“Run Away With Me”: Hopeless Romance, Guilty Pleasure, and Carly Rae Jepsen

June 23, 2023 42

by Julie Rostock – Published June 23, 2023

“Let’s Talk: why is E·MO·TION good? Or rather what makes it so good? Carly Rae Jepsen’s latest effort was a breath of fresh air for me, but I can’t really articulate why. The album was critically acclaimed across the spectrum, adored by fans, eventually voted as Pitchfork’s most underrated album of the year. It’s definitely my favorite mainstream pop album (snuck into my top 50 albums of all time), and it wouldn’t be outrageous to say it is one of if not THE best pop album of the decade so far. It was a pop album that grew on me, as a general trend most radio friendly pop (Swift, Adele) don’t grow on me at all. But no matter how many times I listen to it, I can’t find precisely what makes it so good, sonically. What did she and her producers do that just gelled so well? The album sounds so complete, so cohesive in its idea and identity. Can someone with a better ear for dissecting sounds break down why this album sounds so good?” [1]

Reddit user Theblastmaster posted the query above on r/LetsTalkMusic in 2015, following the release of Canadian pop star Carly Rae Jepsen’s third studio album, E·MO·TION. The most upvoted response (from u/corzeske) identifies three main factors in the album’s success: first and foremost, “the production. Holy s—, the production is so good throughout. It’s not even just polished, it’s almost fluidly perfect… As a hobby producer myself, this was definitely the big ‘wow’ factor that kept bringing me back to the album”. It tracks – E·MO·TION boasts an impressive roster of contributors, including Dev Hynes (Blood Orange), Rostom Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend), Peter Svensson (The Cardigans), along with countless other industry names. After Tug Of War (2008) failed to propel Jepsen beyond post-”Canadian Idol” coffee shop notoriety, Kiss (2012) was pushed out quickly to capitalize upon the success of its overshadowing single “Call Me Maybe” and failed to garner critical attention [2]. E·MO·TION’s other two strengths, as u/corzeske identifies them, are its lack of radio overplay and its “pretty damn tight” songwriting: “I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she has a big songwriting role compared to most pop singers; she really knows how to craft a vocal part to her strengths”. This is only one (popular) Reddit post, but the common sentiment seems to be that E·MO·TION salvaged Jepsen’s critical reputation with its expert production and hit-writing, once Jepsen had secured the resources and connections that she needed to make something good. Even Pitchfork agrees: “The best pop stars distill attitudes and emotions into gestures so perfect they can take on a life of their own. This is why pop icons inspire endless memes: Rihanna for when we give no f—s, Beyoncé for when we’re feeling imperial. We have Drake for performative vulnerability, Taylor for performative generosity. Jepsen, on the other hand, hasn’t captured the Internet’s imagination in the same way… for all its ironclad hooks and studio precision, Jepsen’s third album, like her second, lacks the personality of the most memorable pop records. There’s an unshakeable vagueness to her—her last album was simply called Kiss, and this one bears the generic title E•MO•TION, with inexplicable punctuation. It may be flooded with winning moments—the bridge on “Gimmie Love”! the build to the last chorus on “All That”!—but E•MO•TION as a whole sounds like a slab of blank space. If only Jepsen had written her name.” [3]

What this reading seems to miss is what exactly it means to be a meme – and what it means to be a pop star. “Call Me Maybe”, with its 2012 pop predictability and admittedly annoying chorus, wriggled itself through our ears and into our collective unconscious like all of the radio hits that we grew up with. Like many of our most beloved pop stars, Carly Rae Jepsen entered stardom as a parody of herself: an earworm, a one-hit-wonder, a meme. She tokenized herself knowingly, casting herself as a literal girl next door in the “Call Me Maybe” music video [4]. Her shyness became her hallmark, like Drake’s performative vulnerability or Beyoncé’s imperialism, but also like Lana Del Rey’s sadness, Britney Spears’ sexuality, or Taylor Swift’s performative vengeance circa 2017. To go viral, on the internet or on the radio, is to be tokenized [5], and Jepsen’s “best performance is still as a shy, boy-crazy brunette” [3] because she is a shy, boy-crazy brunette [6]. She’s a hopeless romantic harnessing the hopeless fun of romance, a natural performer, a theater kid who made it big [7], and the media is her inescapably condescending audience [8]. We acknowledge the inherent construction of the pop star image (and of femininity in general) only when we scorn that construction; we cite the corporate construction of mainstream pop music in our dismissal of its artistic merit. Positioned as America’s most eye-twitching guilty pleasure artist, Jepsen made and scrapped an indie album [9] before starting work on E•MO•TION: more girly-girl pop music about guiltless pleasure and pleasurable guilt.

