I'm not sure when it happened.
Somehow, sometime, somewhere along the way...
...I've fallen in love with Katy Perry.
It's a strange thing because I was totally unimpressed with her when she made her big pop music debut, strikingly untitillated by her kissing a girl and liking it, completely apathetic to who or what was hot or cold. I mean, she's not a very good singer. And although those might be good pop songs - they certainly were pop hits - I just don't like them very much.
So to what do I attribute my current love affair, my affection that borders on obsession?
I have two theories: context and intoxication.
Many argue that the thing that makes us love music, even bad music, is the context surrounding the time we first heard the song, or the time and place we were when the song was a hit. But often those arguments are based on theories of nostalgia: first dance, first kiss, growing up in a particular decade, driving with the top down, dancing with friends, being young, being happy. The song - ten, twenty years later - acts as a living memorial to a happier time, a remembrance of times and people past, a way of retaining them in our present day lives.
But what if the context of hearing the song affects your very first impression of the song in that moment, forever affecting your reception of the song in perpetuity? What if you heard a universally agreed upon "good song" (say, John Lennon's "Imagine," a song I actually don't like very much) in a universally agreed upon "bad" context, like at the dentist's office during a root canal? It's likely that nothing could ever make you like that song.
I started hearing Katy Perry's "California Gurls" - really hearing it - while I was on the Golden Coast, driving around LA feeling fine, fresh and fierce with a bikini on top. For two weeks, this pale New Yorker was a California girl - and not the kind that the Beach Boys sang about, but a new breed somehow made possible only by Katy Perry, a fellow brunette, nestled naked in the clouds and ready to melt your popsicle.
When I hear the song now, I'm not nostalgic for Los Angeles or anything that happened on that trip. Los Angeles and that trip forever affected how I hear the song.
Theory #2: Intoxication
This theory is actually a subset of Theory #1, but the context shifts from being external - ambient, atmospheric, geographic - to being internal - physiological, emotional, chemical.
There are certainly songs and albums - even TV shows, movies and Salvador Dali paintings - that certainly seem to lend themselves toward being appreciated under the influence of something. But what about art and pop culture that's not overtly trippy? Put aside the obvious example of, say, Swedish trance music that goes on for 12 minutes in a series of bleeps, whistles and sirens. Is it possible that just your average, everyday three and a half minute pop song - not even one you can dance to - can go from being mediocre to epic with just the right amount of intoxicant?
When I first heard Katy Perry's most current hit single, "Teenage Dream," I thought, "Eh." There was that voice again, and the same formulaic approach of rock guitar with a pop sensibility and a slight dance beat that had placed her on the charts time and again before.
But at 5 a.m., in a taxi cab that picked me up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and was delivering me to Astoria, Queens, I heard on the radio what was, to me, a new song altogether: I both recognized it and heard it completely differently.
I'd had enough to drink that night where I had both tunnel vision and tunnel hearing, functioning at best on auto pilot to get myself home safely. I couldn't see where we were going. I couldn't hear the late night sounds of the city, the engine of the taxi, the traffic surrounding us. I could only hear the lyrics of "Teenage Dream," clearer than ever before.
"We can dance until we die / You and I / Will be young forever."
Yes!
And ever since that cab ride, every time I hear the bridge of that song, I am transformed into the little girl that loved Bon Jovi so much she got on her knees and lipsynched an entire song from the floor of her school bus in front of all of her classmates, not noticing whether she was being mocked or not. I am that girl again, sitting on the subway, standing on the platform, rocking myself back and forth in the back of a taxi, singing "Let you put your hands on me / In my skin-tight jeans / Be your teenage dream tonight."
Is it just that the alcohol weakened my defenses enough to let Katy Perry in and seduce me? Did it disable my emotional inhibitions, allowing me to feel some projected version of teenage love that I still have never actually experienced in real life? Or did it completely impair my judgment, giving me the equivalent of beer goggles for my ears, and ones that I can never take off in order to hear the song for what it actually is?
When I hear "Teenage Dream," I feel nostalgic for something I've never experienced before and probably never will, like the phantom presence of a limb I'd been born without. But if that song, and Katy Perry herself, allows me to feel some kind of approximation of that experience, my own little teenage dream, for that I am grateful, and wonder why I question it at all.
"Let's run away / and don't ever look back / don't ever look back..."
Yes!
