turn·key
/ˈtərnˌkē/

of or involving the provision of 

a complete product or service 

that is ready for immediate use

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction 

2. Believable Reliability 

2.1. Consistency

2.2. Sincerity 

2.3. Perfect Product

3. Manufactured Stardom

3.1. Viral Princess

3.2. Pulled-Back Curtain

3.3. Broken Robots

4. From Canada With Love

4.1. Canadian Idolatry

4.2. A Billion Views

4.3. Known Future

5. Modern Model

5.1. Embarrassment Erasure

5.2. Scalable Songwriting 

5.3. Turnkey Pop Star

6. Media Becomes Air

1.  Introduction 

This work builds on the phenomenon discovered by a screenwriter and captured in his work A Scar No One Else Can See, a manifesto written, we presume, in the grip of delirium not unlike that afflicting a manic monk carving runes into his skin. 

He calls it the Jepsen Pattern, a specific tripartite structure which all—and he does mean all—of her songs obey. His insight may be boiled down to this: Canadian pop singer Carly Rae Jepsen’s songs utilize seven (and only seven) key themes, with multiple recurring subthemes popping in and out of her pen like fireflies on a summer night.  

These subthemes, such as “friends upgrading to lovers/lovers downgrading to friends,” and being “alone with someone,” serve to mark her music with familiarity and comfort. The cumulative effect is staggering: if you sit in an Uber and hear a cheerful tune referencing “running away or to” someone, you can be sure you’re listening to Jepsen—or an imitator. 

And so, although we read with fire Landis’s work, it occurred to us that the driving question behind his work is “why?”  Why on earth is a young Canadian woman writing hyper-specific lyrics describing the ecstasy of falling in love too deep too fast, the ache of rejection borne from the end of that naive love, and the desperation encapsulated in pining forever for that love, only to be rebuffed every time?

Our first thought was heavily hinted at by Landis: Jepsen had a youthful romantic and sexual encounter with a peer further established in his career. Due to their age difference, he rejected her, but that rejection did not reflect his true feelings towards her, leaving her to recreate in song that explosion of childish love, loss, and hope—forever. 

This explanation is both intuitive and logical. Why, you may ask, does she not get over it and move on? Because it was the first—and most formative—love of her life. But also because it ended not due to acrimony or infidelity or apathy, but because the fault line of age-differential relationships is still, and may always be, a line no up-and-coming entertainer can cross without jeopardy. 

So he loved her, and she him, and their relationship was brief but intense, fashioned after the passion of a thousand furtive glances. He then ended it, but—and this is crucial to this explanation—still loved her, perhaps as desperately as she loved him. 

And this is how we get the Jepsen Pattern. She will sing to those initial furious feelings. She will sing to that secret love. She will sing to that unspoken desire. To her, that silence, that wall between her and he is not a slight, slung by a young wandering lover. It is a man who must hide his feelings and play the stoic, even as he too longs for the day they will finally be together again. 

Now that is a story worth singing about over fifteen years. In this telling, Jepsen cannot help but wield this torch, burned into her memories and seared into her skin like a brand. In this telling, Jepsen’s songs will echo forever, bouncing off the world’s antennae, a perfect three-arc storyline trapped in bits and bytes and available on Spotify. 

It is a beautiful tale, far removed from the current music battlefield of SoundCloud rappers battling aged divas for dwindling streaming pennies. You might even say that the deep consistency and sincerity of her catalogue offers the listener a balm in this weary world. 

No matter the album, you know what you’re going to get. Limerence crossed with pointed misery and coy allusions to unsullied sexuality. Bouncy beats and that exact mix of backup singers and violins designed to entertain a bar on the Upper West Side, passengers in the back seats of Ubers, and eleven year old girls in Canada.

But consistency and sincerity 

are not the way we describe our singers. 

It’s the way we describe McDonald’s. 

And that’s because Carly Rae Jepsen 

is the first turnkey pop star. 

2.  Believable Reliability 

Imagine the most consistent band conceivable. They sing the same songs (or even just “song”) at every show, at every media appearance. They wear the same clothes. They have the same haircuts. Music journalists lose their mind at how they just play the same song, dammit, while hippies dip into something and whisper just play the same song, baby. Their shows are identical: same warm-up, same effects, same AutoTune, same guitars, same dance movements. They have four members. Their name, rather consistently, is 1234. 

Tickets on sale now; mezzanine starts at $179. 

Are you buying? Why would you want to see the same show, same songs, same haircuts, whenever you want to see a band? Who would pay for the same old tune over and over? And how would 1234 compete with other acts out there blending holograms with surprise guest stars? 

Try asking anyone who has ever seen any orchestra play anything at any time.

Now imagine the most inconsistent band imaginable. We’re not talking about how the costumes change. Or the backup singers. Or the music. Or the manager. We’re talking a devotion to inconsistency that borders on mania. No two shows in the same town. In the same city. In the same state. Different food at every stop. Aided by social media face-targeting apps, no one is allowed to see them perform more than once to prevent even the slightest consistency among audience members. 

The band even refuses to play the same note twice, meaning that about four minutes into their first show, they had performed all the music they would ever create.

But, we hear you muttering, obviously there’s a middle ground. Don’t do it all the same, don’t do it all different—isn’t that just moderation in all things? We agree to a degree, but with one caveat: maybe we haven’t required enough consistency from our performers. 

Maybe our first band is a better band over all.

Hell, they lasted longer.

2.1.  Consistency 

Consistency (in the way we use the term) is the relative certainty that what has occurred before will happen again. Note that there is no value judgment placed on the result. A terrible restaurant that always sneaks a few too many jalapeños into your enchilada is just as consistent as a Michelin-starred restaurant that never fails to produce exquisite dishes. 

Consistency, by this telling, is not limited to experiences with businesses or schools, but also applies to people. It is one thing to recognize that certain individuals in your life are more “consistent” than others, though it reads as more true when the word “reliable” is used, but we argue that an ex-boyfriend who always bothers you on your birthday, who always drunk texts you on Thursdays at 3:09 a.m., and who never keeps a job longer than two months is more consistent than a parent willing to take your call unless they’re on holiday.  

The same applies to performers, whether they be dancers, singers, or NBA players.  Each performer creates, whether it be a performance of the chicken dance or the 32 fouetté turns, and each performance is then codified into a canon.  Over time, the consistency of a performer begins to take shape.

Here’s an example. Say that Taylor Swift and Steve Aoki announce a new collaborative album. Thumping beats play over the trailer announcing the collab along with hits from Swift’s past. And so you download the album the second it drops, thrilled to hear the next “Love Story” undergirded by EDM. 

Instead, you hear deep guttural screaming from Swift while Aoki plucks an out-of-tune violin, crying quietly to himself. 

Huh.

After the shock dulls, most of us are faced with a touch of cognitive dissonance. First, we think, good for her for trying something new, and maybe it’ll grow on you, and, well, artists should be free to express themselves in the way they believe best, kept in check by the harsh and unflinching marketplace and obscured by the privacy of your Spotify most-played list.

But also, what? This is not how either of them create music. I can’t show this to my kids. Oh god, what the fuck is the music video going to be like? 

Simply put, the contradiction does not live between the quality of the new music, but rather the expectations we had of Swift and Aoki in the first place.

2.1.1.  On Expectations

Each individual has their own unique and hyper-specific expectations for artists, lovers, and best friends. Some of those expectations are more rational than others, of course. Betting the farm that the new Chainsmokers’ song will sound like, well, all of them, is a very kind thing to do for your animals. 

But there are logical limits to expectations. Out of the thousands of YouTube theories arguing over the identity of the Zodiac Killer, no one, to our knowledge, has proposed either Taylor Swift or Steve Aoki. The reverse is also true: one would be forgiven for not expecting a young dancer confined to a wheelchair after a horrific drunk driving accident to perform either the chicken dance or the 32 fouetté turns.  

One more thing to consider: the degree to which an artist is consistent has no bearing on the quality of the work they produce. After all, Macallan 18 blessed with a drop of spring water never disappoints. So, an artist known only for drafting, in charcoal, realistic portraits of political figures has every right (and should be encouraged) to release an exhibition consisting solely of human-excrement sculptures of beloved cartoon characters. 

But let’s not pretend that our artist will be questioned about his upcoming projects in the same way. 

After the shit show, you see, everything is on the table.

2.1.2.  A Quick Probability Game

Now let’s head back to Jepsen. We’re going to give you three events that are common, or at least not beyond the bounds of our current reality, for a young, unmarried pop star. Using just your gut, how likely are you to read any of these headlines in the next two years? 

