The third in a new feature on The Vine, where we listen to the latest Australian #1 single and analyse it to death, so you don't have to.

Katy Perry (Feat. Snoop Dogg)
California Gurls
(Capitol)

“California Gurls” has been stalking #1 for several weeks now, and has finally displaced Usher’s “OMG” (#1 for 5 weeks) to get there. It’s Katy Perry’s second #1 single, after “I Kissed A Girl”. All signs point to “California Gurls” being just as hard to escape in 2010 as “I Kissed A Girl” was in 2008. “California Gurls” is produced by Max Martin and Dr Luke, separately two of the biggest producers in teen pop over the last decade or so. The list of disposable pop songs you have Martin to thank for include “I Want It That Way”, “Baby One More Time”, “Since U Been Gone”, “So What”, “Whataya Want From Me”, while Dr Luke is responsible for “Girlfriend”, “Party In The U.S.A.”, “Tik Tok”, “Right Round”. Together, they also produced Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” and “Hot N Cold” (e.g., the Masterchef theme). We’re talking the heaviest artillery available in teen pop here.



Katy Perry - 'California Gurls'

Dr Luke and Max Martin know exactly what they are doing. The song “California Gurls” shows every sign of being expertly crafted to appeal to the target market. The music has the requisite synthy sheen and disco beat, and Katy Perry’s vocals do put some life in the song. I think the main musical reference here is Stardust’s 1999 song “Music Sounds Better With You”; it has a very similar arrangement, chord progression, and sound (complete with stabs of disco guitar and funky bass). The vocodered “California” hook towards the end sounds like a nod to 2Pac’s “California Love”. And, true to form for Max Martin and Dr Luke, there’s not a second of the song that’s not doing something to implant a hook in your brain.

Of course, for anyone who has listened to Classic Hits radio for more than a couple of hours, there’s a big elephant in the room in regards to “California Gurls”. This aforementioned elephant was released in 1965, correctly spells “Girls”, and features heavenly sunshine-drenched harmonies. The Beach Boys, of course, are inextricably linked to the idea of California in pop music, and “California Gurls” is acutely aware of the existence of The Beach Boys’ “California Girls” – it goes out of its way to avoid anything that smacks of the Beach Boys, but still, note Snoop’s rapping towards the end “I really wish you all could be California gurls”. And the rhythm of the melody when Katy Perry sings “California gurls [sic] are unforgettable” is very similar to the rhythm of the melody when the Beach Boys sing “wish they all call be California” (perhaps why it’s so hooky). If the song is meant to be an answer song to Jay-Z's "Empire State Of Mind", as Katy Perry has suggested in interviews, perhaps the title of the song is meant to echo the Beach
Boys the way that Jay-Z's title echoes Billy Joel's "New York State Of Mind". It’s also not the only recent pop hit with a title similar to a Beach Boys hit – Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long”, The Pussycat Dolls “When I Grow Up”, Chris Brown’s “Forever” all echo Beach Boys song titles.

The main difference between “Girls” and “Gurls”, lyrically, is that Perry's“Gurls” is from the point of view of a California girl, whereas “Girls”, with Mike Love singing the lead vocal, is from the point of view of a California boy – otherwise both songs idolise the beauty of California girls, and (of course) the ideal of California itself – sun, surf, cars, and girls. It’s perhaps not coincidental that the song has been a big hit in Australia right as the frosty weather really starts to bite. Sunny California seems pretty awesome when you feel those cold Melbourne winds that go straight through your skin.



In one of the very first serious books about rock and roll, writer Nik Cohn in 1970 described the idea of California in the music of the Beach Boys (and pop in general) as “a hugely enlarged reality, verges on complete fantasy. In pop, it is the joob-joob land far beyond the sea, where age is suspended at 25, school is outlawed, Coke flows free from public fountains, and the perfect cosmic wave unfurls endlessly at Malibu.” The video for “California Gurls” may as well be set in Cohn’s joob-joob land. Katy Perry hams it up, swanning around in retro dresses (or, erm, a bit of fairy floss cloud) in “Candyfornia”, a fantasy world that’s half Alice In Wonderland and half Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. What’s more, the implied innuendo in the lyric “we’ll melt your popsicle” has been expanded into a video clip, complete with dancing girls with cupcakes over their breasts and Katy Perry squirting out cream from plastic bottles attached to her chest.

At this point, I should point out that my partner is a musicologist studying the music of the Beach Boys for a PhD at Griffith University, and that I’m basically discussing her ideas here, but California was as much a fantasy for the Beach Boys as for the teens they sung to. Brian Wilson was an awkward child who was scared of the water, and the Wilson brothers had a difficult childhood with an abusive father, etc. To some extent, this idea of California is probably fantasyland material to Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg also. Though, like the Beach Boys, both are from California, Katy Perry grew up in a fairly strict religious household she plainly longed to escape (and is a pale-skinned brunette rather than the classic sunkissed blonde you associate with California), and Snoop would have seen a very different side of LA as an African-American child. This outsider perspective sells the song – you need someone who knows but doesn’t live the myth for it to be believable.

The dark side of the California myth is also well-documented in pop, of course –people have travelled to California in search of a better life since the 1850s, and California in reality has its own faults and problems. Thus Raymond Chandler’s swipes at LA hypocrisy disguised as private detective novels, thus Tom Waits’ seedy alcoholics, thus Death Cab For Cutie’s “Why You’d Want To Live Here”. Perhaps the ultimate in California hate is the Magnetic Fields’ “(I Hate) California Girls”, from their 2008 album Distortion. The lyrics to this feature girls who are “tan and blonde and seventeen” who are “looking down their perfect noses at me and my kind”; the narrator eventually resolves to attack them with an axe. Of course, at the moment, the California government is tremendously dysfunctional, the state is basically bankrupt, and the music industry based in LA is in danger of toppling over altogether.

And this is the paradox of California in pop; it’s a fantasy land where teens can escape all the things that suck in their life (cold weather, no beaches, school, the people at school), where they can start anew with a glamorous life – if not to be a star, then to be someone desired by people around the world. And this California myth is a pied piper’s tune that has led millions to follow it. But it’s a dream, a fantasy, and the reality of California is, of course, less fun than the myth. And the people behind “California Gurls” know this, but can’t help but celebrate it anyway.

Tim Byron