celebrity gossip, academic style

The other week I happened upon the latest issue of InStyle. While InStyle popularized the notion that celebrities, as opposed to supermodels, sold fashion (and thus belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine), the magazine is pretty straight up minivan majority. (If you’re unfamiliar with the term — which I borrow from Lainey Gossip — see my early, early post on the subject). Point is: InStyle is fashion for “the rest of us,” and by “the rest of us” I mean people with a modicum of capital. It’s not high fashion — that’s Vogue - but it’s also not cheap. (Sometimes there’s a gesture towards thriftiness, but there are a whole lot of $100-$500 items featured in its pages). Put it this way: people who read InStyle often also read Real Simple. Reese Witherspoon and Katie Holmes are essentially the magazine’s mascots.

But InStyle put Katy Perry on its cover last month, very appropriately mixing her candy cotton pink hair with a super conservative-let’s-all-go-to-the-office-in-metallics dress that covered all that Perry usually bares. But pink hair! YOU GUYS, A GIRL WITH PINK HAIR ON A MAINSTREAM MAGAZINE!

This cover image is exactly what makes Perry so popular: just enough subversion to make her interesting, yet clothed in the thoroughly acceptable wardrobe of traditional American values.

What’s that you say? Isn’t Katy Perry the girl who turned a song about making out with a girl into a number one hit? Who put the words “I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It” onto the lips of millions of American girls? Isn’t that actually subversive? Not really, because while the song explicitly describes a queer activity (a girl kissing a girl) it’s actually a thoroughly heteronormative song. A brief refresher:

This was never the way I planned, not my intention
I got so brave, drink in hand, lost my discretion
It’s not what I’m used to, just wanna try you on
I’m curious for you caught my attention

I kissed a girl and I liked it, the taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it, I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it
It felt so wrong, it felt so right, don’t mean I’m in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it, I liked it

No, I don’t even know your name, it doesn’t matter
You’re my experimental game, just human nature
It’s not what good girls do, not how they should behave
My head gets so confused, hard to obey

In other words: kissing a girl is something that you do only when drunk, as an experiment, and can be “tried on” in the same fashion as a piece of clothing. It’s something that you do while you still have a boyfriend and are thus firmly rooted in heterosexual identity. I could go on, but the song (and Perry) construct queerness as an “experimental game,” not an identity or lifestyle. Or, as Beth Ditto, lead singer of The Gossip explains, I Kissed A Girl is a “boner dyke” anthem for “straight girls who like to turn guys on by making out or like faking gay.”

But then again, the song is catchy as shit. So catchy, in fact, that it enabled millions of people who would hesitate to imagine themselves in queer scenarios to ACTUALLY SAY THAT THEY KISSED A GIRL AND THEY LIKED IT. I realize that’s a lot of caps, and I realize this song is deeply problematic…..but that doesn’t mean that putting those words in girls’ mouths isn’t transgressive in some way.

Now, I realize that I’m arguing all sorts of things here — she’s heteronormative! Her vision of queerness is offensive and problematic! She’s transgressive! It’s true: Perry is all of those things. Like most huge stars, her image is polysemic, meaning that it can “mean” many things at once, even if those things seem to blatantly contradict one another.

Because for every transgressive thing that Perry does, there’s something conservative to counter it. For every pink dye job, there’s slightly sussed-up power suit. She sings about getting wasted in Vegas, but her parents are pastors. She appears on Sesame Street, but wears an outfit that shows too much of her breasts. She’s incredibly feminine (she loves pink! dresses! bubble gum!) but in a way that manages to be infused with sexuality. Her appearance consistently evokes the ’50s pin-up, with its mix of traditionalism and explicit sexual gratification.

Or take her relationship with Russell Brand. Russell Brand is RIDICULOUS. After watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I was pretty sure he was the funniest/crassest person alive. He was also an alcoholic, a rampant drug abuser, and a general asshole. Even Wikipedia says that he was “known for his promiscuity.” Until he went to treatment, that is, and became follower of the Hindu faith and started a regular meditation practice. Now he’s sober, even if his performances and image still emanate transgressiveness.

And Katy Perry didn’t just date Russell Brand, she MARRIED him. Sure, celebrities often get married because they realize how it can positively affect their brand. And while Perry and Brand didn’t sell the “exclusive rights” to their wedding, they did show footage from it on MTV. But she married him. She didn’t date him; she didn’t have a child with him “out of wedlock,” she MARRIED HIM. And as much as Kim Kardashian persists in making a mockery of the significance of marriage, it is important to remember that marriage is still a very traditional pledge of fidelity, and heterosexual marriage remains the antithesis of moral transgression. But again: she’s married, but she’s married to RUSSELL BRAND. Conservativeness tinged with rebellion.

Which brings me to her other, more recent, even more popular songs. The songs that I quite frankly and unabashedly love. I mean, “I Kissed a Girl” was catchy, but it also kinda sounded like a one-hit-wonder. I kinda hate “California Girls,” but there’s a reason it was the uncontested “Song of the Summer” last year — it’s addicting, it has Snoop Dogg, and it references pure and highly evocative pleasures. Daisy Dukes Bikinis On Top, to be specific. The description evokes skin and suggestiveness, but it’s coated in the saccharine sound of the actual song.

But then came “Teenage Dream,” which effectively reversed everything I’d thought previously thought about Katy Perry. I thought that she was playing the celebrity game with certain savvy, but I also recoiled from her songs. Yet “Teenage Dream” combined a pure pop anthem with a wistfulness, nostalgia, and simply evocative images of what it’s like to be young and think that you’re in love. All of her songs have the same simple imagery, but something about the way she uses it in Teenage Dream — combined, of course, with the actual aural affect of the song — makes it exponentially more powerful.

“Firework” is a classic ballad with pretty little substance (other than HEY LISTENER, YOU’RE AWESOME), and “Last Friday Night,” which is basically a “I got drunk and did crazy shit” song, very much in the vein of “Wakin’ Up in Vegas” (from her first album), is still highly evocative and admittedly, okay, FINE, fun. ”E.T.” is about having sex with aliens! That’s transgressive, right! Only so fantastical as to not actually be transgressive AT ALL? More like a game of make believe? But don’t forget: for the single, she let Kanye West rap a verse, which grants the otherwise derivative, B-Grade Dr. Luke song just enough edge to become popular.

Perry’s most recent single, “The One That Got Away,” returns to the “Teenage Dream” vein, describing what it’s like to be totally into someone, break up, and then think back and wonder what life would have been like. If she added violins and a mandolin, this could be a country song.

And therein lies the crux of Perry’s success. Sure, her image embodies the transgressive and the traditional. You see this in her music videos, in her romances, in her sartorial choices. But with the help of her very savvy producers, she also writes songs WITH STORIES. And as Taylor Swift’s success has made abundantly clear, amidst all the unintelligble lyrics and songs that are essentially European disco tunes (LMFAO, I’m talking to you), there’s something incredibly attractive about a song where you can not only decipher the words, but understand and relate to the ways in which those words turn into a story.

And that, in the end, is what’s so highly contradictory and highly appealing about Perry: she tells highly traditional love stories, but she tells them with pink hair. When she’s talking about getting drunk with her friends and not remembering, she’s doing so while also thoroughly married and abstaining from most drugs and alcohol. She’s traditional and contemporary, topless on the cover of Esquire and suited-up on the cover of In Style.

And that dexterity and polysemy — just the right amount of edge, just the right amount of comfort — is why she’s a super star in the most technical sense of the term. Hundreds of millions of people the world over listen to her music. She’s the grand middle, and she’s done so by embodying both ends of the behavioral spectrum.