1. Call Me My Lawyer: Carly Rae Jepsen arrested for amphetamine possession at LAX; accepts plea bargain for reduced 3-year prison sentence. 

1. The One: Wedding bells ring as Carly Rae Jepsen marries boyfriend of two weeks in shocker Vegas quickie wedding. 

1. Oops We Saw It Again: Carly Rae Jepsen stumbles out of limo in torn dress, marking her sixth vag-slip this year. 

Even though Jepsen shares many critical traits with the young pop stars about whom versions of similar headlines were written, including hit songs, bubbly personalities, and unimaginable stress over slumping sales, it is our goal to persuade you that we (speaking as the public) will never see Jepsen captured in ink as above.

But people are inherently unpredictable, we hear you grumble. So many factors, including socioeconomic status, weather, mood, illness, and genetics go into any specific decision that how do we know Jepsen isn’t staring down one hell of a roller coaster over the next couple of years? 

Humor us for now and agree that each of the above headlines feels a bit unlikely. 

2.1.3. Consistent Business

As we touched on before, businesses are also consistent to varying degrees. You might find a description of what they view as their “ideal constant” typed out in their mission statement, plastered on take out bags, or dropped as a footnote in a 10-K. But the result is the same: the company is telling you what they do and what they can deliver to you, but only about 80% of the time.

That number is not an odd joke. We mean that businesses strive to meet their customers’ expectations only about 80% of the time, while utilizing every ounce of the remaining 20% to invent new and imaginative products that scratch where you didn’t know you had an itch.  

Follow us into the real world. Consider that McDonald’s sells and will always sell you a Big Mac. That most likely constitutes 80% of your visits to McDonald’s: give me the Quarter Pounder, the McNuggets, cause I want what I’ve always had. But McDonald’s also knows that 20% of the time, you’ll want to step out of your golden-arched comfort zone and try something new, something different. So they make oddities like ranch chicken wraps and experiment with vegetarian options. 

That consistency, then, gives McDonald’s a tangible advantage in the marketplace.  They get you post-breakup when you need to drown some feelings in fries, they get you at breakfast with that new friend six months later, and they get you on your wedding day when you’re full of nothing but fondant and champagne and about to hurl, and your freshly-minted spouse makes a run to the only business open and serving hot food at 3 a.m. 

Or consider Apple. Few companies will ever match Apple’s ability to balance consistency with novelty. The majority of Apple’s antiseptic-verging-on-cloying press events consist of updates and iterations to existing product lines that may well be pleasant and predictably perfectly-manufactured, but don’t elicit a guttural ache the way two products have: the iPhone and the iPad.  But lightning strikes the tallest trees, and a bit of Jobsian magic and a seamless supply chain gave us the iPhone and iPad, devices that made even the most devoted anti-Cupertinoistas twinge. Even the most cynical among us must agree, when those rare Apple moments hit, they land.

Taken together, consistent businesses enjoy an advantage that other businesses do not: they are always there, always watching, always waiting, and always ready to strike. This advantage is massive and may be best stated as: A brand’s ability to intersect with every pivotal moment in your life, without being the focus of any of them, will be the defining feature of any given brand’s success in the marketplace of the future.

2.1.4.  Benefits of Consistency 

Just as friends, parents, coaches, teachers, lovers, muggers, and preachers each have an inherent consistency (or lack of consistency) to their behaviors, businesses do as well. The goal of a business with respect to consistency is not to achieve a mythical 100% success rate as to their products or services, but to incorporate risk and growth into their offerings to get you think, “I gotta have that.”  

What would it look like, we wonder, for a singer, trapped in (traditionally) a volatile career, to achieve not a mere 80%, but instead something approaching 100%?  We can think of four distinct (but related) benefits from pursuing consistency as a musical artist:

1. Reviews. Similar music stretching across decades gives reviewers a baseline to appreciate and understand the artist. On average, a consistent performer will have better reviews on every succeeding album because they bypass the dreaded “sophomore slump” and won't struggle to mature while similar artists stumble. Think Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera. 

1. Catalog. Unlike other artists who have early albums divergent in tone from later albums, or artists who attempt to strike a unique feel for each song on an album, a consistent catalog can be downloaded and played on shuffle or piped into a bar without worry. The digital age makes this more vital than ever. In the past, when you followed an artist, if their music hit a point at which you no longer cared to listen, you stopped buying their albums, but kept the old vinyl on hand for parties. In the modern world, an album from 100 years ago looks identical to an album from 10 minutes ago, giving an advantage to performers who sound similar on each track. 

1. Performances. Maybe you’re familiar with the dread that sinks in when you realize your favorite band will never again play live the tracks off that album, the one that played while you cried into your McFlurry after that bitch broke up with you. Consistency means that songs became interchangeable, and you’re more willing to bleed for the premium seats because hey, all the songs are great. And you’ll do it again and again.

1. Conceptual Purity. Generating sound and selecting words and smashing them into each other in a non-grating way is hard. Easier to have a box of themes and subthemes at hand, and to write songs by shaking the box and placing those well-worn and market-approved themes next to each like dominos.

2.2.  Sincerity

Sincerity is an invaluable component of our analysis, but its applicability here is perhaps counterintuitive. Like the concept of consistency, we do not ascribe a value to sincerity. A person may be entirely sincere when they state their intention to murder you and yours. Likewise, several markers of common sincerity may actually be cloaking malintent under the veneer of expectations—consider the young waif with trembling eyes promising that this time they will remain faithful. 

Before we turn to Jepsen, allow us to test your intuitions about (our view of) sincerity:

2.2.1.  A Quick Sincerity Quiz

Which of the following musical acts is the most sincere?

1. Journey

1. Backstreet Boys

1. BTS

1. Cannibal Corpse

An odd list, but illuminating. Let’s go one by one. 

Journey. At first glance, there’s a lot that looks sincere here. Journey is one of the bands on the soundtrack of the ‘80s, and those catchy-to-the-level-of-mononucleosis stadium rockers and ballads still amplify beer goggles at bars catering to both frat bros and geezers. 

And make no mistake, finding a Filipino frontman was both a brilliant and tactful decision post-Perry, but it nevertheless exposes that all those songs written about supposedly specific moments in the band’s life were less core to the band as a band than first appears. Note that an identical question of sincerity is magnified by two with respect to the sincerity of Queen, given Adam Lambert’s and Rami Malek’s existence. In sum, Journey is a great band. But swapping out your lead singer while still leaning on the greatest hits is great fan service, not sincerity. 

Backstreet Boys. With a bifurcated career, first a period in the late ‘90s and again twenty years later, this band is certainly more sincere than Journey in the specific aspect of having all original members present in both iterations. But there’s another reason we would argue they rate higher than Journey in sincerity on our list. 

No one over the age of thirteen labors under any delusion that Nick Carter chain smokes to cope with the weight of having to, you know, write music and lyrics. But there is a certain revelatory joy in knowing that somewhere in Los Angeles a room of Ivy League-educated Millenials do stress-Juul over that old question: can we rhyme “fire” with “desire” again? (Spoilers: the answer is never not yes.)

BTS. A recent import tearing the charts apart in the United States, BTS have the distinction of directly making sincerity relevant to fans’ appreciation of the band. They did this by blowing the lid off the Saw-ian torture chamber young Korean (and other Asian) stars must endure to earn the chance to enter an even worse torture chamber before being forced into the cold when declared old (about 26). BTS insisted on writing their own lyrics and singing about not happy things, and we, without question, declared them so sincere.  

And here you find yourself in a trap:

If we consider the Backstreet Boys sincere because we know they use writers for their music and lyrics, but never pretended otherwise, what happens when BTS states that the act of writing music and lyrics makes them sincere? 

It’s an odd little puzzle, similar to how Taylor Swift is considered a “solo singer/songwriter” when a casual inspection of her albums’ credits reveals a cast larger than Cats. For now, we sail away on Theseus's ship. 

Cannibal Corpse. We’re a bit hopeful you haven’t heard this band, unless you know exactly who they are and what they do and like it, in which case, go you. But their songs are violent, disturbing, and merit a hard R for their distortion pedals alone. 

And yet, you guessed it. We view them as the most sincere musical group on this list. They decided to an absurdly specific degree what they were going to do and how to do it. And then they did it. And they keep doing it. And you can say a lot of things about them (and pearls have rarely been clutched tighter), but goddamn do they mean every single note. 

What we hope to offer in our silly quiz is insight that traditional markers of sincerity, such as age, reputation, transparency, and norm-breaking do not reliably predict whether a band or performer is sincere at their core. This is true for a couple of reasons. 

