Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Katy Perry’s second album, a sugary pop juggernaut with big misses and even bigger hits.
When it’s on it’s on: Teenage Dream has the endless promise of summer vacation. It lives in suspended animation, always excited for the weekend, never clocking into work. Katy Perry’s second album is ostentatious, off-color, fearlessly optimistic even when the music isn’t great. It is forever young, but—as teenagers often do—still loudly announces its age. And it was a smash: Its five No. 1 hits tied a record set by Michael Jackson’s 1987 album Bad. Half of the tracklist went Top 10. Teenage Dream was the last gasp for guitar-powered bubblegum; the following year, Adele’s 21 would shatter sales records and kick off a moody new era in pop. To look back on it now is to realize just how fast it all changed.
Teenage Dream’s subject, like the subject of young life broadly speaking, is love. Some of the album was supposedly written about men from Perry’s own life, including then-fiancé Russell Brand (“Hummingbird Heartbeat,” “Not Like the Movies”), Gym Class Heroes’ Travie McCoy (“Circle the Drain”), and nice boy Josh Groban (“The One That Got Away”). But the appellations might as well have been added after the fact; these songs aren’t confessionals, they’re two-ingredient cocktails, party-starters just waiting for you to arrive. Teenage Dream boasts some of the stronger writing in Perry’s catalog, maybe because she hadn’t yet had time to repeat herself. And even then: There are two hurricanes, one representing the passion of youth and another followed by a rainbow, and then there’s another rainbow, except this one ends in a giant penis.
If Perry seems like she’s really trying, it’s because she was an unlikely success. She grew up in Santa Barbara, California, the middle child of Pentecostal preachers who sent her to private religious schools. She dropped out after freshman year and released her first music, as Katy Hudson, on a small Nashville Christian label. Her eventual pivot to Katy Perry, flirtatious and foul-mouthed pop star, made for a contrast as bold as her outfits, and she had to try the whole time: years in major-label purgatory, entering and exiting contracts with Def Jam and then Columbia with no album, no single, nothing except a soundtrack cut for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. She worked for a time critiquing other singers’ demo submissions at a small label outside Los Angeles. It was, she remembered later, “the worst music you’ve ever heard in your entire life. … I wanted to jump out of the building or cut my ears off and say, ‘I can’t help you! I can’t catch a break. What am I gonna say to you? And you sing off tune.’”
Perry finally caught her break with Capitol A&R executive Chris Anokute, the twenty-something son of Nigerian immigrants from New Jersey who’d caught his break by approaching Whitney Houston’s father in public. At a Grammy party in 2007, Anokute heard a tip from Angelica Cob-Baehler, a Columbia publicist: Perry had potential, but the label was going to drop her anyway. Cob-Baehler was plotting her own career move from Columbia to the Capitol umbrella, and she was determined to take Perry with her. “I stole all the Katy files,” she recalled in Perry’s 2012 documentary Part of Me. “I just grabbed them and I put them under my arm and I just snuck out.” Anokute and Cob-Baehler persuaded Capitol to take another chance, though expectations weren’t high. “It was a really bad deal because she’d been dropped, so it’s not like we were going to give her a huge advance,” Anokute later told Billboard.
At Columbia, Perry had been recording a pop-rock album with production trio the Matrix, who’d worked on 2002’s Let Go and 2003’s Liz Phair. She liked rock music; she wasn’t allowed to watch MTV growing up, but she admired Shirley Manson and Gwen Stefani. After landing at Capitol, she revamped some leftover tracks, wrote new material, and assembled her official debut, 2008’s pop-punk-inflected One of the Boys. To re-introduce herself, she released an mp3 download: “Ur So Gay,” a casually homophobic takedown of “metrosexuals,” that elusive, well-groomed, adamantly straight figure of ’00s cultural anthropology. Madonna called it her new favorite song. If this was gasoline, “I Kissed a Girl” was a blowtorch. Perry’s bicuriosity anthem felt a little retrograde, but it was still risqué enough to annoy prudes, and there was no other song quite like it. Wide-eyed and media-trained, she rode to her first-ever No. 1 hit on an updraft of semi-manufactured notoriety.
One of the Boys made Perry a star, but it came with qualifications: The relative novelty and runaway success of “I Kissed a Girl” put her close to one-hit wonder territory, and the perky pop-rock sound was on its way out. “The second record I’m more buckled in because, God, how many times do you see people slump on their sophomore record? Nine out of 10,” Perry told the Guardian. “I want to sell out, but just not in the ‘I’ve sold out’ kind of way. I want to sell out arenas and sell millions of records.” She’d spent years on projects that amounted to nothing, and now that she was finally inside the gates, anything less than improvement would look like a failure. She had to prove she could do it again—become impossible to ignore.
Perry co-wrote every song on Teenage Dream, but she got help from the biggest names in ’00s pop production: Max Martin, Stargate, and Christopher “Tricky” Stewart. She also reunited with Dr. Luke and Benny Blanco, the producers responsible for One of the Boys’ two most popular songs, “I Kissed a Girl” and “Hot N Cold.” In 2010, before he would be accused in a lawsuit of sexual abuse and battery, Luke’s career was on the upswing, powered by megahits like Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA.” At the time, Blanco was Luke’s protégé, working on music for Britney Spears and, of course, Kesha, whose debut single “TiK ToK” became the first No. 1 song of the new decade.
