How Carly Rae Jepsen won the hearts of adult white males

Somehow Carly Rae Jepsen came to be my year-end most listened to artist for five years running. Before it started, I was binging Big Star & Elliott Smith & Tom Petty so I certainly didn't see it coming. I just remember a couple of songs from E•mo•tion briefly leaking to SoundCloud in early 2015 & immediately putting them on repeat. And I remember thinking to myself, "Well, I guess I fuck with the Call Me Maybe girl now."

Which is weird because I didn't really fuck with Call Me Maybe. So I'm not really even sure what compelled me to check out the leaks. Up until that moment, all of her selling points--Canadian idol contestant, career launched by a Justin Bieber tweet, single becomes viral smash via lip syncing meme, the Owl City collaboration--weren't really selling points to me. I was aware of her music, just ambivalent. But even beyond that, there was something super cringe about a 26-year-old woman dressing like a tween in order to appeal to Justin Bieber fans. Chunky, colorful bracelets. White high top Chuck Taylors. Other things I would honestly feel weird describing in print. Sure, she was making bank, but you still had to feel bad for her because there obviously wasn't a lot of concern for her dignity within her label's marketing depart. So it just wasn't a respectable thing for a thirty-something dude to be a Carly Rae Jepsen fan, & I don't think any of us really wanted to be.

And yet, I clicked. Maybe out of morbid curiosity. Maybe out of a sense of pity. Who knows. But I did & these songs--Run Away With Me & Your Type--changed everything.

I remember being so sucked into Run Away With Me because you don't hear uptempo pop songs in 6/8 meter very often. You have songs like Call Me by Blondie or I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry, but there's something kind of menacing about the driving twelfth notes in both of those songs. Run Away With Me obscures the twelfth notes so the beat kind of feels like it's in 4/4, which in turn makes the melodies feel like this perpetual triplet. And this loose vibe, where the melody seems to tumble, weaving in & out of & around the beat, takes the edge off of some really earnest, confessional lyrics. Presented any other way, the words might come across as corny. But within the whole of the song, there's balance. You don't want to hear an acoustic version of this song, you want that building tension from what feels like a half time triplet pre-chorus & you want that gunshot snare crack that kicks off the ecstatic chorus the same way that Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone bursts out of the gate. The arrangement is every bit as essential to the song as the words & chords. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And in some ways, this is a defining characteristic of Carly's music.

She mentions it on the Song Exploder podcast in a conversation about the album's closing track, When I Needed You. "This song sounds happy now, but it was a really sad demo to begin with. ... It was kind of nice to hide a very serious emotion in something that wouldn't be so obviously all out there... just from a personal level. Because it was such a real, felt thing, where the spark came from."

And all over the record, you have these really vulnerable confessions that are wrapped up in these finely crafted pop packages. "I know I said I'm too scared to try, but I still think about you." "When you need someone, let me be the one. The only one." "I'll run to your side when your heart is bleeding." "I'm not going to pretend that I'm the type of girl you call more than a friend." "I don’t know how to act or if I should be leaving." "I thought that it was worth it to let myself disappear."

This type of confessional pop doesn't typically target cis het white dudes in their 30s. And yet, I do not stan alone. This documented phenomenon affects music critics & average white dudes alike. Carly somehow stumbled upon a way to make desperation not just palatable, but relatable. And the music creates a space outside of irony for us to engage with these intense feelings & emotions & desires in ways that don't feel sentimental or cringe. After all, it's one thing to craft a subtly sophisticated pop song. It's something else to open a door to new emotional dimensions within the listener. And that's not really something that was happening prior to E•mo•tion.

The bass, drums, guitar, & keyboards in Boy Problems are all performed by producer Greg Kurstin, a regular collaborator with Beck & Paul McCartney. It's the only track on the record he produces, but he leaves his mark by perhaps outshining all of the rest with this Italo Disco-flavored pop classic. The slap bass, the syncopated hits in the pre-chorus, the novel double-time chorus outro... there's a lot to get lost in. And while the song is gendered, & while it communicates a specific, personal situation, as you live inside the song, you end up doing the work of gender neutralizing & personalizing it without even realizing. And time & again you find yourself engaging with the substance of the songs in ways that shouldn't be so intuitive. The very idea of not being the target demographic starts to feel passé.

How do boundaries work within friendships? What does it mean to need someone? How does vulnerability feel on the verge of a relationship? How do you ask someone to open up? How do you manage your feelings when they're unrequited? These are all topics that, if considered at all by dudes my age, they're considered in private. And maybe there aren't many answers in these songs, but identifying the feelings in some ways is enough. It can be revelatory.

