Carly Rae Jepsen's Dedicated Is a Great Pop Album (But Is It Actually Any Good?)
EntertainmentMusic
Photo: Interscope
On Sunday, I woke up with two alternating songs stuck in my head: “Happy Not Knowing” and “The Sound.” Both come from Carly Rae Jepsen’s fourth album, Dedicated, which dropped Friday and was the topic of an argument I’d been having in my head for much of the weekend. I could recognize the album’s bouquet of charms and its nominal creator’s seeming ability to conduct earworms as easily as someone wearing a wool sweater in the winter does electricity. The hooks, they are undeniable. But beyond the ability to manipulate the listener’s ears into feeling like stomachs on a rollercoaster, I wondered, was Dedicated actually good? Is there a way to ferret out legitimate quality from visceral positive response, particularly when that response is shared with a larger group, and does it even matter anyway? Candy is good, but it is also junk… but is it even, if it’s especially good candy?
This is an age-old question about pop music that the philosophy of poptimism—more or less the standard among contemporary music critics—would suggest we’ve moved on from. Poptimism preaches that pop, in all of its constructed excess and dubious expressive sincerity, has value. Pop is important. If pop feels good, it is good. I believe all of these things, more or less, but there’s something about Jepsen that never really did it for me. This is of more concern to me than the average not-my-thing thing because Jepsen rather blatantly embodies the ethics of pop so purely as to be something of a classicist when situated in contemporary culture. Her music’s craft supersedes its effect, which in pop is generally regarded as inextricable—Jepsen’s pop music is not generally popular on a large scale, but she inspires such goodwill among her devoted following, the net appreciation is probably the same as what it would be if she were consistently feeding an audience of millions of casual listeners.
You read things about the size of her emotions on tape, as if every other recording artist up to this point has been muttering politely.
What she inspires is impressive, and, to me, baffling. I’ve struggled to find her there there and she hasn’t seemed particularly concerned about leading me to it. I have never independently discovered what makes her distinct, and I’ve never been much convinced by the rhapsodies of her I read in reviews. It certainly isn’t her voice, which is of the innocuous gets-the-trick-done variety (she’s no virtuoso, but at least she’s generally convincing). So it must be… something else. The full package, the it factor, the je ne sais quoi that’s breaking up in the transmission from her lips to my ears. Without getting so specific as to seem ill-willed toward my peers, many of whose work I generally admire, critics applaud her for expressing herself exuberantly, which is what pop artists do. You read things about the size of her emotions on tape, as if every other recording artist up to this point has been muttering politely. People praise her probing of relational nuances and their attendant specific feelings, as if before her there were just two feelings—LOVE and HATE—expressed via similar-sounding grunts. Paid thinkers deconstruct her deconstruction of love—the way she herself dissects and lays out its parts, piece by piece, song by song—as if such a remove isn’t inherent in the very act of verbalizing a emotion one has (hypothetically) had, as if being hooked on a feeling is a radical concept.
The RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Aquaria gave a quote to Rolling Stone for its recent Jepsen profile that I thought was ultimately withering praise: “She talks about real-people things, but it doesn’t come across forced or too metaphorical. It’s unapologetically pop music, without trying to call it something else.” It’s good pop music because… it’s pop music. Excessively plain pop music with the modicum of self-awareness required to serve its stated function. Zzzzzzzz.
I do not wish to interfere with anyone’s good time or suggest that poptimism is harmful or incorrect, but I do think that taste (which critics are paid to have) must have some sort of boundaries via structure and that when all pop is considered exemplary by virtue of it being pop, that which purports to be critical thinking is missing the critical component. So much of the writing I have read through the years, and binged in advance of writing this, assumes that we’re all on board with Jepsen’s greatness (after having been seduced by her titanic 2012 smash “Call Me Maybe”), and just here to congregate and testify. Beyond not quite seeing things this way myself, despite having all the working parts to appreciate pop for pop’s sake or so my track record suggests, I resent these fundamental assumptions of interest (especially when they’re further refined to be specific to identity, as in the assumption that as a gay white man, I’ve surely adopted Carly Rae Jepsen as my lord and savior).
Waking up with two Jepsen songs in my head was a sign of infection.
And forget about turning to the Twitter stans for guidance on Jepsen’s singular appeal; unabashed devotion has rendered them less articulate to the outsider. They chatter in their own language. Stans in general behave like doting cat owners whose adoration may originate in a parasite contracted by handling their beloved’s shit (in the case of the cat owners, I mean actual feces; with pop stars, I mean deep cuts that no one else cares about). After all, when we discuss the pop songs that really work, we talk about them like contagion. They are infectious, most impressive when they’ve infiltrated us, refuse to leave, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
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