“Carly Rae Jepsen is a pop artist zeroed in on love’s totipotency: the glance, the kaleidoscope-confetti-spinning instant, the first bit of nothing that contains it all.”
“This is audible and immediate in her voice, whose definitive quality is a childlike ardency inflected with coyness; she sings like her smile is bursting, like there are stars imploding in her eyes.”
“Her music, strictly and deliberately generic, transcends its structure through this sonic technicolor hurry, this ecstatic sense of the possible, untethered from the way anything works.”
“The nameless, sparkling tension in her music comes from two parallel but opposite forces: Her substance regresses back to an impossible purity of emotional intention, while her form progresses towards an emotional climax that, necessarily imaginary, can never come. Carly Rae wants love; she wants nothing more than to want it—as in, she literally will not move past that point.”
“In Decreation, the poet Anne Carson wrote about art without a personal center—a hole in the middle, left open for God. Carly Rae has resuscitated this idea, shot it through with molten sugar and planted it in genre. She’s displaced herself from the center of the pop album, a self-centered form, designating love—or E • MO • TION, the album’s title—as her god.”
“Decreation’s title comes from religious philosopher Simone Weil’s idea of self-erasure. Carson quotes her: “If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there.””
“The love of Carly Rae’s sonic imagination is distinctly spiritual: directed with unimaginable force at some distant object, further distinguished by having no subjectivity at all. Piece by piece, she insulates her subject matter against self-pollution, building a cathedral out of crystal and neon and smoke.”
“Decreation draws heavily on both Porete and Weil, and for the writer, the paradox gets sharper. “Withness” was the problem, wrote Carson: “I cannot go towards God in love without bringing myself along.” The teller can’t disappear from what she is telling, and what’s more, a writer’s vocation renders this project disingenuous from the start.”
“But Carly Rae, like Marguerite Porete (who, again, was burned at the stake for it) seems to be after direct communion. Her willingness to be directly possessed by emotion—to regress, away from narrative, away from audience, back to that original point—reminds me of Porete’s idea of the soul stripped naked by divine presence. A soul: to whom one can teach nothing from whom one can take nothing away to whom one can give nothing and who has no will at all.”
“Taylor Swift could inhabit and electrify the sheer direct pull of the song, the big Swedish chorus. But it’s the defining feature of Taylor Swift: She is never, ever, ever going to be de-centered.”
“So, Carly Rae is almost everyone, and in the process she becomes no one—just not in the way that people might think. She’s not derivative but absorptive. E • MO • TION burns three decades of pop down to a few heartstrings and plays them from a home base of pure need. And in the playing, Carly Rae becomes invisible, the Casper of pop music, this album her Lazarus machine. There’s her resolution to that paradox. If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. One way to do it is to be a ghost.”
“The great, stupid, fascinating mystery is that vectored positioning—that ambient hunger, that sense of possibility, the deliberately thoughtless worship of love before it complicates or decays. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to stay there, hovering at the unreal beginning, under a spell of violent self-enchantment? Tearing your eyes out and replacing them with stars?”
“The world, as they say, is a vampire; by sheer force of wanting, Carly Rae outpaces the world. On the chorus of “LA Hallucinations,” there’s a line: There’s a little black hole in my golden cup/ So you pour and I’ll say stop. It’s a neat and perfect recompression of her genre, whose broadly painted cravings are just accessories to infatuation; it’s a sixteen-word explanation of her endlessly desiring ethos, and of endlessly desiring, you and me.”