Katy Perry: Part of Me [A Does Pop Music Suck? special]

Jacques Audiard’s new film, Rust and Bone (currently the best of some 200 new films I’ve seen this year to date) left me with a good few questions, one of the most pressing being… hold on… do I like Katy Perry?

I should explain.

Two scenes in Rust and Bone are soundtracked by Perry’s hit Firework, a song I didn’t like until I heard it in the film (especially in the second scene, which is one of the film’s most emotional). It’s clearly a brilliant use of a song, but it made me like the song itself a lot more, and not for the first time (I guiltily like several of her singles), made me wonder whether it was worth spending some time getting into Katy Perry‘s music. So, given that I only own her first album, and am a film critic most of the time, I figured that a good way to try and get a handle on whether I actually like Katy Perry or whether Jacques Audiard just made me think I did would be to watch her documentary/concert film Katy Perry: Part of Me.

It hasn’t helped much.

It turns out that Part of Me is essentially Perry’s In Bed With Madonna (the documentary known in the US as Madonna: Truth or Dare). Like that film it blends background with a behind the scenes tour documentary and a concert film. Part of Me, again like In Bed With Madonna, shows its protagonist as someone who seems always to be on; so totally her public persona that you are never sure whether you are seeing the ‘real’ person that a documentary purports to reveal. The difference in the Madonna film was that director Alek Keshisian clearly had a freer hand in the editing room, and was able to show his subject as decidedly less than perfect, whereas Part of Me is so slobberingly, slavishly, in love with Katy Perry that it feels sycophantic even by the standards of the corporate promotional product it is. So much time is spent praising Perry’s artistic brilliance, creative verve and shiningly wonderful personality that almost nothing escapes through the cracks of the hagiography.

The film does sometimes get the chance to zero in on something interesting, but every time it pulls back from it. Take the segment of the film that deals with the fact that Katy had several record deals before she broke out with I Kissed a Girl. The film acknowledges some issues with production team The Matrix, and shows some intriguingly different clips of a very young Perry doing material produced by Glen Ballard (Jagged Little Pill), where she seems to try to channel Alanis Morrisette.

The film, unfortunately, glosses over the details of all of this, and puts Perry’s eventual success down to the fact that someone – finally, blessedly – let her just be herself. The other thing that threatens to be interesting is the fact that Perry’s marriage to Russell Brand disintegrated while she was on her California Dreams tour, but again the film almost totally glosses over it, apportioning the blame to Brand not flying out to see his wife, rather than digging any deeper – directors Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz never get anything more from her than lame platitudes about love not being a fairytale. The one time that something that isn’t perfectly put together show through the cracks is before a show in Portugal, which is almost called off because Perry is a wreck (it’s never disclosed why, but it seems very likely this was the day she got her divorce papers). Watching her pull together and get through that show is the film’s one truly moving, and truly revealing, moment.

The only other thing that really seems genuine and unvarnished is Perry’s enthusiasm for her fans, over and over we see her take time at meet and greets, and she really does seem to be genuine in wanting to make those fans feel good, and in her desire to put on a good show.

That brings us, I suppose, to how the film works as a concert film… it’s okay. Certainly it captures the energy, but it also shows Katy Perry as a rather patchy live performer, her show more driven by gimmicks and an infectious sense of fun than great vocals. Firework is still stirring, Teenage Dream is still a great pop record, as are Hot and Cold, I Kissed a Girl (despite a hideous introduction, rendering it as a torch song, which Perry just doesn’t have the voice for) and several more besides. I’ve said before I don’t mind artificiality in pop, and ultimately Katy Perry probably benefits from some vocal help in the studio, as good and as infectious as some of her songs are, as great as she can be at making pop music, I think I’ll stick with the studio incarnation.

So. Where does that leave us?

Does Katy Perry: Part of Me suck? Yeah, pretty much. It has some fun concert sequences which big fans will love, but it pulls back from anything negative, and that makes the film rather dull.

Does Katy Perry suck? Ye… No… Kinda… Sometimes… I don’t know, I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

Movies and Music: Something From Nothing – The Art of Rap

Dir: Ice T

Ice T has been involved with films as an actor for more than 20 years, though he’s never really matched his surprisingly engaging debut as a cop in Mario Van Peebles New Jack City, this is T’s first film as a director, and he’s stuck close to home, with a documentary in which he speaks to a wide selection of rappers about how they go about creating their rhymes.

