Carly Rae Jepsen: An Appreciation

Like most people, my first exposure to Carly Rae Jepsen was her inescapable smash hit “Call Me Maybe.” At the time, it was frequently derided as obnoxious, but I secretly kind of loved it. It was catchy and fun, but it also felt different from other music on the radio, in part because of Jepsen’s personality, which comes through in the song’s title.

“Call Me” obviously makes me think of the Blondie song, which had Debbie Harry’s confidence and cool. Pop music is often about those two traits, with artists exuding swagger and needing to appear like they’re on the cutting edge. “Call Me Maybe” added that one word — “maybe” — which gave it such a different feeling from all that other music. It was a song about not being confident: “Call me… maybe?” Uncertainty and shyness are rarely traits I hear in pop, and it endeared Jepsen a lot in my mind, because within the artifice of pop music she felt like a real person.

Since “Call Me Maybe,” I’ve become more annoyed at how egotistical so much pop is. So many songs are only commentaries on the artists’ own celebrity, whether it’s addressing their “haters,” talking up their own skills, or lashing out at the media that covers them. I never quite know what I’m supposed to get out of that as a listener. Am I supposed to care that a very popular artist apparently has haters, or about how they’re living it up in NYC? Even the catchiest chorus can’t make up for not caring about the artist’s lyrics and personality.

Part of the appeal of Jepsen’s new album, Emotion, is how it avoids these self-involved pop tropes and instead focuses on the sort of lyrics that have been the bread-and-butter of pop music forever, about love, falling in love, loving love, and various other love-based things. This has been perceived by some as a flaw in Emotion — that its songs are too blank and don’t reveal enough about Jepsen herself — but in the current landscape I find it to be a strength, an antidote to the increasingly viral nature of pop. When so much pop is about branding and being a phenomenon, the focus Emotion puts on crafting actual songs gives it a humble, even admirable quality.

And it helps that the craft on Emotion is really, really, really good. Jepsen reportedly wrote a massive number of songs, working with an army of producers at several recording studios before picking out the best ones for the album. This lengthy recording process is the opposite of what was expected of her after “Call Me Maybe” blew up and she rushed out her previous album. When she was already being predicted as a one-hit wonder, the logic was that she should strike while the iron is hot, before people forgot who she was. Instead, she took her time to make sure the songs fit together and sounded the way she wanted, which is why Emotion feels like a single artistic vision despite the cavalcade of personnel attached to it.

Emotion won’t yield a “Call Me Maybe” level hit, but that isn’t the point. Jepsen’s goal was to make a pop album (yes, an album) that sounded timeless, that wasn’t the product of novelty. Given some of the gems on this album like “Run Away With Me,” it’s hard to argue that she didn’t succeed.

“Vulnicura,” “I Want to Grow Up,” and the Albums of the Decade

This post was initially going to be about my albums of the decade (so far). I put an initial list of 20 albums together, agonized a lot over the order, and had started writing the blurbs when I decided to abandon the whole thing because part of me just felt like it was a waste of time. Most people just want to see the list anyways, so here is what I ended up with at the time I threw in the towel a couple weeks ago:

20. Allo Darlin’ – Europe
19. Wild Flag – Wild Flag
18. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
17. Lotus Plaza – Spooky Action at a Distance
16. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Sea When Absent
15. SubRosa – More Constant Than the Gods
14. Nona – Through the Head
13. Janelle Monae – The Archandroid
12. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints
11. No Joy – Wait to Pleasure
10. Colleen Green – I Want to Grow Up
9. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest
8. Ex Hex – Rips
7. Kate Bush – 50 Words For Snow
6. Afrirampo – We Are Uchu No Ko
5. Throwing Muses – Purgatory/Paradise
4. Björk – Vulnicura
3. My Bloody Valentine – m b v
2. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
1. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

(I made a youtube playlist with a song from each album if you’re interested.)

The toughest part of the list was deciding what to do with my two 2015 favorites: Björk’s Vulnicura and Colleen Green’s I Want to Grow Up. With albums that have been around for a few years, my opinion on them is pretty set in stone, but these two were new enough that my feelings on them were constantly shifting throughout the process. And they both ended up illustrating my problem with making these sorts of lists, which is that my personal feelings get inevitably tangled up with ideas of objective Importance in music, and it becomes this unsatisfying struggle between brain and heart.

These sorts of lists and rankings were basically made for albums like Vulnicura. It’s original, complex, and beautiful, the work of a truly individual artist in peak form. Most of all, it’s very serious, and year-end lists are the natural habitat of “serious art.” The top of my list certainly reflects these biases, and I do have a soft-spot for a well-executed serious album that I feel accomplishes something beyond just being enjoyable to listen to. So I never really thought twice about putting Vulnicura very high on the list, since it just felt right.

Figuring out what to do with I Want to Grow Up was a lot tougher. Originally, it wasn’t on the list at all. As I grew more and more obsessed with it in the last few months, I eventually threw it on there, and then continued to move it up as I seemed unable to stop listening to it. It became kind of the Cinderella story of the list: mentally, I envisioned Colleen Green stunning Wild Flag in round one, scrapping past St. Vincent, beating EMA with a three-point buzzerbeater, etc.

