents looking up the lyrics to any song I wanted to buy to make sure they weren’t going to corrupt my innocence (which was already pretty much gone given my existing obsession with Lady Gaga). Somehow, “California Gurls” slipped through the cracks and my mom, miraculously, gave me the thumbs up. “She’s talking about the drink” she replied to my brother after he pointed out the first line of the second verse (“sex on the beach”). As soon as it was on my green iPod nano I set it up to max volume and jumped up and down on a mattress on the floor of my bedroom with the song on repeat. My mom had no idea that I knew what “sex on the beach” meant (assuming she wasn’t talking about the drink), but my dad knew me a little better than my mom did which was why “E.T.” was never allowed in the house or on the radio. Any time I got to hear it without my dad changing the station felt like catching a glimpse into another dimension (no pun intended), and hearing the Kanye West remix was the ultimate heist. But with how popular Katy Perry was at the time, that amounted to a lot of car rides soundtracked by classical radio. Perry’s journey to the pop icon she is now wasn't a smooth ride. She was 16 when she released her debut record in 2001 as Katy Hudson. It’s odd to think that her debut wasn’t a failure of a pop record. No, it was a failure of a Christian rock record. Yes, the woman who would release “I Kissed A Girl” 7 years later started her career writing and recording Christian music. While that may be a shock to the average fan, it was a massive disappointment to those who liked her unmarketed debut record, or that’s at least what the comment section of her song “Faith Won't Fail” on YouTube suggests. Commenter Tiffany Smith put it most elegantly: “I'm praying that she [finds] her way back to Jesus! If [you're] truly a fan of hers, make it a habit to pray for her.” As sad as it might have been to see Katy Hudson “[gain] the whole world but [lose her] own soul,” as another comment suggests, fortunately for the rest of us Katy Perry heard her true calling to radio pop. However, while the subjects of her songs became more scandalous and less serious, there’s no denying that it’s the same Katy we know and love that wrote the songs on that record. On her 2008 debut “One Of The Boys,” the same knack for melodramatic vocals and lavishly arranged pop rock, a similar youthful energy and ability to tackle well-established musical topics like Christianity in a creative way is all there. While her two sides couldn’t be more different, when you think about it it’s actually quite easy to imagine that “Hot N Cold” was written by the same person who wrote “Faith Won’t Fail.” However, the difference lies in the maturity she found as a 23 year old. Rather than going a more serious route with her songs, Perry took her new chance at fame as an opportunity to explore more adult-oriented topics that would sound inappropriate coming from a 16 year old. She treats themes of love, sex, heartbreak and relationships in a more free spirited, fun-forward type of way. As a result, the immaturity of “One of the Boys” feels more mature than the maturity of “Katy Hudson,” and with strong hooks, performances and personality, there’s a lot of pop rock prowess on that album, especially in smash hits like “Hot N Cold” and deep cuts like “Mannequin.” “Waking Up In Vegas” is still one of the best pop hits of the past 20 years (in my opinion, anyway), and overall “One Of The Boys” is an underrated record for sure. But while the roaring guitars and classic rock inspired songwriting certainly had their own charm, Perry didn’t feel like she was putting her best version of herself behind the microphone. “When I went on tour,” she said, “I felt I was missing some of the stuff that made people bounce up and down.” This lack of danceability led to Katy giving the pop mastermind songwriter and producer Dr. Luke a mixtape with songs by artists like ABBA and The Cardigans to show how she wanted her second record to sound, describing it as "more groove-drive” before they even started writing. No matter what your opinion of the record is, whatever they did in those studios worked with the general population. It’s the second album ever with five number-one singles (after Michael Jackson's “Bad” in 1987) and the third album in history to produce eight top five hits. All six singles ("California Gurls,” "Teenage Dream,” "Firework,” "E.T.,” "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” and "The One That Got Away"), plus two from the 2012 rerelease “The Complete Confection” (“Part of Me” and “Wide Awake”), have sold over two million sales in digital downloads in the US alone, setting a record for the most multi-platinum singles from one album in the digital age. It went 3x platinum in the US and hit #1 on the Billboard charts, as well as making at least the top 10 in several other countries. For a lot of us, Katy Perry, whether we liked the music or not, was a major part of the soundtrack of our childhoods. So many memories have been built around these songs that still somehow captivate so many of us one decade later. But what was it about “Teenage Dream” that struck such a chord that it’s still an important piece of pop culture? A lot of mainstream pop records are put out every year, a lot of them have one or two hit singles, maybe coming close to number one. But eight in the top 5? Five at number one? That’s not just something most artists could hope for, that’s a pipe dream. And that pipe dream might be the exact force that drove the meanings behind the songs on the album, because the appeal of it is stated right in the title: “Teenage Dream” is an authentic piece of escapism. In this headspace, Perry and her collaborators created an album that could appeal to everyone in a different way. It’s best explained through its penultimate track “Hummingbird Heartbeat.” The track opens with the straightforward line “you make me feel like I’m losing my virginity.” A lot of people look back on their teenage years not too fondly. They are filled with identity crises, raging hormones, emotional turmoil, bad breakups for romances that lasted for less time than the heartbreak itself and a lot of drama about what can be boiled down to practically nothing. But it’s also a time of firsts - your first kiss, your first time drinking, smoking, having sex, experimenting with who you are and what you want to be. But Katy Perry’s not a teenager. She has already experienced all of this, and she acknowledges that in this line: “You make me feel like I’m losing my virginity”. It may be easy to write this off as a shameless rip off of Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” but this line is the strongest statement of the sentiment of the entire record. When