Pop Music kind of wrecked my shit, fam

Katy Perry, right? Started out as sort of delightfully catty and rude, eventually transitioned to a mainstream template of pop music? Passable voice, vibrant personality, usually works with acceptable teams of studio musicians? I like her, and I like pop music in general, but I don't think I've ever been singularly obsessed with any of her songs for the sake of her songs sounding good (I like to imagine Dark Horse as the Chrysalis-mind-bonking-Shining-Armor song, complete with its own nonexistent music video, but that's about as close as I got.)

But her new album...man. Two of the biggest songs are essentially club songs with her early-career persona on them; one of them's a mix of figuratively and literally wanting someone to eat her. The music video to that one doesn't help clarify which one is which on that front. But in either case, the blog post isn't really about those songs, since gushing about songs that came out quite a while ago isn't great blog post material. I know I've done it before, but hush.

Then I discovered Chained to the Rhythm. And...Jesus. Just flat-out Jesus. I haven't been kicked in the groin this hard by music since, I dunno, some long-ass stretch of time. Being called out on a song that makes you feel angry? That wouldn't have been surprising. Being called out on a song that makes you feel like a shitty, miserable person? I mean...damn.

Here, I'm just gonna post it below. Even if you aren't into music, I recommend looking up the lyrics. They aren't poetry, but they do a damn good job of doing what they want to do: wreck people.

Granted, some of you are going to be successful, happy people with fulfilling lives and careers, in which case the song won't do much (or quite the same, anyway) for you. But for folks like me, just...

"Aren't you lonely
Up there in utopia,
Where nothing will ever be enough?
Happily numb?
...
Are we tone deaf?
Keep sweeping it under the mat,
Thought we can do better than that;
I hope we can.
So comfortable, we live in a bubble, a bubble
So comfortable, we can’t see the trouble, the trouble..."

Fuck.

It's nice knowing that the closest I can come to being happy is fragile and tenuous; that it's inherently self-destructive, that it's inherently a devaluation that'll help ensure that I feel this way forever. And it's not like she's wrong, at all: this is completely on the nail and accurate, and the stuff I've been trying to ignore. But phrasing it in music that sounds superficially happy over a deeply dissatisfied core? I don't feel like I'm being judged by the song; I feel like I'm being lamented.

I can't even get self-righteous or angry about this one.

Jesus.

Maybe I need to start taking antidepressants again. At least that way, stuff like this might hurt less.

-Petrichord.