Around the same time, women such as Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson, and Avril Lavigne began scoring hits inspired by mosh pits but more appropriate for malls. But over the first few years of the 2000s, CD sales crashed thanks to the internet, boy bands such as ’NSync began to splinter, and Britney Spears’s long-running confrontation with the paparazzi reached an ugly culmination. When the 21st century arrived, the music industry was near the historical peak of its profitability-in part because of slick sing-alongs catering to teenagers and written by grown-up Swedes. Pop has seemed to die and be reborn many times. There are many reasons for that, but they can all be reduced to what Perry’s journey over the past decade has shown: Life and listening have become too complex for 2-D. The early-2010s strain of it seemed like the height of irresistibility, and yet it’s mostly faded away. It is omnivorous, and will spangle itself with elements of rock, rap, country, or whatever else it wants without losing its essential pop-ness. This type of pop prizes easily enjoyed melodies and sentiments it moves but does not challenge the hips and the feet. But pop also refers to a compositional tradition, one with go-to chords, structures, and tropes. That’s a funny concept to consider-isn’t popular music, definitionally, whatever’s popular? In one sense, yes. The recent state of commercial music has led to much commentary arguing that pop is dying, dead, or dormant.
Almost nothing creates the sucrose high of Teenage Dream almost nothing sounds as if Smurfette might sing it. 1 on the American charts while capitalizing on it-but that doesn’t change the overall mood of the moment. A light disco resurgence may be brewing-BTS just strutted to No. Ultra-hummable singers such as Halsey and Billie Eilish are still on the radio, but they cut their catchiness with a sad, sleepy edge.
The Billboard Hot 100 is largely the terrain of raunchy rap, political rap, and emo rap, with a smattering of country drinking songs thrown in. Regarding her new music’s likelihood of world domination, Perry told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “My expectations are very managed right now.”įor the younger class of today’s stars, Teenage Dream seems like a faint influence. Perry’s latest album, Smile, came out Friday. Swift keeps reinventing herself with greater seriousness, and little about her latest best seller, Folklore, scans as pop. Gaga, after a long detour away from dance floors, has returned to sounds and looks comparable to those of her early days, but she cannot bank on mass listenership for doing so. Beyoncé has turned her focus to richly textured visual albums that don’t necessarily spawn monster singles. Rihanna has put her music career on pause while building a fashion and makeup empire. Each singer achieved impressive things, though arguably none of their albums so purely epitomized pop-in commercial, aesthetic, or sociological terms-like Perry’s Teenage Dream did.Ī decade later, that early-2010s fantasy has ended, and Perry and her peers have seemed to switch gears. Taylor Swift trundled around in horse-drawn carriages. Kesha, glitter-strewn and studded, babbled her battle cries. Nicki Minaj flipped through personalities while wearing anime silhouettes and fuchsia patterns. Beyoncé shimmied in the guise of her alter ego, Sasha Fierce. Teenage Dream arrived amid a wave of female pop singers selling their own costumed fictions: Lady Gaga, a walking Gaudí cathedral, roared EDM operas. Perry wasn’t alone in achieving domination through colorful looks and stomping songs. 1 singles in the United States -a feat previously accomplished only by Michael Jackson’s Bad -and it went platinum eight times. (Maybe that’s because, like with so much classic Disney and Looney Tunes animation, the cuteness barely disguised a ton of raunch.) Teenage Dream generated five No.
Kids loved the stuff, and adults, bopping along at karaoke or Starbucks, enjoyed it too. Perry’s music was cartoonish too: simple, silly, with lyrics stringing together caricature-like images of high-school parties, seductive aliens, and girls in Daisy Dukes with bikinis on top. She made her voice-acting debut, in 2011, by playing Smurfette. She titled one world tour “Hello Katy,” a nod to the Japanese cat character on gel pens worldwide. Everywhere you looked or clicked back then, there was Perry, wrapped in candy-cane stripes, firing whipped cream from her breasts, wearing a toothpaste-blue wig, and grinning like an emoji. “I am a walking cartoon most days,” Katy Perry told Billboard in 2010, and anyone who lived through the reign of Teenage Dream-Perry’s smash album that turned 10 years old on August 24-knows what she meant.