There are definitely problems with Something From Nothing, largely that it is very bitty, each interview lasts for only a few minutes as the film hops from place to place and person to person in an effort to cover as much ground as possible, this is a mixed blessing, as while it does achieve that aim it also makes the film feel, at times, frustratingly incomplete, as if the subject matter would be more suited to a half hour TV series format, or even a series of internet videos. However, the substance is excellent.

The aim here is not to contextualise rap music, not to analyse its place in culture, not to confront its violent or sexual or even sometimes misogynistic content, it is to look at the pure craft, and that’s always what interested me most about rap. As a white, middle class, kid from the south of England it’s perhaps a surprise that I grew up a big fan of a lot of the groups that dominated the golden age of rap in the 90’s, names like A Tribe Called Quest, Ice T, Public Enemy, Busta Rhymes, the Wu Tang Clan and many many more are ones I have lost touch with in recent years, but was a big fan of when I was in secondary school, and many of them are here, talking candidly and articulately about how they became rappers and how they learnt the craft.

Lyrics are a big thing for me in any music, and that’s probably because I grew up listening to rap and loving to write, both things defined by the choice and construction of words. That’s always what appealed about rap to me, and what appeals about so much of this film is watching the way, during the many moments in which Ice T challenges his subjects to freestyle, they craft and curate their words. We see many differing styles displayed here, from the ‘Nigger’ laden invective of Grandmaster Caz, to the chilled rhymes of Q-Tip and Yasiin (the artist formerly known as Mos Def) and the funny off the cuff stylings of KRS One or Snoop Dogg to Kanye West’s typically self aggrandizing, but almost annoyingly impressive freestyle.

There is advice, there are lyrics that seem ripped from reality and there are flights of fancy, and there are some very funny moments too (notably KRS One’s story about how he got into his first battle). Ice T is a solid guide to this world; the respect he commands opens doors, and it’s hard to imagine that many other people could get Grandmaster Caz to demonstrate his writing process by having him sit down and write a song in 20 minutes. The film is also pretty well structured, travelling across the country from New York to LA, each of which is beautifully shown off in some impressive contextualising shots that really give us a feel for where this film is coming from. This is also nicely demonstrated by having many of the interviews take place in public – KRS One in a record shop, Doug E Fresh in a diner, Q Tip on the street, complete with people walking up to greet him and Ice T.

My only major complaint about this film is that I want more of it, what’s here is fascinating and I’d happily sit for another hour of it, so we could hear from the Wu Tang Clan, or more from Ice Cube, or Afrika Bambatta, or something from Busta Rhymes, or Saul Williams or… you get the point. If you want a far reaching look at rap music, this isn’t for you, if you’re interested in the artistry of it, and feel like that needs celebrating then Something From Nothing is something pretty special.

Movies and Music: Wish Me Away / Lifted Off the Ground

All three of us who write this site are huge movie fans, and two of us are film critics into the bargain, so it makes sense to start a series that will focus on how movies and music relate to one another.

I saw a documentary about Country singer Chely Wright (who I hadn’t previously heard of) at this year’s London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival back in March, but I’ve only just got around to getting hold of a copy of her latest album, Lifted Off the Ground. Below you’ll find a review of the film, Wish Me Away, which I wrote for my film blog at LLGFF, and a capsule review of the album.

The Movie
Wish Me Away
Dir: Bobbie Birleffi / Beverly Kopf

I confess, based on what we hear in this film, I’m not the greatest fan of Chely Wright’s music, which seems to have been, until recently, largely country pop cast from the Shania Twain mould but, while it does of course address her career and her status as an artist, Wish Me Away is about much, much more than that. Wright became a massive star in Nashville’s country music scene, with a series of hit albums and singles and critical acclaim. She also, it seems, became a well loved celebrity; dedicating herself to charity work for disadvantaged kids and the military among others. Outwardly she appears to be the perfect all American girl made good; a Christian with strong values who loves her country and sings and looks like the girl you wished lived next door. She was also, that whole time, gay.

