Katy Perry signs the liner note acknowledgements on“Teenage Dream,” her second major label album and first as a certified superstar, “Love, the new & improved Katy Hudson-Perry-Brand.” If you didn’t know about her fiancé, Russell B., or the actress with her given name who beat her to fame, you might think the singer was referring to herself as a salable item. Something, perhaps, like Maybelline mascara in its familiar pink and green tube — a commodity so definitive in its category that it starts to seem original.
Perry likely wouldn’t mind being compared to a feminine product. “I love an obvious innuendo,” she once told an interviewer. She also loves the God-given gift of her lovely breasts and the bad-girl business of rock and roll, which she approaches the way the ad men on “Mad Men” approach cigarettes and cold cream. How to capture its spirit and sell it? How to make it seem new, yet unthreatening to an average boy or girl? Bury the dark side, scrub the dirty parts with Ivory and insist, as Don Draper would, that it’s something your audience has never before encountered. That’s madcap Katy, both slap-your-face fresh and unapologetically calculated, a brutally effective advertisement for a self.
More than her Christian background or the chick-lit limits to her take on sexual liberation, what makes Perry a controversial artist is her essential hollowness. “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?” she sings in the power ballad “Firework.” Perry felt like that bag, but then realized what a bag was for: to be filled up with shiny, purchasable things. Continue Reading...