First, anything related to performance is suspect, as that is the stock and trade of, well, performers. Put another way, the paychecks depend on image as well as art, so we caution against using either to judge sincerity. (We would caveat this by noting that none of us are in any way related to the entertainment industry, so we don’t doubt that there are nuances to this point we don’t understand.) 

Second, the markers mentioned above may all be considered external, in that they are aspects of the band that are derived from forces beyond the band. By this we don’t mean to say that BTS writing their own lyrics is not an internal act, but that the act of writing lyrics functions as a floating concept, and may be either plucked from the clouds and applied to a band, or not. Similarly, a band that breaks norms such as by using profanity or risque costumes makes that choice set against the standards of propriety. If profanity is not an issue or everyone is a nudist, those decisions no longer have the capacity to shock. 

Sincerity, then, is an internal thing. It is a band playing their sound, and perhaps expanding it with age or improving it with technology, but always understanding at core what made them want to pick up the sticks in the first place and start playing. We suspect the acting style of Christopher Walken fits in here, as does that of Nic Cage. For directors, we think Michael Bay makes a fine example. 

2.2.2.  Sincere Marketing 

Even though it smacks of paradox, it is for this reason that sincerity is best appreciated as a form of marketing. A company, for instance, who promises a long walk through a maze ending with meatballs and then constructs buildings that allow you to do precisely that everywhere from New York to Utah is consistent, yes, but also sincere—a result of honest marketing and focused experience. 

This works in reverse. A company that promises 99-cent products suffers no slight to its reputation when that glass you bought a week ago shatters under a little soap and warm water. You might even say that a dollar store’s reputation fares better even with a higher failure rate than a hot new indie pop-up food stand serving truffle-infused cotton candy. Yes, you might think, fate broke that cheap glass, but I stood for three hours for promised pink clouds of earthiness—and gag. Other than bored YouTubers and tourists with time to kill, who thought that was a good idea? 

The problem, we submit, with truffle-infused cotton candy isn’t the concept, but rather that no one dreamed of making it when they were young, trained for years to realize their dream, and after so much toil, birthed the end product and served it up. More likely, a committee hit shuffle on trendy food and issued marching orders. We can feel dissonance, and it drives us forward, yes, but also repels. 

So, we set aside businesses that promise to deliver high quality, unique experiences and do, and terrible businesses that advertise more about the quantity of their product a dollar will get you than the freshness of the ingredients (but who are open at 3 a.m.), and turn to that dreaded middle ground. 

Businesses that never promise the world, but also never promise that you won’t mind losing their products are put into a difficult position. The dilemma has three separate aspects:

1. Mixed Expectations. Businesses who offer good (not exceptional) quality and reasonable (not rock-bottom) prices, find themselves at the mercy of customers seeking qualities and attributes found in “higher” and “lower” places. 

1. Inconsistent Messaging. Commercials are odd in this sphere, as businesses are forced to cloak themselves in everything except for their price and quality. This shows up in cable companies with identical price points and service tiers, who must cite silly surveys and “stand-ins” for customers. Businesses in this unfavorable position resort to tying their products to market-tested and generated ideas, e.g., cigarettes may or may not be toasted, but that fact may be all a customer has to distinguish between identical colored boxes.  

1. Extrinsic Appeals. Given no inherent comparative advantage, brands bounce between images and ideals with no inner core, resulting in Super Bowl ads tackling racism to bump up their diet soda sales. Worse, this problem compounds with time, until at some future date we will all be able to view side-by-side ads for the same company utilizing two opposite ideals. 

Turning back to artists, each of these problems apply with equal verve to the pop music scene. A band, for example, that has (i) a couple songs you enjoy; (ii) an album you hate, and (iii) alienating live performances has a greater challenge in winning you over with a new single than a rival band that has, to your ears,  few misfires. 

Pop artists also swing back and forth between who they were and who they are. This is a natural fact, to some degree, as few among us would begrudge a young, fiery singer turning more introspective with time. This also allows artists to grow with their fans, so right as the songs about sex and drugs hit, their audience is on the cusp of stripping down and lighting up. 

The third factor, however, more than makes up for the second. This is that dreaded sell-out culture, the dumbing down of affective early work, of burnouts who got a few nickels, showered, and bought suits. 

We are unsure at present if this may even be an issue, in both businesses and pop singers. An entity, flesh or otherwise, staying static for decades on end smells of death and decay. It is an old saying, but to change is to live. 

Remember this when we get to Poppy.

2.2.3.  Benefits of Sincerity

The benefits of sincerity, as applied to people and businesses, are more subtle than consistency, but just as rewarding. Ignore McDonald’s and dollar stores. What would a sincere business, currently competing on everything from Instagram catchiness to mythic ideals to prominent spokespeople, gain by declaring with one voice this is who we are, and then never not being that?

1. Underlying Value. Our view of mid-tier businesses, whether they be restaurants, law firms, or mechanics’ garages, is one of struggle; they are not one of the big players with the innate advantages of scale and reach that brings, nor small and scrappy enough to need (and thus create) innovative solutions or perish. Telling yourself that you will always be sincere as a business forces you to consider painful questions like “do we only exist because we’re headquartered in central Arizona and our competitors are based out of California?” It may be uncomfortable to discover this fact, but now you can double down on your strengths. 

1. Alignment. If you, and by extension your employees, understand your unique strength, that not only influences your operations and internal philosophy, but can be communicated to your customers. It may not feel great to know you’re bottom of the mid-tier, but you may not be for long if you focus on your value and accumulate renown for it. Rather than create policies such as customer rewards to bonuses based off industry trends, you can tailor every aspect of your company towards your purpose. 

1. Specialization. If you know what makes you unique, and your entire business is geared to that end, it won’t be long before you become the best at that, e.g., you are the only choice for customers in central Arizona—go to those other guys only if you have to.  And once you acquire a specialty, similar to learning a new language, the skills and lessons learned in acquiring that speciality have a lower marginal cost the further time goes on. It is easier to open a fine art boutique if you already own a renowned ceramic boutique, after all. 

1. Meaning. This one is more mushy than the others, but sometimes an answer is better than seventeen answers. What we mean is that if you believe you’re the best Arizona shop, and your employees, customers, and competitors believe it too, it’s a lot easier to wake up in the morning and answer those unspoken questions bubbling under the mirror. While others are left to wring with white knuckles every drop of animus they can from their withered spreadsheets, your spreadsheets are not ledgers of inputs and outputs. They are battle maps. 

2.3.  Perfect Product

To Jepsen, armed with the sword of consistency and the shield of sincerity. 

We first turn to consistency. We submit that Landis has staked 90,000 words in the ground establishing to our satisfaction that Jepsen is consistent. Not only do specific images (willow trees are a big one) appear with regularity, the themes and subthemes she uses begin to feel pulled from a Jepsen-bespoke Scrabble bag. 

Her music is another story, of course. Her debut album Tug of War (which we will discuss later) has an acoustic, earthy tone more reminiscent of a twangy Southern belle than anything Celine Dion ever sang. The lyrics are her most complex, which is a bit odd considering the chronological gap between these tracks and even her breakout hit “Call Me Maybe.” It is no understatement to say that Tug of War feels like Polaroids of her prior life shaken and pinned to a cork board for our inspection. In fact, we would argue that Tug of War is just as much a Jepsen album as Emotion, which is to say that if her next album beyond Dedicated were to be purely acoustic, it would sound like Tug of War II. 

In other words, Jepsen has a precise and careful musical style, has never deviated from it, and never will. 

Not because you have no interest in her doing so. 

Because she doesn’t.

But why think so highly of consistency and sincerity? The world has a tension to it. Systems that allow moments and events in your life to recur, day after day, month after month, are always pressing into and through systems that deliver unique-to-your-lifetime experiences. So you walk down the same street 1,623 times, and on trip 1,624, a fire burns away all you love, prompting a phone call, after which that street will never feel the same. 

We argue that all else equal, the more consistency and sincerity a person, place, or product has, the better. Note that we proffer no numerical formula. Note also that things are almost never equal. 

Three reasons why: 

1. In people, high consistency/sincerity in familiar situations allows for lower-level heuristical thinking to take over, allowing you to stress less for the same result. If, for example, your spouse is late two nights in a row, after years of punctuality, you may rightly assume that something terrible is going on, and be more likely to be correct, than a different spouse more used to wild ways. Or, of course, you may relax because there’s nothing going on, clearly. Either approach at each extreme is considered not foolish. 

1. For places, high consistency/sincerity helps both first-timers and life-long returners. For your first visit to an unfamiliar location, it’s better for it to match the description, pictures, and general attitude captured by the words “blessed by sun” than for you to mentally enter a manic point-and-click video game, overturning every other stone in a mad dash to find a buried key. 