This underdog image fits Green, who is about as far from Björk as an artist can be. While Vulnicura is made by an artist with seemingly no limitations, I Want to Grow Up is all about working within them. Green doesn’t have Björk’s ridiculous vocal range (it’s okay, no one does). Her songs are conventional, simple guitar-driven pop nuggets — far from the lengthy and complex sonic landscapes of Vulnicura. And while Björk always has fantastical imagery in her album covers and videos, the cover of Green’s album shows her just wearing a plain dress with a sad birthday hat on her head.

Those limitations are why I initially didn’t think I Want to Grow Up was as good as I think it is now: it’s an album that doesn’t really present itself as “important” in the way albums on these lists are supposed to be. On the surface, it sounds so much like it’s going to be another one of those 90s revival albums that is fun to listen to but quickly forgotten about. And the subject matter of the songs — Green’s slacker anxieties and difficulties with becoming an adult — can also easily be perceived as trifling or juvenile compared to something like Vulnicura that is so adult. I actually suspect Green wants be underestimated and not taken seriously, so the truths in her music hit that much harder.

Green’s current Twitter bio (@ColleenGreen420, by the way) is “I can only be me,” which sums up her appeal: she may not have the prodigious natural gifts Björk has, but she knows it, and I Want to Grow Up is (somewhat ironically) a very self-assured album made by someone who knows exactly how to use the skills they do have. Green establishes herself as a great pop songwriter on the album, which is stacked with addictive hooks. But I think what Green really has going for her is her personality, and I Want to Grow Up is really a masterpiece of character. Her lyrics are funny, sad, and moving in equal measure, and she writes with remarkable clarity. I get a really strong sense of who Green is through her music, which is difficult to accomplish and a trait I really value.

Most of all, I Want to Grow Up has meant more to me personally than any album in a long time. No album has ever felt like it was reading my mind this way, and I have huge respect for Green’s ability to capture the feeling of mundane slacker terror and self-destructiveness that has been so familiar for me. This is really cheesy, but it actually made me feel less weird and alone, knowing that someone else is out there who is having these similar thoughts. To the extent that music can really be “important,” I think it lies in that kind of connection with the artist, which is why I’ve come around on the innocuous I Want to Grow Up as one of my favorite albums of the last five years.

The comparison with Vulnicura isn’t meant to try to figure out if one album is better than the other — debates like that are why I kind of soured on making a big deal out of the list. I just find it interesting that two albums can succeed with such different angles of attack. It illustrates something I like about music, which is that each artist has their own tools to work with: Colleen Green can only be Colleen Green, and Björk can only be Björk. And each, in their own way, is capable of making an album that feels important and necessary to me, as they each have done in 2015.

Colleen Green – “I Want to Grow Up”

Something I’ve found interesting about getting older is that people seem to grow up at different speeds. I know some people my age who breezed into adulthood and are already grown-ups. Things have always moved much more slower for me, and my life usually feels like a series of very cautious baby steps compared to the confident strides that other people are making.

The Facebook era makes this even more stressful by turning growing up (and life in general) into a quantifiable competition: you can now measure the quality of someone’s life by how many likes their posts get, how many photos they’re tagged in, or how many “friends” they have. If you’re lagging behind your peers, Facebook does a good job of informing you by using an algorithm to make sure all of their momentous accomplishments are shoved in your face every time you view your timeline (which only happens because you set a Facebook bookmark years ago that you’re too lazy to remove, but still accidentally click on sometimes while going about your Internet business). The grown-ups always have those big highlighted Facebook posts that take up 90% of your computer screen and get dozens of likes and comments. Meanwhile, mine is mostly some sparsely read blog links with some intermingled bad jokes.

Colleen Green’s latest album, I Want to Grow Up, as you could probably guess from the title, captures this not-quite-adult feeling I’ve had with a brutal level of accuracy. I’m not normally big on the idea of lyrics “speaking to me,” since I find it corny and self-absorbed, but in this case it was hard to ignore that every song on the album was basically my internal monologue for the last few months. On each song, Green describes these anxieties — ranging from TV addiction and a short attention span to the ultimate fear of dying alone — as if she’s constantly facepalming after just screwing something up (some sample lyrics: “I’m shitty and lame and I’m dumb and I’m a bore,” “I can’t hold a conversation,” “I’ve gotta stop doing things that are bad for me.”) It’s a familiar mindset for anyone who has been stuck in life and knows they need to do something, but isn’t sure exactly what they should do or how to do it.

All of the negativity and self-loathing would make this a hard album to listen to if Green didn’t have a gift for writing catchy, addictive pop songs. I Want to Grow Up is full of bright, grungy melodies, which along with Green’s voice provide a dissonance between the sound of the music and the dark lyrics. At least half of the songs have been stuck in my head in the last week, with the title track, “TV,” and “Things That Are Bad For Me” leading the way. But the most jolting track on the album is “Deeper Than Love,” a painful song about the fear of intimacy and the possibility of never finding the one — or a one. (It also has another lyric I relate to a lot: “I don’t wanna think about it. It’s too scary.”)

I Want to Grow Up is not a very subtle album. The lyrics are as literal as it gets, and the songs are all mostly familiar sounds to anyone who likes 90s music. I actually think this is part of why it’s good. It takes familiar structures and signifiers (slacker pop songs) and warps them with the lyrics, which have a real edge because they are so straight-forward. Ultimately, your enjoyment of the album probably hinges on those lyrics. If you get where she is coming from, are in a similar place, or have been in that place yourself, it’ll be an enjoyable album that has real emotional depth. If you’re one of those people who grew up easily, I could see her annoying you, and you would probably be better off spending your time playing croquet and drinking tea or whatever it is that real adults do.