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.