1. It’s a bit more understated with products, but imagine the threat of a new barber bringing an untested razor to your throat without knowing exactly what corporation (who built razors for Union soldiers) or Brooklyn forge handcrafted that weapon. This is perhaps one area we feel we don’t have to emphasize: you really really really want consistency and sincerity in the tools you use to cut away your most intimate aspects, out of sight of the world. 

So, as we puzzled over our thoughts and concepts and what we saw as facts and what we pretended was true, it became clear that Jepsen was (or rather, is) a prototype, perhaps the most basic (not in any negative way) of not only her generation, but every generation. This was everything, we thought, knowing full well that the extent of what we thought was not enough, by any measure. 

But even then, in the early days of Turnkey Pop Star, certain of us were bothered by one thought, one idea, one overriding and obvious question:

Why pray for an ingenue when you can create one? 

And that takes us to Poppy.

3.  Manufactured Stardom

You’d gag on the air surrounding Poppy in the deepest recesses of the internet back in 2014, as web dwellers alighted on what looked like a digio-turned-physio fembot designed to titillate those who weren’t really living in their parents’ basements, but behaved as if they did.  Those androidic-but-oh-so-feminine mannerisms, deliberate-but-too-cheery automatonic voice inflection, and recurring cast of oddities marked her as a new “thing,” a pop princess knit from candy-coated air. There was little to no hard data about who she was, and that too felt deliberate. 

You’d be forgiven for thinking it was a hoax or scam, but seeing as how her product appeared to be her, bundled into bits and bytes and available on YouTube, the threat of an upsell never felt too close around the corner. 

And as the mystery grew, Poppy began to exhibit new and exciting, but also uncomfortable, behaviors, such as appearing to “upgrade” her operating system, referencing the Illuminati, and pimping Tide detergent in a video that felt refreshingly not sponsored. As the performances piled up, the world caught on that maybe “That Poppy” was not a hyper-realistic simulacrum of a post-ironic Britney Spears, but instead something worse: an art project. 

But the hope remained that Poppy had (what appeared to be) no limits on what she could do. True, there was the nagging itch that someone somewhere else was calling the shots, but the delight of a new 45 second (or 45 minute) video wore away the discomfort of paranoia before long. There must be something amazing here, reddit forums and YouTube comment sections agreed. 

This is going to end in spectacular fashion.

Away the curtain. The world now knows that Poppy is played by a young woman named Moriah Rose Pereira, in an act managed by her collaborator and director Titanic Sinclair (nee Corey Michael Mixter).  And after hilarious litigation—did Poppy steal all the things that made her Poppy from a previous Poppy named Mars Argo, real name Brittany Alexandria Sheets?—the parties and glitter settled, confirming that you can’t will a chart-topping off-brand Bratz Doll into the big leagues.  

How Poppy connects to Jepsen will burst into focus as we consider the attributes that make Poppy who she is, the advantages and disadvantages of those attributes, and what they say about pop stardom more broadly.  But we use also Poppy as an example because we believe Poppy represents the opposite of the breadth and depth of Jepsen’s success at wearing the skin of Carly Rae Jepsen.  

A lot of times, it is not the game you play, but the way you play it.  

Poppy is an outstanding player. 

Jepsen is better.

3.1.  Viral Princess

It can be difficult to summarize Poppy’s peculiar aesthetic, blonde and cotton candy and whispery singing and all that, but at core we believe Sinclair and Poppy generated certain overarching rules (calling them rules might be too strict, but the term “guidelines” feels too capable of mood-based evasion by Pereira) for her to follow in all YouTube videos, music videos, interviews, and fan interactions. 

These rules are:

1. Poppy is an android. Poppy is not human, but an android designed by unknown creators to approximate a young female Barbie-esque singer who loves without shame “girly” colors and products. As a consequence, Poppy is superior to women but beloved by all (especially men).

1. Poppy flaunts wealth. Poppy loves wealth and the finer things in life, flaunts (without care) cash, and sweats luxury. It is unclear (to us, admittedly) how much wealth Poppy has accumulated, or from what source her wealth is derived, but we submit that Poppy is not living her best life riding the poverty line.

1. Poppy is standoffish. Poppy does not interact with other singers, YouTube creators, or fans out of character. To be clear, she is neither rude nor dismissive, far closer to unfailingly polite. But the many interactions she has with fans may not be reasonably defined as warm. 

All at once, we notice something staggering: our rough list may be stated as “Poppy is [artificial/superior]” “Poppy does [love wealth],” and “Poppy does not [interact].” If you were to write these three commands on a slip of paper and hand it to a talented improv actor, within two hours you’d have a Yellow Page’s (one of us is old) worth of conforming and nonconforming behaviors. There is just enough there, in those three rules, that Poppy can find a way to never violate any of them, while generating new stories, songs, and soundbites forever. 

3.1.1.  An Eating Contest

Here’s what we mean. Imagine Poppy is forced by her masters to enter a hot dog eating contest where the winner receives a cash prize. Given this scenario, how would she behave?

1. An Android who is. Poppy may either eat all the hot dogs in an efficient manner or declare the hot dogs unappealing to her robotic sensibilities and eat none. 

1. Wealthy but. Poppy may deeply desire the prize money and all it might buy or declare disinterest because she is already loaded. 

1. Standoffish. Poppy may choose to remain silent and never acknowledge her fans or act charming or act coy. 

The pattern is clear. Because Poppy has an either/or mechanism designed into her, so long as she chooses an extreme in either direction her behavior will always fall within the rules. And those rules appear strict, but always have an out. Feeling tired or hungover or sick? Retreat to the robot persona. Feeling chatty? You’re a pleasure bot!

One thing we find fascinating about these rules is that a positive feedback loop clicks into place without much effort. Poppy makes a video following the rules. People watch the video and their expectations of her shift in a direction dictated by the rules. She makes more videos, shattering those expectations, but never violating any rules. This surprises viewers, and sparks desire to watch the next video. 

In other words, Poppy was in beta, and through our film theories and YouTube diatribes, we upgraded her to version 1.0. 

This is a planned, but still pleasant result. If your fans say you’re standoffish, you have that same + / - quality to your decisions (as Poppy) as before. But you now have the benefit of live feedback. If people say that Poppy is too odd, too impersonal (and these are the dudes who know a person pretending to be an android infiltrada when they see it), Poppy, through reading those comments, logging them into a database, and then executing future behaviors based on that feedback, can choose to play the #2 “charming” personality three times out of four. Over time, mystery will recur, as people begin to see Poppy as a benign, friendly, bland pop star. 

Now, of course, Poppy has the ability to ratchet up the oddity by embracing rule #3—no interacting with fans—and over time, the pendulum will swing to Poppy is too “much of a computer” and back she may—or may not—swing at her leisure, forever. 

There is only one potential flaw to this system. It is monumental, built in, and certainly a risk Sinclair thought worth taking. The risk is that someone identifies the existence of the game, and, worse than earning mere knowledge of the pieces or rules, begins to predict the next moves.  

In other words, Poppy only works if you never quite clock who Poppy is. If that teeter-totter of mechanical and sweet begins to feel, for the average fan, like a script, the whole thing falls apart.

But why? 

Because when there’s a timer, we choose chess over blackjack, which is to say we prefer perfect information games when we’re in a hurry. 

3.1.2.  Anticipating the Unknown 

Compare the experience of playing StarCraft to Checkers. Dense blackness conceals not only the enemy, but even potential resources from the player in Starcraft. Decisions must be made quickly, as the enemy is racing to gather, build, and destroy you, and so each binary choice begins to branch into webs of consequences, to the degree that a match may be won or lost in the opening seconds. Manual dexterity, pattern recognition, and above all, deep and sustained focus are required to compete at the upper echelons of the sport. 

Now consider Checkers. First, the game provides both players with perfect information as to themselves—and each other. It is not possible for a more talented player to move strategically in such a way that a player of equal talent could not identify and guard against the gambit. 

Second, the design of Checkers is deliberate and easy to comprehend. The game pieces are round, with no variation in size or color minus the traditional red and black. The board is equally spaced, but the exact size of the squares is immaterial. In other words, cast away on a beach and given 20 minutes to gather resources, you and a friend could design, construct, and play Checkers with nothing more than moderate effort. 

But the final distinguishing factor between StarCraft and Checkers is the level of focus required to both play and master. Even a rudimentary StarCraft player must understand the nuances between the human, robotic, and alien races, yes, but also understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each individual soldier or alien or tower, rendering the level of knowledge required to play even a single match far above zero. 