Wish Me Away sees Wright, in incredibly personal and exposing fashion, put her decision to come out, and the almost military precision with which she decided to do it, under the microscope of directors Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf. She comes out of it very well. Wright’s story powers the film, and it’s largely self told, whether through (often devastating) video diaries, interview footage or a meeting we sit in on between her and her spiritual adviser. As the film runs on we hear about the pivotal things that drove Wright to, in 2010, become the first country musician to come out. From the bargain she made with herself as a very young girl that she’d pray extra hard to God, and be extra good, if only he’d make her not gay to the moment she found herself with a gun in her mouth, and how she didn’t pull the trigger, there are many difficult and moving stories shared here.

Wright does touch on the fact that she probably hurt people in hiding her sexuality, from her girlfriends (including a woman, never named or otherwise identified, she calls the love of her life) to the men that she dated to maintain the appearance that she was straight. She talks with evident regret about Brad Paisley, another country musician with whom she had a serious relationship which seems to have ended abruptly. It’s a bit of a shame the film doesn’t talk to Paisley, because while Wright is incredibly likeable it would serve the film well to discuss a few of her less admirable moments.

That’s not to say, however, that Wish Me Away is anything but a penetrating insight. Wright – and to an only slightly lesser degree her family – is laid bare here. She says that she is coming out both for herself (‘to live my complete truth’) and for others who find themselves in her situation, in the hope it might give them some hope and some strength. You could see this latter motivation as egotistical, but it doesn’t feel like it, and has been borne out in Wright’s activism since she came out. It’s also borne out in this film, which is an incredibly moving personal story and manages to preach equality without feeling hectoring. I was often genuinely moved, and I suspect you will be too.

 
The Music
Chely Wright: Lifted Off the Ground

Let’s just get one thing absolutely clear before we start: if you don’t like this album because, for example, Hang Out in My Heart is addressed to a woman, rather than a man, fuck you.

Okay, with that said, I’ve got pretty mixed opinions on this album. It’s not exactly my particular thing much of the time. I tend to prefer my country music a little more stripped back, a little earthier, for want of a better word. I’m a big fan of Laura Cantrell, Emmylou Harris and a few others, but Chely Wright strikes me as a bit poppy for my liking, however, that’s not to say that this is bad music, or that there aren’t things worth exploring and investing in on this record, though it will definitely have much more resonance and interest if you’re aware of the story behind the album.

Wright’s identity and her coming out are the key themes here, but it’s not especially explicitly stated, rather she layers the themes in gender non-specific words and songs that could have several interpretations. The opening Broken, for instance, speaks of the pain of love, but lines like “Last time I loved it ’bout left me dead” are essentially genderless, and the same goes for Object of Your Rejection (a song that isn’t as bad as its title, but really does try). Where the album is more interesting is when Wright really strips herself back and sings her most exposing lyrics, generally with not much accompaniment apart from her guitar. Snow Globe is a pretty song of lonelinness and Wright’s difficult relationship with her Mother, while the longing Like Me can be taken several ways – the key line “Will anyone ever know you like me?” could be asked in the context of how well people know Wright, but it’s pretty clear that it’s addressed to a lover, and asking if Wright will ever be able to acknowledge her feelings outside of that relationship. You can hear the emotion in her voice, and it’s well supported by the skeletal guitar.

In a similar vein is the album’s most heartbreaking, and likely it’s best, song; Wish Me Away. It’s the most naked song about Wright’s sexuality and her fears about coming out in public. However, and the film that shares the song’s title makes this painfully clear, it’s also about the way Wright viewed her own sexuality for years; attempting to pray it and indeed wish it away. Again, the emotion in her lovely voice is clear here, and makes the song very affecting.

The more upbeat side of the album tends less towards the personal, and is much less interesting. That Train, Object of Your Rejection and Hang Out In Your Heart are all rather dull, middle of the road country pop workouts, not terrible, but very blah. The exception is Notes to the Coroner, which marries the story of Wright’s lowest point, when she was inches from pulling the trigger of a gun in her mouth, and the album’s most nakedly Pop inflected music. The jaunty music makes the lyrics more palatable, but the extreme contrast also gives it real emotional punch.

Ultimately this album is patchier than the film that surrounds it, but both suggest that Chely Wright, if not entirely my cup of tea, is interesting and talented.

Standout Tracks

Notes to the Coroner
Like Me (couldn’t get a good version to link)