Carly Rae Jepsen

[catalog]

don't know if i'll bother then. is she like kylie or madonna?

 

[luka]

More like Kylie

 

[catalog]

late style 'confide in me' kylie or early 'i should be so lucky' kylie? both are suspicious but the late style is a bit more interesting

 

[Corpsey]

Any full grown adult male who's not a gay who claims to be really into pop music is a pedo. That's a fact.

Why is it different if you're gay?

 

[catalog]

you've fallen into the trap corpsey!

 

[boxedjoy]

Weird interzone of late Kylie (like, All The Lovers and later stuff) and 80s/90s sophistipop stuff but not the Sade axis of. I'll have a think about a list thread for this week...

 

[catalog]

late kylie is very sexy and unhinged. tricky covered one of her tunes!

 

[sufi]

this is terrible btw
5555th thread in Music? auspicious

 

[Corpsey]

I'll bet a fiver thirdform prefers that version

 

[beiser]

yeah a friend of mine has seen her live a bunch of times and he told me the audience is alwasy heavily tilted toward gay men

which is another great pop tradition ofc, the relation of slightly outre female pop figures and a gay male audience

Key note is that Carly draws more heavily from bisexuals, marginal gays, nervous-looking twinks. Less glam and less pomp. Saw her and Kim Petras both in San Francisco last year; both heavily gay, but the Kim Petras audience was (in contrast) muscled, oiled, gleaming. No ripped men in bondage harnesses at a Carly show.

 

[boxedjoy]

earnest and sincere types like me 😎

 

[beiser]

I think both of them represent a return to an imagined ideal of pure pop that's seperate from what actual pop music looks like in the 2010s and today. A lot of contemporary pop music sounds over-compressed and brash, deliberately futuristic and abrasive. Lyrics about clubs and drinks and self-mythologising. Whereas Jeppo and Robyn hark back to a time when pop dealt with love and romance and a different kind of sexuality. You could picture them on a Saturday morning kids' TV show from 20 years ago in a way you couldn't picture eg Lady Gaga or Drake doing it.

Which is really sad, because

a) a lot of pop music is in really great health just now - Tove Styrke, Tove Lo, Charli XCX, Annie, Taylor Swift etc, all releasing music lately that's really good but not afforded the same broadsheet column ink

This is incisive stuff. I think you've hit on the clearest failure of Carly's work, which is that her work is out of step with the times. She's aggressively conventional about song structure. Hook, verse, big chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, etc. A lot of her process seems to be working with producers and trying different melodies she's saved up against different underlying tunes. Very different from a more production-forward workflow; you would never write "Money Machine" or even anything off "House of Balloons" like this, and it does feel like it's becoming a drag on the output.

c) Jeppo's quality control isn't there - there's some incredible stuff in her catalogue but half of E.Mo.Tion and a lot of Dedicated is anaemic, wishy-washy stuff that doesn't reach the heights of Run Away With Me or Call Me Maybe. Dedicated was a massive disappointment considering how much I loved the first two albums.

It's funny, I disagree on the case of Emotion—other than Warm Blood and Black Heart I would say it's the closest an album has come in a long time to feeling like it's comprised entirely of singles. But yes—there has been a dragging. Dedicated is "meant" to be a less catchy, more relaxed album, but I do think that's a cop-out, and the cover of a song from the popeye musical (???) is a kind of pandering to the base that disrupts the flow of the entire album. Mostly though, I feel like the issue isn't that the individual songs lack quality, it's a kind of sameyness.

 

[boxedjoy]

poptimism 2015-2020

poptimism 2015-2020 · Playlist · 32 songs · 3 likes

open.spotify.com

There you go @Corpsey, poptimism of the last half-decade based on me idling through Spotify on the bus home from work today

 

[boxedjoy]

(strict one-song-per-artist rules, and I've tried not to do much r&b crossover because much as I think something like "Motivation" is great it's coming at pop from a different angle)

 

[Corpsey]

Thanks! I'll make sure to listen asap

 

[RWY]

 

[Corpsey]

Ahh cut to the feeling is the best

 

[boxedjoy]

And the worst thing is apparently they had it up their sleeve and didn't think it was good enough to make the album never mind be a single!

 

[beiser]

And the worst thing is apparently they had it up their sleeve and didn't think it was good enough to make the album never mind be a single!

Similarly, there's an unreleased track named "Bullseye" that strikes me as one of the strongest songs Carly has recorded. Still unreleased, years after the fact. I think the "Carly Rae Jepsen Vietnam" facebook page is the only place you can listen without pulling out a torrenting engine:

 

[beiser]

Similarly, there's an unreleased track named "Bullseye" that strikes me as one of the strongest songs Carly has recorded. Still unreleased, years after the fact. I think the "Carly Rae Jepsen Vietnam" facebook page is the only place you can listen without pulling out a torrenting engine:

In general, the leaked tracks have been more memorable than most of what Carly has released officially in the Dedicated era; consistently, none get released, with the exception of "Wildflowers" in an about-as-good rendition sold off to Elle Fanning.