A series in which I
waste time watching current pop-culture junk on YouTube, and then come home to
my blog to express my aging-hipster befuddlement with it all.
Call me crazy, but this teeny-bopper tripe is actually
artistically significant in its way. Not
on its own mind you, not one teeny tiny bit, but in the grander scheme of
things. A few years from now, when VH-1 is
readying I Love the ‘10s, I think you’ll
find that “Call Me Maybe” marks the exact moment when Autotune became more
important to pop music than a human-performed vocal. I’m completely serious about this: click PLAY
on the embedded video above, and try to listen past all of the vocal processing
in an attempt to hear Carly Rae Jepsen’s actual voice. Having trouble? That’s because this was a trick assignment:
you can’t hear it because it’s not there.
Seriously: given the amount of humanity to be found underneath the
production layers of the thing, this song might as well have been sung by R2D2,
or Rob the Robot.
It’s a completely different thing than, say, “Friday”. Rebecca Black gained notoriety because
underneath the Autotune her singing was awful, worse even than my own
pitch-challenged warbling after the number of drinks it takes to get me to sing
in public. It was compelling (if that’s
the word for it) because what was in the middle of Black’s production Tootsie
Pop was remarkably sour. In Carly Rae
Jepsen’s case, there is nothing but air at the Tootsie Pop's center. I’ve watched this video three times now, and
I’m not entirely convinced she truly exists; CGI is pretty good these days,
ya know? The voice is robotic, detached,
emanating from deep within the void – that is, if it’s even real at all. She’s the voice that asks me to “please enter
your passcode” every time I check my voice mail, tricked out with processing
effects, given a weak, tinny beat, some abysmal rhymes and mailed straight to
iTunes, postage due.
The lyrics are dopey, in that way that teenagers always need
dopey lyrics like these to exist. There
is something profoundly of-the-moment about the way Jepsen keeps referring to
the boy she’s crushing on as being “in my way”, and I’ll make you a deal: if I
agree to begrudgingly admit to the accidental genius of that, what’s say you
agree to bury the thing in a time capsule and that way, with any luck, none of
us will have to hear it again for at least fifty years. Deal? The music is absolutely nothing to write home
about: the blaring synth hook is straight out of 1988 – everything old is new again, after all – and it’s
exactly the sort of thing that pushed the strong-minded smart kids towards punk
or metal back in the day (or, in the case of your humble, ever-conflicted
author, both). The less strong-minded smart kids got stuck with
a pile of Smiths records and a life soundtracked by wimp-city alt-rock, but
that’s a tangent for another day.
Which leads us to the end of the video, and the BIG SURPRISE
contained therein. I’d throw a spoiler
alert up right about now, but let’s be honest with each other: anybody who’s
made it this far into this post has either already seen the video, or never
intends to. So the guy that’s (ahem) in
Jepsen’s way gives his number to one
of the dudes in her band, making it clear that he’d like said dude to call him definitely. How of the moment! How with the legal-marriage-in-the-news
zeitgeist! How convenient a way to
simultaneously come off as gay-positive and
make a gay joke! And how on Earth did Katy Perry* not beat her to it?!
There are times when I truly dig getting older, and each
time I watched this video for this post was one of them. If any of you out there want to hit up the
Early Bird at Golden Corral later this week, call me maybe.
* If, in fact, Katy
Perry has done something like this in one of her videos already, please do not
hesitate to get in front of your keyboard…and write your congressman or something. I made one hard ‘n’ fast rule when embarking
on this series: NO KATY FRIGGING PERRY. And just like the best punk rockers, I mean
it maaaan.
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