I like some pop music, and Katy Perry is the most fun of today’s pop stars. She is politely offcolor, rebelling from religious parents, and has steered herself an amazingly straight line to popular stardom, from the novelty hit I Kissed a Girl to the singing at half time at the Super Bowl. I’m sure that’s going to be murky and awful, especially because the long in the tooth Lenny Kravitz is the guest artist (taking the lead vocal on I Kissed a Girl, by the way), but that shouldn’t obscure the awful corporate fun of at least three Katy songs (and videos).
Novelty dance decadence cheese.
Passionate overstatement, her best song.
Crazy alien sex metaphors. Or is it literal?
All of this music is terrible, terribly popular and I just watched the halftime show and it was as murky and dismal as expected. All I can say is, like the NFL, please forgive me.
I kind of like Katy as a person. I admire her rebellion against how she was raised: cannot have been easy to break out of an evangelical environment, as she did.
but, honestly, i did not know any of her songs other than she had the hit “i kissed a girl” though i never heard anything from it but the first line/title from the chorus. no idea who Missy Eliot is either.
that said, i guess it was ok enough. i never find half time even remotely rewarding, and oddly, though some of my favorite bands–Tom Petty, and the Who–have been half time entertainment, they were always fairly pedestrian to me crammed into 12 minutes of silly dancing and pyrotechnics.
what i did tweet about Katy yesterday was, “she is not my cup of tea, but at least she ain’t the Osmonds or Up With People. Ugh.