Ten Years Later, Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” Is Indestructible
Female pop stardom, of the kind that dominated American music in the late aughts and early 2010s, has experienced a revival in the last year, after near-implosion. By late 2017, Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” singles were floundering, Beyoncé had withdrawn from Hot 100 consideration, Miley Cyrus had shed rebel veneer for fast-fading pseudo-country—ditto Lady Gaga—and Rihanna had eloped with high fashion.
Then Ariana Grande co-opted trap and channeled trauma into hooks, bubbling from mid-tier to upper-echelon. Gaga executed a cinematic reinvention rivaling Bowie, won an Oscar and re-centered herself in the cultural consciousness. Swift put out her lowest-selling but highest-streaming record to date, and Dua Lipa and Billie Eilish emerged as full-package artistic forces.
Absent from a shifting but not so pop-averse landscape is Katy Perry. The singer spends these days judging “American Idol” and courting virality, recently in oversized toilet-paper and hand-sanitizer costumes. Perry’s last LP, “Witness,” promised political revelations, but ended up revolving around a breakup; while perhaps more coherent than previous work, it shook the belief system of my ten-year-old self. How could these deeply unmemorable songs belong to the woman responsible for “Teenage Dream”?
That album, Perry’s second, which propelled her into the pop stratosphere, turns a decade old today. It is still the only album by a female artist to produce five number-one singles (none has since amassed more than three). Highlights of the promotional cycle included budget-breaking music videos, a world tour and a concert film. “Teenage Dream” indicated that Perry might possess superstar stamina, not for inimitable performance theatrics or vocal prowess, but flexibility and effervescence.
Such a consensus held through the next five years, through a “Teenage Dream” follow- up and Super Bowl performance, then evaporated with “Witness.” The album sold a few hundred thousand copies and failed to register on streaming platforms. Non-album collaborations with Zedd and Charlie Puth lacked energy or staying power, or both. Six and a half years have now passed since Perry’s last number-one single.
I still remember the “Teenage Dream” disc, thick and pink, almost literally a confection, with scratch-and-sniff scent emanating from the inside flap and peppermints in place of O’s on the track list. The cover seemed built for immortality. Perry lay painted among cotton candy clouds, half-nude and bronze, her gaze directed just beyond the viewer. Whatever befell the real star, this one was to remain suspended, in the sky and out of reach. The thematic core of the album—celebration of that fleeting state of youth—might want for depth, but how could it age?
Critics were initially indifferent. Ryan Dombal, of The Village Voice, called the lead singles rip-offs of “Tik Tok” and “Since U Been Gone,” earlier smashes for which executive producers Dr. Luke and Max Martin were responsible. Slant Magazine complained of a “raunchy pop nightmare.” The response undersold an ability established on “One of the Boys,” Perry’s major-label debut, to distill experiences into affectionate, insulated recollections, and meld conversation with instruction. Songs like “Waking Up in Vegas” served as handbooks for romantic management, offered from high school to the Strip (“Get up and shake the glitter off your clothes”).
The melodic weight perhaps needed throughout “One of the Boys” arrived, narrative intact, on “Teenage Dream,” which opens with Perry’s memories of getting drunk on the beach, renting a motel room, and building “a floor out of sheets.” The one-note wallop of the title track’s chorus delivers because it’s catchy, and because it’s foundational.
“Teenage Dream” also establishes a paradox. In describing her lover, Perry invokes a sensation from which she has for years been distanced, but at the end of the chorus cries, “Don’t ever look back!” She enters nostalgic limbo, re-summoning one part of a former state of mind and accidentally internalizing a second part, really the eternal adolescent aspiration, to leave adolescence behind (and never reclaim it).
This contradiction, which is what makes the album memorable, dooms teens to longing; as they push toward adulthood, they grasp what there is to miss. The contradiction is also muddled by numerous distractions on the “Teenage Dream” track list. “Peacock” foregoes conviction or humor in its desperation to capture the sound of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.” “Firework” inserts empowerment otherwise ignored on the album, but, being an earworm, became its biggest hit.
“Last Friday Night” and “The One That Got Away” do the most to expand on nostalgic conflict, and on Perry’s self-conception in “One of the Boys.” The former follows weekend activities, the latter a bygone relationship. Both feature dense verses and anthemic choruses, and are (bar AutoTune) sonically time-proof.