In Checkers, of course, pieces move at a diagonal, and jumping a piece removes it from the board. We suspect you could play Checkers pretty deep into a 12-pack before a spectator would catch on that you weren’t playing at your best. 

Now, back to Poppy. 

For our attention—our focus— she must be more StarCraft than Checkers. So long as we believe that Poppy might do anything, we are in an imperfect information game as to her origin, beliefs, and capabilities. When she first released a song, we added singing to what we know about Poppy. When she sat for her first odd interview with a YouTube channel, we added mechanistic to our mental list of her attributes. This activates an innate curiosity functioning almost as unfinished story—what if Barbie were a demented C3PO?—and forces us to focus when we watch her videos, listen to her songs, and muse about her whole thing, man, with both friends and strangers on the internet. 

And man, that intrigue crawls into our interest centers and captures our senses to blow our minds into never-before-explored recesses of the human psyche (wait, what does Poppy smell like? what does it, uh, feel like?) and makes every new piece of info so scrumptious that we eat our fill, over and over again. 

3.1.3.  Avoiding Death Canyons

We know very well that our monstrous appetites are tracked and recorded by digital sentries overwatching our every move and packaged into blocks of smaller blocks of data called analytical reports, but please ignore for a second those formal attention-capture reports and think of the bigger, more metaphysical picture. 

The act of following, cataloging, and appreciating every aspect of Poppy’s manufactured personality resembles nothing more than a video game. Granted, it’s a mash of online and offline actions and has no discernible scoring system (yet somehow still has hordes of anime-iconed trolls castigating you for doing it wrong). But above the ocean of off-color comments debating what we are allowed to like, we believe that all of us—including and especially fans of Poppy—are playing the Poppy Game, even though most of us are hampered a bit because we don’t know we’re playing. 

Consider. Most video game online shooters with competitive play feature maps designed by the developers to maximize fun or profits (mostly profits). The map layouts do not change, or, if they do transform in some way, retain their shape for at least a small amount of time. This allows developers to play test the map to pieces and predict the exact routes players will trend to at any given time. The developers use this knowledge to reward players, perhaps by placing a power up or weapon along their ideal route, or punish players, perhaps by placing a moving train or platform in an unexpected, but inviting, place. 

Players will adapt, however, given enough time. They will choose to venture down less-traveled paths to gain an advantage. And they will use their hard-earned knowledge to lash out. At a certain tipping point, even the act of walking down the most inviting pathways leads to inevitable respawn. 

Few gamers are unaware of this concept; what is interesting for our purposes is that the key differentiating factor between two players with equivalent skill meeting for the first time on one of these unchanging maps and locked in a death battle is not the players’ total time playing video games.  Neither gun barrels nor grenades. 

Instead, the key differentiating factor that determines who survives and who dies is the relative time each player has spent playing that exact map. 

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, on a map one player knows better than the other where all else is equal, the knowledgeable player wins. It’s easy to see why when you consider that having the most precise weapon loadout and hard-earned pin-prick accuracy will do little against a player perched on a platform in an area capable of being reached only with diligent practice (and plenty of time in his pocket). 

Now, if you consider Poppy’s videos, songs, and media appearances as a metaphysical “map,” then the gigantic risk Poppy and Sinclair took becomes clear. Fans of Poppy are “playing” the game of “experiencing” her, and with focus added in, every additional occurrence of Poppy lays another waypoint in the map of the mystery of Poppy. 

This, we admit, is obvious. But we offer one novel analytical idea: Poppy’s rules, designed to maximize mystique and teasery, actually exacerbate her unveiling. 

(And we promise this all applies to Jepsen.)

Here’s why the rules above are intrigue rocket fuel masking a severed brake line:

1. The rules offer instant novelty and serve to differentiate Poppy from similar artists, but also, crucially, marry her to mystery. 

1. Poppy enters the marketplace with that mystery as an innate advantage, and her odd mannerisms, which are unlike similar artists, require and acquire deep focus from intrigued viewers and listeners. 

1. As Poppy’s fame grows, opportunity beckons, and a variety of media outlets and marketers place her into new and novel situations, which force her to lean harder into the rules.

1. The combination of deep focus by fans and increased Poppy presence means that rather than a drip drip drip of Poppy, her audience gets soaked. 

1. More eyes and more minds mean that compilations, theories, and forums explode with itemized clues, stamping into existence a ledger where even the dullest stan can analyze, absorb, and appreciate what was obscured before: the rules.  

In other words, given enough time and focus, the game of Poppy shifts from Starcraft to Checkers. 

Before we leave this section, we ask you three questions: 

1. Did the art project called Poppy lose its luster because her guidelines were too alien, her guidelines were too strict, or an attractive young woman with a fake name triggers interest, but also suspicion? 

1. If you drafted guidelines that were humanizing and relaxed, and found someone known, but not a household name (like a third place runner-up on a Canadian singing competition), how many songs, interviews, and awards shows would it take for people to even realize they’re playing an imperfect information game and losing?

1. Now that we’ve hinted at how heavily your movements, behaviors, and thoughts are being tracked by dark, monstrous overlords, if you had the chance to burn away all their memories of you with fire, would you do it?

3.2.  Pulled-Back Curtain 

There’s a great moment in one of Poppy’s newer music videos for her song called “Bleach Blonde Baby.” It’s a fairly quick shot (and we will admit that the video’s quality is certainly not up to par with Christopher Nolan’s latest), showing her with attendants (or grey people? sure) presumably preparing her for the day, and combing out seven feet long eyelashes. 

She mentions these eyelashes in the lyrics, noting that “people stop, they stop and stare.” It’s a surreal visual that adheres to Poppy’s rules, but we also think stands as a marquee example of the spark creeping up the gas main. 

You can take this shot as telling two stories. First is the obvious: Poppy is an android who has long eyelashes (a mark of beauty worldwide tied together on a string with the recent boom of synthetic eyelashes), and is thus genetically superior. 

She may be wish fulfillment or fantasy, but she adheres to all the rules here, including wealth given the inclusion of attendants. The shot then, is perhaps not so odd and definitely not the weirdest one she’s done. 

But the shot tells another story, one we think is more interesting. Consider again the rules, but blend that thought with perfect information games. In other words, what is Poppy telling us about her through this moment, and how does it bear on our enjoyment of the “game?”

And this is where we think Poppy fell apart. Bleach Blonde Baby fails to add any new pieces to the game. 

The video also has a few Illuminati mentions, repetition of her sexbot leitmotif, tributes to her beauty, and high value placed on material possessions. The central conceit of the music video has her appearing as a queen (we read this as robotic when underpinned by the words (Rule 1), shows her with devout older worshippers (Rule 3), and shows her driving what is presumably an expensive car (Rule 2). 

So, if you’re playing the Game of Poppy, what new details have you uncovered? Very little that fills out your bingo card. Now, your enjoyment of the song is reduced to how much you enjoy her singing, the beats Sinclair cooked up, and the “karaoke factor,” measured by how likely you are to belt Bleach Blonde Baby buzzed in K-Town. 

Set in that light, another titanic risk Sinclair took becomes clear: fans of the mysterious Game of Poppy are probably not the same crowd attracted to mediocre faux-Britney rip-off jams. 

Why he did it seems obvious: his first project, Mars Argo, had a more indie old school vibe (to our ears, better music), but wasn’t taking off the way he would have liked. That’s because there was dissonance between his intent and his result. Fans of Mars Argo may have stumbled on their tracks and liked the groove far before they knew Sinclair was commenting on the music industry, not to mention that the name “Mars Argo” sounds like a band, not a character. Perhaps that’s why Poppy’s first video is just Poppy saying Poppy’s name for ten minutes. 

This is further exemplified by a fantastic Mars Argo video for the song “Using You.” The lyrics are clever (“You’re the only one who’s making me come to my sinful senses / I’ll never love anyone the same”), the video is shot with bright colors and allows Mars Argo’s blonde hair to pop, and features the track itself when played live entrancing and forcing dancing from a test subject. 

It’s too meta to function as a clue delivered by music video, because a curious music video fan may see the video and assume the band Mars Argo is just engaging in the same sorts of oddities that include Lady Gaga in a bathtub and Britney Spears in a fetishitic flight attendant outfit.  

And if you, speaking to the next Sinclairs of the world, attempt this sort of conceptual-meets-catchy, you run into a curious result: you have fans who enjoy the “game” and get it, and fans who buy your albums and see your shows because they love your product unironically, and there is little crossover between the two. Once you hit this position, you’re forced to make choices between your original “true” fans and those new, dumb fans who want commercialized crap and . . . wait, this sounds like the struggle of every band ever. 