We open, in fact, with a meme: a Vine-famous saxophone hook like a siren(!), a driving beat, and the line “you’re stuck in my head, stuck in my heart, stuck in my body (body)”. The first verse builds through a nightlife courting scene until we reach a massive, soaring chorus that recalls the sax hook from the beginning: a bittersweet cry to “run away with me”. From section to section or even word to word, Jepsen transforms loneliness into sexuality into romance, often with a strategically placed “ooh” or “ahh”: the verse feels like desperation, the pre-chorus feels like titillation, and the chorus feels like love. This transformation is never more clear than in the bridge, where she takes a wistful pause to repeat the line “over the weekend, we could turn the world to gold[!!]” before building to a third chorus with a gleeful series of “ohs”. A shimmery riser, a touch of saxophone dissonance, a vocal inflection, a major chord. Musically, the song prioritizes that head-over-heels feeling, even when its lyrics complicate it: “run away” is made exciting by “with me”. The album’s other major hit, “I Really Like You”, recycles the bashful hookiness of “Call Me Maybe”, but this time Jepsen’s giddiness and incessant use of the word “baby” thinly conceal the sexual frustration in the verses in favor of goofy sing-along excitement [10]. “Gimme Love” and “All That” lace that frustration with 80s glitz and glam, transforming it first into cautious desire and then into desperate showiness (which are recalled and reversed in “Warm Blood” and “When I Needed You”, respectively). After the love letter to the Bechdel test that is “Boy Problems” rockets us back to feel-goodism, “Your Type” takes a heart-wrenchingly resigned stance on themes from “All That”, and that resignation becomes satisfaction on the title track. “Let’s Get Lost” and “LA Hallucinations” revel in cutesy double entendre and irrational decision-making. “Making the Most of the Night”, with its overt codependency and biting use of the word “hijack”, is the romanticized hopelessness to “Black Heart”’s hopeless romance; pop has more in common with horror than we tend to realize [11], and the two tracks both feel a bit sinister, but we’re never scared. There’s a weirdly compelling tension in that confusion of fear and excitement, love and sex, fantasy and reality, pleasure and pain [12], but there is also tension and release in the pop song structure, and E·MO·TION arranges those supposedly contradictory sentiments into an irresistible celebration of emotion itself, in all of its strangeness. On the cover, Jepsen wears a technicolor sweater against a pitch-black background, biting her nails and looking off to the side. Below her name is the title, E·MO·TION – which she sounds out for us, just in case. The album ends with the decidedly danceable “I Didn’t Just Come Here To Dance”, followed by “Favourite Colour”, a kaleidoscopic ode to wild abandon in which Jepsen is “bright baby blue[!!!], falling into you, falling for each other”. We can only hope that her lover likes purple. [13]

It’s no secret that E·MO·TION was meticulously crafted by countless hired hands [14] – but so was, like, every pop album ever. What makes it so good (like every pop album ever) is its knowing use of Jepsen’s pop star image: “Call Me Maybe” girl, dressed in pink and blushing. In post-E·MO·TION interviews, Jepsen responds to her newfound critical acclaim with humble intelligence, but she’s still her pre-E·MO·TION self; when interviewer Zach Sang misremembers the “Barbie Dream House” that she bought with her winnings from a childhood talent show, she reminds him, “Barbie Mansion!” with a giggle [15]. In her NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, Jepsen nervously laughs herself through her introduction of “Want You In My Room”, a “very come-hither song” [16] from her 2019 album Dedicated, but then she performs it with the same coy, playful sexuality that marks many of her recent performances [17]. In the studio, on tour, and on camera, Jepsen is a performer, tweaking her act for her stage and audience [18, 19]. Her 2022 album, The Loneliest Time, dealt directly with both post-COVID and regular old loneliness [20], finding optimistic escapism [21] in dreams, the wind, and her beach house in Malibu. From her Barbie Mansion, Jepsen builds her listeners Barbie Dream Houses, and yes, they’re made of plastic, but they’re pink and sparkly and fun to play with, so what’s the difference? Like the rest of her discography, E·MO·TION works the same way Call Me Maybe worked: by layering the contradictory aesthetics of sex, drugs, and bubblegum pop, mostly for the sake of having fun. It’s always a good time! [22]