Living the teenage dream, in perpetuity

"This unarguable truth — there is something pure and lovely and raw about teenage emotions — is the driving force behind the Katy Perry phenomenon, which seems custom-made to make the heads of NME readers explode like melons. When The Beatles recorded I Wanna Hold Your Hand in 1963, I Wanna Hold Your Hand was pretty much all your average teenager wanted to listen to. These days, they listen to the music of their generation, but are also familiar with the parent's music, and peripherally catch some of their grandparents, too. Pop tastes come stratified, vertically sedimented, like a layer-cake. With her Vargas girl aesthetic, Betty Boop innuendos and Pop art stylings, Perry is like a single slice of that cake, her lyrics cut with just enough Jagged-Little-Pill realism to satisfy Tween fans that they are not being fobbed off with fluff (‘There’s a stranger in my bed / And a pounding in head” she sings on Last Friday Night, a rousing anthem to binge drinking), while serving as handy storyboards for anyone who wants to turn them into a music video." — from my interview with Katy Perry in The Guardian