Everything He Needs is based on He Needs Me, a Shelley Duvall-performed, Harry Nilsson-penned tune from the soundtrack of the Robin Williams-starring, live-action Popeye (1980).

Come for the John Mellencamp drum fill in When I Needed You or the Harry Nilsson co-write credit on Everything He Needs. Stay for the personal growth. And if you happen to end up spending a Sunday afternoon alone with a bottle of sauvignon blanc & a John Hughes double feature, maybe that's progress.

We're in a unique moment, thanks to the 30-year rolling nostalgia wave, when an '80s record like E•mo•tion can sound nostalgic & modern at the same time. There's something immediately comforting & disarming about the gated snare drums & the hand claps & the chimey synths, but the real appeal of the record is not in the motifs but the authenticity rooted in Carly's person. Her story is an '80s story of girl next door skyrockets to notoriety & has to find herself amidst the noise of fame. Ink has been spilled about how she's the Queen of Mall Chic or a shopping buddy or the relatable pop star, but for a generation of dudes, she's our first crush. She's Blake Lively or Molly Ringwald or Tiffani Amber Thiessen. Only, she's telling her own story. And where the male gaze & the need to advance a plot might have rendered these '80s characters two-dimensional, Carly is expressing a fully-rendered person with hopes & fears & apprehensions & compulsions that reflect the messiness & dualities of real life.

Carly is both familiar & new. Retro & modern. Simple & complicated. And you wouldn't immediately think so, but she & the music create a perfect cocktail for marketing pop music to my demographic. If we only could've known Kelly Kapowski so intimately.

But I also think that the appeal goes even deeper than that. And it's captured in Corban Goble's review of E•mo•tion for Pitchfork. "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 fucks, 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." He means this as a slight, but it's Carly's refusal to personally brand her emotions that allows those songs to be lived in. It removes a barrier between the listener & the feelings. And that universality is a feature, not a bug.

It's different for Carly's contemporaries. A Taylor Swift song is about Taylor Swift's life & Taylor Swift's beefs & Taylor Swift's boyfriends, which limits how deeply you can engage with them. They weren't so specific, originally, when the songs were about anonymous high school boys. But they evolved into a single component of a sort of post-modern soap opera also playing out on TMZ, in industry rags, & across social media. David Greenwald articulates this in a 2015 essay for the Oregonian on reclaiming the power of pop mystery. "There is enough space, enough omitted, in [Carly's] celebrity to question what she's really like -- an ambiguity that gives her music a subversive power. Listening to Swift has become about living vicariously, but listening to Jepsen can be about yourself."

It's a paradoxical thing about art, that a scene taking place under an anonymous street light in an anonymous city with an anonymous "you" can feel more intimate than a vivid description of a scene taking place within too specific a cultural context. That withholding can be more intimate than the illusion of access. That honest privacy can be more intimate than paid-for publicity.

In some ways, E•mo•tion was a coming out record. Carly died her hair black & cut it into a Joan Jett mullet. She started dressing like an adult(-ish). And she left behind the Call Me Maybe era of awkwardly trying to live out someone else's expectations of a pop star. "It's OK to just be like, 'I don’t think that’s me, I’m sorry,'" she told the Guardian in 2020. "No one should have more authority over you and your vision and your artistry than your own damn self. I want to have the steering wheel, versus some 50-year-old guy and a group of old people telling me what I’m supposed to wear." And there's something that's universal but that is also very specific to the LGBTQ community about not just leaving behind a tragedy of a former self, but discovering yourself late & giving yourself permission to blossom into something fabulous.

Ironically, this woman who had the biggest hit of 2012 is kind of an underdog in that way. To believe so is to define success in terms of self actualization, rather than fame & fortune. And while, on the one hand, the success of Call Me Maybe gave her a safety net to explore new territory, it also created a much higher tightrope to walk. In some ways, it might have been easier to just retire than to re-emerge as your own authentic self & allow yourself to be judged by the masses who now know who you. Failing as an unknown at an open mic night is one thing. Failing as a follow-up to Call Me Maybe is something quite different. And so it's one of the heartwarming stories of modern pop culture that art ultimately won out over commerce. Authenticity over memes.

We live in a world where pop stars regularly let us down. Lorde has become the royal she said she'd never be. Taylor is the cheer captain she was always so jealous of. But the very fact that they were making these relative assessments of themselves early in their careers hints at a preoccupation with status & recognition that was, given any success, bound to dominate their careers. You don't find this dynamic within Carly's music. You put on a Carly Rae Jepsen record & it's personal & it's intimate. And that may not be the way back to the top of the charts--two albums into this experiment, it demonstrably is not--but a Carly stan wouldn't have it any other way. And neither would she.