So with Poppy, no music, at least not at first. Sinclair made it so obvious she was a product, a comment, a puppet, a thing. And this time, we got it. Man, we thought, that Poppy is crazy and creepy and a  little bit Britney!

And so, before Poppy ever sang a note, we already knew the words. 

And that’s how Poppy went from 50 million views a video to 2.5 million. That’s how she got sued. And that’s why, in two years, nobody will give a shit about Poppy. 

3.3.  Broken Robots

Now that we have delved dangerously deep into the strategic vision Poppy and Sinclair had when creating her character (a brainstorming session so epic that although the Poppy YouTube channel was created in 2011, her first video was not uploaded until 2014), we look back and back again, to root our assumptions and arguments in history itself. 

Our first peek into the past (culminating in KPop and meltdowns in hair salons) begins in an unlikely place: Pat Boone. Yes, the squeaky clean Christian singer who hawked acne medications and other wholesome products and turned down a chance to work with Marilyn Monroe. The idea of reputation being an element of performance, and that reputation being birthed from wholesomeness, is very not new indeed.

Just to give you whiplash, let’s bounce from the ‘50s and ‘60s to now, then back a decade and a half ago, and compare Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. Both Mouseketeers (along with Justin Timberlake, who has had his own tripartite successes in Disney, N’Sync, and his solo career), both pretty, blonde, and idolized by everyone from young girls to old men (although it should be emphasized that each group had unique and non-overlapping, ahem, fantasies). 

Spears burst into the scene with the energy of a fourteen year old girl swigging expired Four Loko, and soon conquered airwaves and cultural hegemony with what looked like ease. Aguilera, the more talented singer, represents almost an inversion of Jepsen; when the sappy “Reflection” from Mulan became her greatest hit besides that French dance number starring three other singers, she or her people or both decided to go dirty and nasty and then did just that. So the world possesses in physical (as opposed to metaphysical) format short music-backed pornographic bits starring a semi-nude Disney princess acting out those dirty old mens’ fantasies, only for everyone involved to realize no one cared. 

There is an odd thread here, but we want to pull on it just a bit. Spears went from forbidden fruit to meltdown to Vegas residency. Aguilera went from sweet to provocateur to afterthought. Timberlake went from Boy Scout to boy band to playing the Super Bowl. To add Poppy into the mix, we may say she went from enigma to ingenue and is on her way to becoming old news. 

The trend line then, seems to be that a star appears, burns bright, and then dies, following, fittingly, the arc of an actual star. Sinclair and Poppy, of course, realized this as well, by analyzing the same evidence we did, but misinterpreted the lesson. 

By making Poppy a mystery in the beginning, they may have thought the result—old news—was not possible because they calculated the starting point of Spears and Aguilera (known to many from so young an age), and correctly deduced a way to combat the effects of early fame. But they didn’t understand that the issue is the star’s trajectory, and that that line applies regardless of where you set the starting baseline. 

In other words, Poppy and Sinclair thought the level of information the public had about Spears and Aguilera was the problem, when the true problem was their lack of consistency and sincerity. To prove our point, regardless of your taste in music, do you doubt that Timberlake is a more reliable performer than all three of our pop princesses?

We’d say yes, but you could argue it either way (we know Super Bowl performances anger our argument a little). What we do not believe is arguable, however, is that Jepsen is far more reliable than all of them, Pat Boone included. 

And we think that’s because people smarter than Poppy and Sinclair (and definitely us) looked at the same trends and realized the problem was not where you start on the line, it’s how often the line jumps from bottom to top. Sinclair then, saw these trends and chose to comment on it.  Jepsen or her record label, perhaps, saw these spikes and decided to flatten them.

(Too late for Britney Spears, of course.)

And so here we are, with so many pop princesses entombed in transparent castles. 

At long last, we turn to Jepsen.

4.  From Canada With Love

We note at the outset (and in the interest of full transparency) that this is not a deep, heavily-sourced dive into Jepsen’s past.  Hell, this isn’t much deeper than what you’ll find on Wikipedia.

That is not a mistake. As mentioned in our disclaimer below, we have no ties with the music industry in any capacity, and so we possess no more behind-the-scenes insight than the casual fan. Our intention in drafting this quick exegesis of her history is to build the stage upon which our final conclusion will premiere.

To that end, we are untroubled by the lack of depth in this explanation, as we believe the lack of substance is intentional, and not by us. In other words, that Jepsen’s general audience knows only a broad sketch of her past makes isolating and identifying her specific rules (which we will note are almost certainly less strict than Poppy’s) harder, and allows the game to run longer. 

Search what you know about Jepsen, right now. 

She sang “Call Me Maybe.” She is a pop singer. She was on Canadian Idol. That’s exactly enough to give you a sense, in broad strokes, of who she is, but comes nowhere close to Taylor Swift, about whom screed after screed has been written detailing her wealthy father conspiring to snag her a career, or Demi Lovato, about whom live tweets chase news of serious health troubles. Or who can forget the tragic news of Ariana Grande’s tattoo mishap? 

We suspect you’ve heard about both the spelling-struggled stained skin of Grande and the intimate demons Lovato herself has described in two separate documentaries, but we bet you don’t know which place finisher Jepsen was in Canadian Idol (hint: we’ve mentioned it once above) and almost certainly not which year, tells us that fame, for Grande and Lovato, is not the same fame, for Jepsen. 

We will hear from Jepsen herself, below, as told through a single interview taken in 2016 (cited at the end). We do this to allow her to speak, but also to probe her answers. 

And so, with our three Jepsen facts in hand, allow us to introduce you to Ms. Carly Rae Jepsen.

4.1.  Canadian Idolatry

In an era of gossip blogs and unsourced YouTube hot takes, we begin our exploration of Jepsen’s past with a rare primary source: the bio page on her website. Accessed last on April 30, 2019, the first sentence states:

“On the follow-up to her U.S. debut album Kiss—a 2012 release featuring the Grammy Award-nominated, multi-platinum-selling breakout hit “Call Me Maybe”—singer/songwriter Carly Rae Jepsen brings new depth and dimension to her undeniably hooky but heart-driven breed of pop music.” 

This sentence has an odd structure; it feels like you’re flung into the middle of an episode of The Twilight Zone.  The second sentence clarifies the first, but makes clear that we’re smack in the middle of a discussion of her third album, Emotion:

“With a sense of pure feeling and passion inspired by classic pop records of the early ‘80s, E·MO·TION finds Jepsen conjuring up pop’s most thrilling paradoxes and delivering songs both carefree and introspective, tender and bold, sensitive and self-assured.” 

Did you catch it?

A subtle sleight of hand, but the ambiguity lurking behind the words hides a mountain.  

Look here, dear reader: “[Kiss is Jepsen’s] U.S. debut album[,] a 2012 release[.]” So, she has had at least one other album, but not in the U.S. Could be horrorcore, could be jazz. Could be dozens of albums, each dedicated to a different verse from the Kama Sutra. 

Her website does not tell us what that first album is about. A careful read suggests that the mystery first album must not be “carefree and introspective, tender and bold, sensitive and self-assured,” as Jepsen is apparently “conjuring” that for her third album. 

So much mystery!

Away the curtain. Jepsen released her debut album Tug of War in Canada in 2008. The music is folk-influenced, as opposed to electronica-influenced, but we would be at great pains to say that it is not carefree and introspective, tender and bold, sensitive and self-assured.

Before Tug of War, Jepsen appeared on Canadian Idol in 2007, finishing in third place. Prior to that she worked as a barista, and before that completed a year-long program at the Canadian College of Performing Arts in Victoria, British Columbia. Add in some early years acting and performing in school, and Turnkey Pop Star begins on November 21, 1985, with Jepsen’s birth.

4.2.  A Billion Views

The story of Jepsen’s United States debut carries notes of Cinderella (a Disney princess Jepsen portrayed on Broadway). Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez heard “Call Me Maybe” while in Canada, and, Bieber, after a few tweets, convinced Schoolboy Records to sign her. 

Notice again the disconnect: Jepsen, already a rising star (10,000 sales of Tug of War to her name and a third place finish on an internationally-known musical audition show), became a nobody so that she could be discovered. 

This isn’t an oddity in the entertainment industry, of course. Contra Fitzgerald, second acts occur in Hollywood (Robert Downey, Jr.), music (Bob Dylan), and politics (Jimmy Carter), even if we’re split on whether we want them to (Louis C.K.), with a frequency and success rate far higher than the suburbs. We’d also be remiss not to note that the opposite is true, with certain individuals never appearing in roles as less than exactly who they claim to be all the time (Nic Cage; Christopher Walken).

