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Last year I reviewed Katy Perry’s CD “Teenage Dream “ and said:
Let’s just be honest here: I would bet that Katy Perry spend much more time keeping her body in shape than working on her vocal range, breath control, or pitch. But that is pretty much the point – Katy Perry is a pure pop sugar package: an attractive young woman who gets packed into skimpy, tight-fitting clothes (Daisy-Dukes, bikinis on top?), and sings very catchy songs written by others to work around her limited vocal skills and allow her to perform them live without sounding awful while strutting around the stage.
In short, she represents everything wrong with popular music. In the ‘golden age of movies’, studios had ‘stables’ of actors they could put to use as they saw fit, and it is only in more recent years that actors had the power of independence. Similarly in the music industry artists who wanted control of their own music would find it difficult when contracted to a large label.
However, in the last decade the music industry has consolidated, and as a result they hold a tighter grip on their ‘product’ than ever. The result? No song is ever ‘un-messed with’, and there are constant ‘guests’ on just about every song. The latest formula? A singer and a rapper. It worked once … then twice, now EVERY song is like that.
To the point that in order to fulfill my prediction that they “pitch to whomever decides what sells these days, in order to be able to support a string of hit songs into 2011 so that Katy can still be known in 2012 when her next CD comes along” … and do so by saying ‘hey, let’s add a rapper’. Then they look in the stable and find Kanye West, and presto we have a ‘new take’ on a song so mediocre I didn’t even mention it in my review.
Here is the music video …