If in media coverage Perry came across as especially partial to frivolity, “Last Friday Night” qualified the excess. The song notes doubts and memory lapses involving “streaking in the park” and “skinny dipping in the dark.” Perry’s self-awareness is nice because it maintains momentum—she admits flaws, but moves on before unpacking them. Soon the listener is presented with a statement of intent, which pushes back on Perry’s regrets: “This Friday night, do it all again.” When exploits are committed to writing, Perry suggests, they are enshrined.
Armed with the same instrumental layering, “The One That Got Away” downshifts tempo, though not by much. Entertainment Weekly called it overproduced in a positive review of the acoustic version; my love for the song originated with its heft. The roof to which Perry and her long-ago beau climb is magnified by quaking drums and processed “oohs.” Perry’s assertiveness is on full display, only as ineffectual, when she sings that “in another life / I would make you stay.” She stakes no wounded position, but fast-tracks between the romance’s highlights and echoes, setting out Mustangs, where “we’d make out...to Radiohead,” and June and Johnny Cash, as she did “Lolita,” Seventeen magazine and class rings on “One of the Boys,” like they are pieces in a time capsule, aligned for her and no one else.
The cinematic contours of many of these references—and Perry’s request at the end of “Teenage Dream” that if her romance is not like the movies, “that’s how it should be”—mirror the bond between the album and its visual content. A framework hardly defines the music videos produced between 2010 and 2011, which secured views with color blasts, costume changes and boobs. Perhaps accidentally, they showcased Perry’s range, of which there had been hints in the “Waking Up in Vegas” video.
No single from Perry’s catalog—or maybe any contemporary pop star’s—has since been better transposed to the screen, or matched the rock-solid arc in “Vegas,” established by popular knowledge and embodied by a wonderfully emotive protagonist. Perry is mortified at the altar of a shotgun wedding, willingly entangled with her boyfriend in a cash cube, all- knowing at a Last Supper table spread. Her hope simmers and blossoms and reverts.
These expressive shifts are undergirded by more literal transformations in the “Teenage Dream” series. “Last Friday Night” reincarnates John Hughes, while “California Gurls” explores Snoop Dogg’s Candyland. “The One That Got Away” has vital “Vegas” DNA, plus geriatric prosthetics. Perry pierces through, mostly with her ecstasy, which, among familiar cotton-candy clouds in “California Gurls,” is taunting, to fit the song’s home-state superiority. In “Last Friday Night,” it’s defiant, in the face of twelfth-grade hierarchy. In “The One That Got Away,” it’s almost disbelieving—Perry does not let the viewer forget that she can’t believe her luck.
Of course, the acceptance of “Teenage Dream” as an emotional force accounts for its multi-sensory presence, from the songs to the videos to the scratch-and-sniff. Perry’s physicality becomes an anchor, though the project reaches out in so many directions that it’s difficult to get back to the locus of her appeal, those small-scale desires and personal histories. “The One That Got Away” and “Last Friday Night” might exist of a part in an album context, but their videos are pretty irreconcilable. “Prism,” the sequel to “Teenage Dream,” sacrifices continuity on all fronts, and overloads in as many ways as possible.
Why did she have to do so much? Well, halftime shows and stadium tours don’t happen without muchness. Perry’s label probably grimaced at the prospect of a boldface political alliance in 2016, but it too provided another tack. Count on Lana Del Rey to make “Teenage Dream” the first installment of a multi-album saga; Perry hasn’t proved she possesses Del Rey’s attention span.
Clinging to the aura and indestructibility of “Teenage Dream” has meant isolating it from the music that followed, from pop’s trajectory, from the hardship of commercial resilience, especially as a top-billed female artist, and even from the fate of Dr. Luke, with whom Perry severed direct creative ties before “Witness.”
It is nice instead to imagine Perry an enigma, in league with her album-cover doppelgänger, an ingénue who, after “Teenage Dream,” fled recording studios for the soundstage, or who vanished on the Amalfi Coast, as midcentury spies do, who retreated from the public eye and from musical production, spotted on occasion at Santa Barbara bars. “Teenage Dream” feels like this kind of big: hard to pin down, fun to mythologize. I wonder what growing up with it has to do with deeming it substantial, what wouldn’t have been disappointing in its wake. The album both develops and scrambles a persona. It is held together by a woman’s resolve, and by the people who believe in her. It isn’t quite strong enough to last forever, unless it does.
Fergus Campbell is a Culture writer and sophomore at Columbia College.
