Audio files: My Katy Perry problem

Posted on April 6th, 2011 by Michael Cade

I cannot stop watching Katy Perry‘s “California Gurls” video. It’s addictive. The production values are sky-high. Gleaming.

See, as time rolls on, I find myself really liking vapid mall pop. The more insipid the lyrics, the better. The more it feels like I’m in a department store, the better.

I call this genre “Impressive Tripe.”

Snoop Dogg‘s appearance in the Perry song/video is a stroke of genius. You’ve gotta admit that Snoop makes selling out look like the greatest thing ever — a commendable, ennobling act. Purposeful, wise.

I wish I could find the words and talent to give Perry’s video the Dana Vachon treatment. If you missed Vachon’s epic analysis of Rebecca Black‘s “Friday” video, please do yourself a favor and read it ASAP.

A sample:

Rebecca Black wakes somewhat too perfectly in the early scenes of her viral video, “Friday.” Her eyes open exactly as the clock beside her bed flashes seven. She wears full make-up. Rare for a teen, she isn’t tired, longs not for any receding dreams.

Her cultural debt is less to Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles than Vicki the robot girl from Small Wonder, we realize, as in a voice controlled by Auto-Tune she enumerates the banalities of an anti-existence: “Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs, gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal… gotta get down to the bus stop.”

She offers the camera a hostage’s smile, forced, false. Her smoky eyes suggest chaos witnessed: tear gas, rock missiles and gasoline flames. They paint her as a refugee of a teen culture whose capacity for real subversion was bludgeoned away somewhere between the atrocities of Kent State and those of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the start of a creeping zombification that would see youthful dissent packaged and sold alongside Pez and Doritos.

“Look and listen deeply,” she challenges. An onanistic recursion, at once Siren and Cassandra, she heralds a new chapter in the Homeric tradition. With a slight grin, she calls out to us: “I sing of the death of the individual, the dire plight of free will and the awful barricades daily built inside the minds of all who endure what lately passes for American life. And here I shall tell you of what I have done in order to feel alive again.”

But whereas Vachon is a poet, I am a mere gutter-dwelling hack, if that. I can offer little more than sexually charged screenshots (see tantalizing images below, some of which are NSFW).