Nor do we find it odd that Jepsen’s history would be scrubbed from her website. That bio page, of course, is an advertisement, not a hagiography, and if her label does not wish to advertise Jepsen’s prior album under a different label, thus sending potentially paying customers to her 2008 debut, that strikes us as reasonable. Likewise, we offer no value judgments as to what her current label thinks of that prior project. 

We will point out, however, that she was actively working on her Curiosity EP, which was released through her major labels, at the time of the Bieber positive interference, and therefore we do not believe a hard break exists between her talents and vision and what the new labels claims as their own.

But time wears on, of course, and Jepsen received avalanches of accolades: sales, Grammy nominations, the coveted prize of singing the “song of the summer,” and a hat tip from President Barack Obama himself. Typical top of the world stuff. Things had never looked better for Jepsen. 

Then Jepsen’s third album, Emotion, flopped. 

You may think we’re being harsh or unfair, but how’s this for context: from what we could tell, Emotion sold only about 6,000 more copies that her debut, Tug of War. 

Whatever may have contributed to the weak release, it was not the music. Tracks from Emotion represent some of Jepsen’s best work, if one music critic after another is to be trusted. And, considering Tug of War was her debut, this third album did not hold her sophomore songs, so, no slump. 

All of this resulted in a dark night of the soul: Jepsen ended up opening for a lesser act in 2015, three years after stepping into the international spotlight. As we have no reason to suspect (i) drug abuse; (ii) romantic fallout; (iii) medical issues; (iv) financial issues; or (v) professional squabbles, why did Emotion fail? 

1. Option 1: Perhaps her age (Jepsen’s hardly an old woman at 33, but lifetimes older than Grande and Lovato, both born in the nineties)? 

1. Option 2: Perhaps her identity (stapled tight to a track channeling limerence and peppy beats, her new lead single starring Tom Hanks in the music video conjured memories of the past and promised listeners there was nothing new here)? 

1. Option 3: Perhaps it was the odd release schedule (seven of the tracks were released as singles, which is over 50% of the album’s twelve, and an international release also occurred before the stateside launch, meaning that for about two months, U.S. fans were free to pirate, fall in love with, and then discard her album before ever having the option to buy it commercially (Landis fans take note: that cycle is itself a microcosm of the Jepsen Pattern)?

Within her own words, you can sense how badly Jepsen wants to understand Emotion’s failure, how she tried her hardest and it didn’t work:

“They had a whole bunch of reasons for the game plan of [Emotion] . . . I look back, and I think it’s something that I will pay more attention to next time. Not that I wasn’t aware and involved and actively debating all of these things — singles and strategy — but at the time I probably trusted other people before myself, and I think that’s something that I took from this. I will learn to value my own opinion on things just as much as I give that power away. I think I really took my power with the artistic side of the album, and the things that I was more excited about handling, but I think it’s important to look at both.”

“I was unanimously across the board getting told ‘I Really Like You’ was [the best single] . . . And then as soon we got Tom Hanks on board, I was like, this is a moment in and of itself. But you can always look back and say, should I have?, and I don’t know[.]”

And you finally hear her land on a conclusion:

“There’s nothing I look back on and regret profoundly. It was all a very wonderful experience. But you do a cycle, and you look at how it played out. You look at the questions you had before, and you go back in with some new tools for how you handle it the next time around. I have those now, and I’ll use that as a force of benefit in the future.”

Taken together, the tenor of her words suggests mismanagement, not malfeasance or antipathy. In other words, it doesn’t strike us that this is a story about an evil record label forcing a young girl into a role she didn’t want, before casting her into the wilderness after failure. 

It feels more like a conference table of C’s and O’s debating how to best position a product, reaching rough consensus, and experiencing less than expected results. No one is to blame; data read in the past may not offer guidance in the future. Memories burn away. People behave in erratic and unfamiliar ways. 

Even the Call Me Maybe girl can have a flop. 

But wait. Isn’t our entire argument that this wouldn’t happen? She’s consistent, she’s sincere, she’s McDonald’s, and now you tell me that she’s a struggling pop singer? Are you goddamn kidding me?

We knew that was coming. 

But check again. We never said a benefit of being a turnkey pop star was sales. 

4.3.  Known Future

This writing is occurring in early May 2019 and will be released close to the release of Jepsen’s fourth album, Dedicated. Several of that album’s tracks have been released, and her “carefree and introspective, tender and bold, sensitive and self-assured” songwriting skills seem still in place. It appears that her labels understand the failures of Emotion and are launching a counteroffensive, and Jepsen, in her own words above, seems to realize that she must take a harder position on those issues that matter to her. 

From this, we predict the album will sell better than Emotion, but not climb to Kiss’s heights. Reviews will be good, maybe even stellar, fans will be satisfied, everyone involved will measure success according to their own yardsticks, and thirty years from now, Dedicated will come in at number 2 on a list of best albums of the ‘10s. A happy ending for all, if not a particularly ecstatic one. 

But there is something missing from this analysis. It is the same reason car owners ignore the check engine light, gambling with next week’s paycheck. It is the same reason a young couple pays a couple extra interest points on a mortgage to stave off a tricky remodel. It is the same reason CEOs take short term risks due to shareholder pressure.

Cash in hand feels better than an IOU from the future. A second beer tastes better than a clear head the next morning.

And a trendy hip hop collab is easier to create than a song catalog that will play in every home, school, church, hospital, police station, and stadium for all time.

Jepsen must really really really like IOUs and a clear head, because she’s been playing the long game for 15 years.

5.  Modern Model

We are here, at long last. Together, we have wound our way through brambles as dense and diverse as McDonald’s, Poppy, and the frozen wilds of British Columbia, Jepsen’s home province. We have gained much, and lost less inquisitive readers along the way. You have earned answers through your tenacity and grit. You have followed us very deep into this peculiar box. 

And now, reader, it is time for us to show our cards. We do this in two turns. 

First, what do we think is really going on with Carly Rae Jepsen? And second, what does it all mean?

Our answer to the first question in black and white, although we want to point out it’s been in front of you all along, hidden in plain sight in the Table of Contents: 

Carly Rae Jepsen, through consistent and sincere application of her key seven themes based on love, harnesses her believable reliability to manufacture stardom based on a modern model less focused on short-term success than long-term influence in a world where media increasingly becomes air.

The answer to the second question is more philosophical, and we will turn to it, but first: the benefits of being a turnkey pop star.

5.1.  Embarrassment Erasure

The first benefit of being a turnkey pop star is the absence of a problem. If the star has a statistically low chance of causing trouble in the first place, the bar for trouble is set higher than for a similarly-situated ingenue who may turn out to enjoy the partying aspects of the lifestyle more than hard hours in the studio. 

A high internal consistency suggests that the singer’s propensity to act a certain way in a certain situation will remain more static over time than others, meaning that a bad concert or struggling album are less likely to inhibit future performance. A high internal sincerity means that the end product will be substantially similar to what came before with less effort required on the back end to AutoTune lackluster tracks.

This benefit, then, ripples outward into a positive feedback loop much like how Poppy’s rules enable her to capture the mindshare marketplace quicker than rivals. If a star is consistent and will always be on time and perform adequately, it is far easier to prepare tours, press events, and albums than if the star is prone to hysterics upon slight provocation.

This in turn leads to additional opportunities, similar to the rise of Poppy. But the key differentiating factor between Poppy and Jepsen, of course, is that Poppy is selling an artistic idea (or even ideal), and therefore is constrained at the meta level by that pretense. Poppy can never break character, not really, and that starts to build tension, as each performance and appearance is a Jenga block, stacking higher and higher. 

For Jepsen, and future turnkey pop stars, they are who they appear to be, and thus, not only is there no rising tension, there is a de-escalation of tension because as Jepsen’s career continues, she will become more skilled at navigating the tricky mazes of publicity tours and late night shows, and by so doing become more comfortable in those processes, as herself. 

Poppy, of course, gets better at playing the game of Poppy, or in other words, following the rules. It is true that Poppy is more polished now than she’s ever been, and it’s true that she has the crowd work down to a science, but we argue that Poppy is at core an Olympic athlete, always forced into playing her game at the highest level. That means work, work means stress, stress means tighter adherence to the rules, a/k/a playing her game, requiring more work, ending in more stress, forever.

So when selecting a turnkey pop star, it pays to select someone not prone to extremes and willing to endure the agony of sober night after sober night straining for the high notes. We suspect the music industry already does this, at least in part, by passing on otherwise talented young singers who exhibit problematic substance abuse tendencies and passing on them before the world learns their names. To this point, it will be interesting to see what the SoundCloud revolution and its cratering of traditional gatekeepers will do in the future to nervous executives.