speaking on the title track, Perry said “when you’re growing up and you’re falling in love for the first time, it’s such [an] amazing feeling that sometimes you can’t recycle again later on in your life.” That’s true! You can only do something for the first time once, and that’s what Katy Perry captured in the life-affirming chorus of this song and on many others. It’s a euphoria found on the chic, driving pop-rock of “Hummingbird Heartbeat.” It’s an intensity like the mystical and climactic “E.T.” with its futuristic production. It’s a euphoric experience of coming to terms with who you are and believing in yourself like on “Firework,” a power ballad that set the stage for lesser pop power ballads for an entire decade. It’s the first heartbreak that comes in on “The One That Got Away,” a heartbreak that sounds straight out of a pink, lock-and-key journal of a middle school girl. According to Perry, she and her collaborators rewrote the chorus to the title track until it allowed you to “release, let go, and dance... and have that euphoric feeling of having teenage love all over again.” The romance presented in this song is exactly that, and its lyrical content allowed it to play on the radio and resonate equally with young children and adults. It’s a love song for young adults that isn’t too mature for kids to understand but it’s childish enough for anyone with a sense of humor to enjoy. Saying that it sounds like a teenager could have written it is meant as a compliment rather than an insult. The language is simple, straightforward, yet exactly how young love feels. Like on the cover, which features the scandalousness of a naked celebrity and the childishness of being surrounded by a cloud of cotton candy, she juxtaposes youth and adulthood on lines like “got a motel and built a fort out of sheets.” There’s the sexual aspect of it but also the act of building a fort out of bed sheets, showing how true love can bring out the happiest, most unapologetic sides of people. While playing with sexuality and innuendos, it’s innocent enough for elementary schoolers to sing along to and still acquire a whiff of its romance, to proudly declare “we'll be young forever.” It's a declaration that pours into almost every following track, starting with the song that shaped most Generation Z kids’ perception of what high school would be like: “Last Friday Night,” a song whose music video is half the reason I wanted to become a teenager in the first place. The image of dancing on table tops and taking too many shots was somehow so inviting to someone who couldn’t relate to a single aspect of the song, and with the iconic 8 minute video, in which Rebecca Black invites a headgeared "Kathy Beth Terry” to a party that eventually moves to the house of her parents, played by former teen stars Corey Feldman and Debby Gibson. There’s a love triangle between a hot football player and “Glee” star Kevin McHale, cameos from Darren Criss and 90s boy band Hanson, and Kenny G plays saxophone on the roof of the house. It makes about as much sense as it sounds like, but that doesn’t hinder its magic, in fact it’s a part of it. Dissecting a song and video like the instantly recognizable “California Gurls” reveals no deeper layers than what’s on the surface, no greater intellectual value than the shock of Katy Perry spraying whipped cream out of her breasts in candy land, which is part of why Snoop Dogg’s phoned in feature sounds more like an artistic choice than a lazy verse delivered for a quick paycheck.
Aside from its poetic closer, the closest the record comes to anything clever is “Peacock,” which is still possibly one of the most shockingly unclever euphemisms for showing your penis ever written. It makes Britney Spears’ “If U Seek Amy” sound like Joni Mitchell. Still, there’s something so tongue in cheek about it that artistically just makes sense, and the rebellious act of pretending you didn’t know what it was about meant everything to a fourth grader like me at the time. As an adult, I transformed that love for this dirty secret into an appreciation for shameless fun, for the ability to not take yourself so seriously that you can’t spray fireworks out of your breasts in a music video, for the ability to find the time to not be serious during even the most serious of times. All that might have had something to do with the record’s success, given the financial crisis at the time of its release. While that may seem like a far-fetched claim, Will-i-am of the Black Eyed Peas said they wrote “I Gotta Feeling” as an escapist response to everything that was going on at the time, and we all know how big that song became. Maybe people were looking for that kind of escape at the time and found something of value in Perry’s absolute refusal to let real life creep into her music. Ironically, that’s almost the opposite of what Perry herself said when speaking on the narrative of the record. When describing the listening experience, she said “Teenage Dream” is “a bit sugary sweet but when you listen to the record head to toe... it's completely appetizing. I didn't want to have just club songs,” she said, “people are living real lives, working jobs, having relationships. There's definitely a bit more substance and perspective on this record." While that might not be evident from songs like “California Gurls” or “T.G.I.F,” it’s certainly a welcome change of pace on the under-discussed closing track “Not Like The Movies,” which marks the first and last time the record brings a sense of reality to the listener and explains the role that a teenage dream-style escapist mentality can play in a person’s life. Singing of what true love should feel like, she says “if stars don't align, if it doesn't stop time, if you can't see the sign, wait for it,” and that it will be “just like the movies.” This movie-like experience might feel like a childish dream, but it’s also a standard that people chase as they get older and begin to feel love, and this song serves as a reminder that maybe this teenage dream isn’t unattainable after all, and that’s a reminder that is much needed a decade later on the dot. It may not avoid the tired cliche of closing a pop record with an emotional piano ballad, but this one ties up the themes of the album in an unpredictably poetic way. I’m not saying that this is one of the most unique or even one of the best pop records of the past decade, that is certainly not the case (especially with weak deep cuts like “Who Am I Living For” and “Pearl”), but with 10 years under its belt it’s become a lot easier to finally peel back its layers, or lack thereof, to see just what it was that clicked. 10 years on and counting, it’s still an adequate representation of a teenage dream.
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