In Defense of (my girl) Katy Perry

by Cody Kilgore

In response to Paul's Pop Goes the Music

Growing up, I distinctly remember my father’s musical tastes. It didn’t vary; you couldn’t have heard more country music than came from my father’s car radio unless you lived in Nashville. Dad was hard core Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton…the list goes on. Old school country, I think they call it nowadays. I still call it fingernails on a chalkboard.

I shudder to think what might have happened to me if that had been my only exposure to music throughout my childhood. Really shudder. But, I was fortunate to have two brothers that were six and seven years older than me and experiencing their teens when I was just beginning to pay attention to music, in the sixties. I cut my musical teeth on the Beatles, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane (before that Starship crap). I was saved. I was even spared much of the pop 40 stuff, I think. Either that or I blanked it all out and the really good music stuck with me.

When I myself became a teen, I was into album rock (or so we called it). The station I listened to back then stayed with the heavier stuff and had times at night where they spun entire albums, or a collection of albums, from one artist. I was into Aerosmith, Styx, Queen, ELO, Jethro Tull, Kansas, Led Zeppelin, Journey, Fleetwood Mac, Rush, ZZ Top, Pink Floyd, Supertramp, Yes, and Van Halen, to name a few. Okay, more than a few. To me, these were superbands, larger than life, and their music was intricate, smart, and loaded with thought-provoking lyrics. They would come through Kansas City and pack the arena halls, even the outdoor stadiums, with people my age flocking to experience their music live. They were shows, but the power of their music was still the raw energy that drove most of the performance.

My music tastes since then have gone through a series of phases, but those bands are still a large chunk of my iTunes list. I even spent a great deal of money getting them back after years of neglect and garage sales depleted my album collection. That music of your youth, I think, stays with you.

But since then I have had the British phase that was prompted by the MTV explosion of the 80’s. Then I had a Bohemian phase, defined by mostly underground and punk bands of the late 80’s and early 90’s. Then I started listening to music that was then called alternative, until alternative became a nametag given a lot of music I would now call mainstream, borderline pop. I still have, and listen to, a fair amount of that music, but not as much of it populates my playlists as much as my high school music still does.

Lately my tastes have been fairly wide-open, although I will have to say I listen to more reggae influenced and college station music than anything. I watch the reviews in Rolling Stone and try to dial into the college station scene as much as I can. It keeps a fresh infusion of new and different music coming in, keeps me from getting musically stale. Sometimes I think there is nothing better than finding some good new band that has not been picked up by the pop stations and played into a numbing repetitiveness. Dave Matthews was in that category for me for a while, until he went mega-everything.

However, like Paul, I have a teen daughter, and that means I have to fight for control of the car stereo dial. Sometimes I win, but most days I just give in. Some days I can tune it out, make it sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher coming over the speakers, and other days I can’t. The days I can’t: when some super hit is playing and Megan and Kylee are singing along with it, or worse—when I am chauffeuring Megan and three of her teenage girlfriends to the mall and such a hit comes on. Ugh!

I’m certain I am getting into territory here where I am going to sound like my dad, and probably his dad before him, but there is very little about pop music today to like, unless you are a doe-eyed teenage girl with a heart as naïve and gullible as the ocean is wide, or a teenage boy with hormones raging through your bloodstream. It all seems so synthetically produced and so simple in lyric that a concert might consist of someone with Dr. Seuss level rhyming skills on stage with a computer hooked up to massive speakers. Check that: I think I just insulted Dr. Seuss.

Sure, we had our Bee Gees and disco when we were teenagers, but…well, no, there is no defense for the Bee Gees or disco. Sorry. What was I thinking?

I will say this: if you can set aside the production characteristics and revenue-generating motivation of the music of a couple of artists out there, you can see something interesting shining through. My arguments for this, oddly enough, are based on my evaluation of artists like Katy Perry, Black-Eyed Peas, and LMFAO.

During the 60’s—that all important time to us—a new genre in literature emerged called postmodernism, where the novel itself was self aware. Those authors broke rules, mocked the reader-writer relationship, and tried to convey their meaning sometimes in just the way the novel was constructed or written. Some of those novels (some of the greatest written) forced us to look at things we assumed, did, or took for granted, and rethink them, because they forced us to see them from a different perspective. (By the way, postmodernism was my focus in my major, if you couldn’t tell.)

Katy Perry has had several hits so far in her short career, but there are three that stand out from the rest (according to my teenage daughter’s Sing-Along Hit-O-Meter): I Kissed A Girl, California Gurls, and Teenage Dream. Take a wild guess who she is poking fun at guys. Yep, it’s us. And she is laughing all the way to the bank at the expense of male psyches. If you have any doubt about this, just take a moment or two to watch her videos for each of these songs and a clip of her performance of Teenage Dream on Saturday Night Live last week. It seems pretty obvious to me.

Katy Perry writes and sings postmodernism. Who’d a thunk?

The Black-Eyed Peas do pretty much the same thing, although they parody men and women, as well as the music industry and the relationship of fans with the music industry. It’s not all just party music pop. Fergie’s video for Fergalicious is just as obvious as Perry’s Teenage Dream. The message: “you lusty little idiots.”

But my analysis that yields the opinions of their music, that they are a little more intellectual than what can be seen on the surface, creates this big question for me: if these people are this sharp, why don’t they produce something more obviously intelligent? They seem to be wasting their talents on something less than they are capable of creating. And the self-aware message in their music is pretty lost on their teen audience; they don’t, I think, have a clue about the subtext contained in what they are listening to and singing along with.

Which means that even if this is a demonstration of something like the intelligent music we thought we grew up with, it’s not going to be seen or remembered by this generation as such. And if you miss making your point, you’ve missed your purpose by a mile.

Music changes, as do our tastes. I guess that’s part of the beauty of it. And the music that we identify most with is the music we think reflects the voice of our lives, serves as a narrative to it. For each generation it will be different. We likely understand today’s music little because we are not immersed in the teen culture today and not aware of some the current nuances of it. But some of those nuances are as much produced by the music woven into the teen culture as they are a reflection of it. It’s kind of an “art imitates life” question, where you are not sure which spawns the other.

So, let’s face it, Paul. We’re not teens anymore (thankfully). Now it’s our role to be disdainful of their music. Our music, the good stuff, is just Dust in the Wind.