The final key to Teenage Dream was Bonnie McKee, a friend from Perry’s first years in L.A. Once an aspiring pop star herself, McKee switched to songwriting but, much like Perry, spent years languishing in the industry. “After we got dropped from our labels, we used to play shows together,” she said later. Teenage Dream changed her life. It was McKee who came up with “Teenage Dream”—not the entire song, but the phrase, the first of Teenage Dream’s many flytrap hooks. Like sex scenes in high-school movies and “...Baby One More Time,” “Teenage Dream” brushes uncomfortably against pop culture’s obsession with the barely legal, but Perry and McKee pull it off. “Teenage Dream” is sexy, but it’s written from an adult perspective: Perry’s narrator is a (slightly) more mature woman getting back in touch with the kind of young dumb love that feels like a distant memory until it happens again. Hear the nods to nostalgia in the elastic guitar chords of the intro, as if “Good Vibrations” started with the chorus, and in the climactic line, “Don’t ever look back, don’t ever look back,” like an echo from “The Boys of Summer.” If Perry wasn’t listening to Don Henley, she probably heard the Ataris’ Top 40 pop-punk cover.
Perry and McKee collaborated again on “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” a song inspired by their own youthful party days, and on “California Gurls.” Bouncier than a beach ball, “California Gurls” is Teenage Dream’s towering lead single, with a scene-stealing cameo from Snoop Dogg, identified in the Candy Land-themed video as the “Sugar Daddy,” winking and nodding as he takes in the scenery. It’s the biggest song on the album, not by sales, but because it sets the backdrop: Teenage Dream is a California record, and from the cover art to the concert tour, it all happens in Candy Land. The “California Gurls” video is the single most memorable part of the album, and the single most memorable part of the “California Gurls” video—well, you already know. Mashing up Madonna’s Jean Paul Gaultier cones with a little Varsity Blues-style Americana, Perry’s whipped-cream-can bra was so critical to the Teenage Dream aesthetic that she closed concerts by spraying foam from a red-and-white bazooka.
To the media, Perry pitched “California Gurls” as the West Coast answer to JAY-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” which conveniently had spent five weeks at No. 1 earlier in the year. But “Empire State of Mind” is about ambition; “California Gurls” is about having it all. It’s the sped-up, tarted-up update of the Beach Boys (whose label was apparently successful in removing Snoop’s ad-libbed “I really wish you all could be California girls” from the album version) and the carefree party girl’s reply to 2Pac’s streetwise anthem “California Love” (whose talkbox vocal hook sneaks into the outro). Perry’s first real flirtation with hip-hop was anything but hard, which is why it’s so much fun—Snoop Dogg sounds as game and as goofy as she does.
But more often, Teenage Dream feels dated, and not just because of the white girl with a feather headdress in the “Teenage Dream” video or 2010-vintage lyrical clunkers like, “That was such an epic fail.” Ironically, it’s the fresh-faced power-pop of One of the Boys that aged better; the attempt to outdo it sounds loud, insistent, compressed. The tracklist takes a nosedive with “Peacock,” a song-length dick joke that aims for high camp and misses. Even that isn’t as grim as “Who Am I Living For?” a dreary power ballad for the Serious Person that previews Perry’s future lyrical woes. Her 2008 Warped Tour jaunt resurfaces on the powderpuff hard rock of “Circle the Drain,” a chronicle of a crumbling relationship that can’t stand up to its inspiration, Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” But Teenage Dream refuses to take itself seriously for long: “E.T.,” a bizarre, shouty sci-fi romance, magnifies a confused lyric with a stadium-sized beat originally created for Three 6 Mafia. The No. 1 hit single version, which picked up an absurd, Avatar-looking video and a shitpost-tier Kanye West verse—“Tell me what’s next? Alien sex”—is the type of weird-monoculture monument that feels almost impossible to explain in retrospect.
Teenage Dream’s emotional peak, though, is “Firework,” yet another No. 1 hit, a brassy positivity banger with a soaring chorus note doomed to embarrass you at karaoke. It is very, very easy to be cynical about “Firework”: “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,” wrote Ann Powers for the Los Angeles Times in 2010, citing its stupidest, funniest lyric, a line straight out of American Beauty, the question that has endured as a kind of ironic synecdoche for pop culture’s vast, vapid ocean of motivational bullshit. And yet—there’s Perry singing it for the president, replacing Stargate’s pneumatically powered strings with a tasteful cinematic arrangement: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?”
Do I ever. Stare too deeply into Teenage Dream and strain your vision—it’s plastic bags all the way down. One more outrageous detail: The inspiration for “Firework” is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that formative text of artists and teenagers, specifically the passage where Kerouac’s narrator claims “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,” who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” “Firework” is Teenage Dream’s American dream, and it’s not about freedom but desire, desire for redemption, for recognition, for the kind of infinite, desperate consumption that necessarily burns itself out in the end. Perry changes her look, but she has only one true aesthetic: It’s gaudy, explosive maximalism, and Teenage Dream is the most maximalist of all.
So forget about nuance and forget about Kerouac; put both hands in the air and submit to plasticity. Teenage Dream came to have a good time and to hit it really, really big. “Teenage Dream,” “Last Friday Night,” “California Gurls,” and “Firework”—four No. 1 songs in a row. Some pop stars spend their whole lives trying to put together a string of hits that amount to a lasting legacy; Katy Perry did it in the first 15 minutes. This album is a crowning achievement, not just of her career but of its style: EDM and disco and pop, bold and belting, entirely processed yet instantly recognizable, robust yet chintzy. In 2010, having it all was still enough.
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