Another positive benefit of high consistency and sincerity in a young singer is counterintuitive, perhaps, but no less real. We know we keep harping on the point that these concepts do not assume or require intrinsic values set high in the sky and plucked downward to alight on a pop star’s head, and here is where it matters. 

If you, as a label, want an edgy, angry bloke, go for it. The benefits remain. If your star is always smashing guitars and cursing out the crown, after all, you have a Poppy or Jepsen, but tailored for a different audience. So long as that audience has a little cash or a few hours to stream a few tracks, from a macro perspective, the result is the same. 

5.2.  Scalable Songwriting 

The seven themes and multiple subthemes Landis discovered recurring in Jepsen’s work pop out of her pen like stars dotting the night sky. The most interesting thing about these themes is that they are broad and emotional, as opposed to trite commands such as “party” or “dance.” 

Take the concept of limerence, defined as “the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings but not primarily for a sexual relationship.” Jepsen has examined this concept on “Call Me Maybe,” “I Really Like You,” and “Tug of War,” each time holding the idea to the light and rotating it this way and that. But notice something unusual about this description: it carries within it a story.

If you write “I am obsessed, but don’t want to be, overcome by my feelings for you, when you don’t want me,” you’re well on your way to crafting your own Carly Rae Jepsen song, just by sketching in the silence. This has another power too, in that the feeling of crushing so hard is universal, strikes anyone at anytime, and although it may decay with age, it never dies. 

And just like that, you have a verse that burns the young and warms the elderly, that captures the now and recalls the past. 

A bit better than describing another night at the club, we think.

But Jepsen is shrewd and knows that although her hooks will get you in the door, they aren’t enough to guarantee you’ll stay. Too many songs pleading for calls, so to speak, and not enough answering them is not the secret to longevity. For that, there has to be darkness. 

For that, there has to be misery.

Misery as an emotion is far from rare in music (there is, of course, an entire genre named after it). 

Let us, for a moment, wax philosophical and ruminate on the life and death, day and night, and love and loss cycles to which we are all beholden, and understand that songs written about that darkness are core to the human condition. Songs about rejection and fear serve similar purposes as a horror movie shared between friends on a windy night: they allow us to stare into the unknowable and see ourselves captured within. What would it feel like to have a killer in the backseat, we wonder. What would it feel like to be crucified?

What would it be like to receive that phone call, the one you can never expect no matter how many times you hear it answered by others? For just a heartbeat, a drop in a very deep pool, we are consumed by shadow. We let it in. We become the darkness; the darkness becomes us.

But dawn follows. 

So Jepsen sings about heartbreak and sorrow and tears wrung from memories of nights past. But after, she sings about that first flash of fleeting flame. Limerence and misery echo and rotate, an entire universe of beginnings and endings collapsed into bits and bytes, lifetimes bouncing into and through each other, sparks set free on a summer night.

This is her power. This is her gift. It is not enough to cobble together disparate feelings from ramshackle lived experiences and staple them together with common chords. It is not enough to recall that lover, or that summer, or that heartbreak, and spin those recollected memories into A and B rhyme schemes. 

It's not that it feels hollow. 

It feels incomplete.

Other artists fight and bleed to capture a single flicker of a memory and hold it in their hands, begging our inspection. Jepsen reaches into the eternal song written by existence itself and beckons us forward, so that we may kneel, and in that moment, drink. 

5.3.  Turnkey Pop Star

And that how is Jepsen writes her music. It is, of course, although not completely, conjuring up paradoxes and delivering songs both carefree and introspective, tender and bold, sensitive and self-assured. 

It is, completely, a marriage of consistency and sincerity crystallized into its final form: 

The collision of history and prophecy.

Jepsen’s consistency allows her to garner high reviews from music critics, ensuring that her reputation will always rest on high shelves, irrespective of her sales. Her catalog allows every song to build into her three act structure, itself a microsom of life and death (but dramatized as love and loss), meaning that even if she were to release 500 tracks, you could hit shuffle and hear a version of our ancient story every time. 

Her performances are distilled glimpses into her psyche, in the sense that they are not orchestrated or calibrated, meaning that over time, she will grow even more comfortable and proficient as a performer. And the conceptual purity of all of the above means that a breakup or breakdown won’t interfere with her songwriting vision, as the story of human life will always bend to include it all.

Jepsen’s sincerity allows her to never stray too far from that underlying value (demonstrated as longing) that led her to audition for Canadian Idol with a song she wrote herself. This aligns all aspects of her songwriting business, from the style of music she prefers, to the tone of her music videos, to the outfits she wears to red carpets. And critically, Jepsen herself has meaning. It is not, perhaps, the meaning that animates a politician to seek high office. Neither is it the meaning that drives doctors or rescue workers. It is something far more personal.

Jepsen has looked into the mirror of her life and answered that terrible question that haunts us all: Why am I alive? 

Only she knows the answer.

But the world knows what comes after. 

And that is why a young Canadian woman writes hyper-specific lyrics describing the ecstasy of falling in love, the ache of rejection borne from the end of that naive love, and the desperation felt by  pining forever for that love. 

Because Carly Rae Jepsen knows that only by so doing will her music never fade away. 

6. Media Becomes Air

Let’s finish this by turning our gaze forward.  If you have truly followed us all the way to the end of our adventure, we believe you are capable of accomplishing what we ask next. It is a challenge, made all the more difficult because it directly presses against everything you have been taught, whether in college seminars or at your local multiplex. But give it a go.

Take yourself 75 years into the future. Once there, you realize that there is no Google, no Apple, no Facebook. There is only one media corporation, called MediaCo. 

MediaCo is a fully-owned subsidiary of CommuniCo, which is itself a fully-owned subsidiary of BusinessCo (a fully-owned subsidiary of LifeCo). 

Once you arrive in this future world, you are given a device, a small metallic slab. After a few seconds tinkering with it, you realize it expands into a larger metallic slab that displays information. The service powering the device’s apparently limitless capabilities is provided by CommunicCo, and when you flip it over, you see BusinessCo stamped on the back, and in smaller letters below that, LifeCo. 

You see a large icon on what you assume is the home page, and on that icon, a music note. 

Let’s take a step back and analyze this scene. We suspect you might have a visceral, even negative, reaction to this, because obviously this is the start of every dystopian story ever. You, as the hero, will soon discover that the government has been corrupted by LifeCo, that LifeCo has been conducting heinous experiments on human subjects, and it is your job to spark a revolution.

Except, we promise that’s not the case here. Minor abuses of power exist in this world, and sure, not everything’s perfect. But this future is as it appears to be: everyone has access to these devices, everyone has access to the services on them, and you are even (after some slight snickering at your rudimentary grasp of English) offered a job. 

It is at this point you realize something you always knew, but could never quite capture, an echo of a memory of a dream from years past:  

Media used to be an event. 

You would dress up for it, mark it in red on the calendar. And not just formal events like concerts or stage plays, either. There were songs that could only be sung by families at reunions, stories that could only be told by those who knew their language in all its nuance, books that retained their power against idle eyes as so much of the text relied on the flicker of candles.  

Then the world stumbled forward and radios replaced pianos. You would huddle around the large box at night with your loved ones, enthralled by the latest thrilling turn in an epic saga and tune out ads for soap during the day. 

And then music shifted even further, from an event requiring complete attention to physical products you bought at the store. Your collections grew, and before long, you found yourself the king of a curated library, analog carvings tailored to your taste and available only in your bedroom.

Then the digital revolution ushered in an era of portability and replicability. You stored a library exponentially larger than your grandparents in the same place you stored your credit card. 

And on and on it continued, you realize, long past your death, until there are no companies, no copies, and no libraries.

There is only the thing itself: pure expression shared between everyone on earth. 

Media has become air.

You snap out of it. Things don’t seem so bad, you think. And as you’re about to head off to your new dwelling, you think a little music will help muffle the sound of your steps.

You tap the music note. Hundreds of years of music appear at your fingertips. You know exactly what you’re in the mood for: bouncy beats and that exact mix of backup singers and violins conjured to make you feel . . . alive. 

So you tap.

And you hear

I threw a wish in the well

Don't ask me I'll never tell

And soon, you realize, the world will birth more and more turnkey pop stars, and turnkey movie franchises, and turnkey book series, and turnkey video games, as we reach together into the melody of our age and the songs of ages past, and see and hear and feel the sublime, and on occasion, some of us will return with a piece of the sun itself held tight between trembling fingers, a bit of all of this, and we will convert it to bits and bytes and upload it to the clouds.