A 'Dark Horse' that wins big

Three years ago Katy Perry tied an impressive chart record when her album “Teenage Dream” generated five No 1 singles on Billboard’s Hot 100. She matched a 23-year-old mark set by Michael Jackson, whose “Bad” in 1987-88 became the first album ever to produce five No 1’s.

The first three were “California Gurls” – featuring Snoop Dogg. the second single, the album’s title track, all electro wistfulness. The third single “Firework” was the album’s biggest-selling hit, an ersatz “It Gets Better” anthem that will probably be sung at elementary-school graduations for years to come.

The fifth of the five, the summer 2011 trifle “Last Friday Night (TGIF),” was accompanied by a memorable video that put Perry in braces and big hair for a parody of every ‘80s teen movie ever. 

But what was that fourth hit?

“ET”, featuring Kanye West. As a song, the alien-sex curio isn’t as grabby as any of the above-mentioned four hits. But amazingly, “ET” is the second-highest-selling single of Perry’s career (5.6 million copies, behind only “Firework’s” 6.3 million) and was the fourth-biggest Billboard hit of 2011. It’s also a song her label didn’t originally plan to release as a single. Reportedly, after “Firework”, Perry had to convince them “ET” could be a hit, and for the remix West was brought in as extra insurance.

I bring up “ET” because Perry’s new Hot 100 topper, “Dark Horse”, featuring rapper Juicy J, might as well be called “Son of ET”. The darkest track on Perry’s sparkly 2013 album, “Prism,” “Horse” is just as spooky – and it was conceived to fill the same slot in Perry’s otherwise bright-and-shiny oeuvre.

And like “ET”, its hit potential was not obvious. “This No 1 is the most unexpected one I’ve ever had,” Perry told Billboard last week when the song reached the penthouse. “ ‘Dark Horse’ has been a dark horse of a song, since August when [fan group] the KatyCats voted to release it early on iTunes, before Prism even came out. I’m so thrilled and grateful.”

The similarities don’t end there. “ET” was a pop-friendly approximation of then-current electronic music tropes –techno and dubstep –just as EDM was beginning to storm pop radio in 2010. Likewise, “Dark Horse” is a pop-friendly version of the hip-hop/electronic subgenre known as trap; it retains trap music’s synth sheen, if not its druggy bleakness. Perry’s version of trap music is then painted over with goth nail polish –made even gaudier in Perry’s “Spinal Tap”-worthy performance of the song on last week’s Grammy telecast. Both songs are blippy, spacey, and broadly danceable or at least bounceable, if you like your club music minimalist.

Unsurprisingly, both songs were co-written by pop mastermind Lukasz “Dr Luke” Gottwald). He’s worked closely with Perry since she broke in 2008 and is responsible for the bulk of her chart-toppers. And he, too, seems to have viewed “Dark Horse” as an unofficial sequel to “ET”. He first wrote the earlier song with Juicy J’s long-time rap crew Three 6 Mafia in mind, before Perry snagged the song for herself. T6M are best known for their Oscar-winning “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”; they had a handful of gold and platinum albums before the Oscar win, and a handful of Top 40 hits afterward. 

Sonically at least, Gottwald, Perry, and their army of studio wizards did a better job the second time. Though it may have been a blockbuster hit, “ET” was lugubrious, dopey, and left a bad xenophobic aftertaste. “Dark Horse” isn’t a great song, and it hasn’t entirely solved the dopey-lyrics problem; Juicy drops an unfortunate Jeffrey Dahmer simile right at the start of his verse. But on the whole “Horse” is more energetic and has a brain-sticky digital bounce. Ageing Gen-X fans of vintage synths might even find its keyboard hook warmly familiar – it’s a sound R&B and hip-hop have been mining for several years now. Juicy’s rap is catchy, and Perry’s yelp of a voice, an acquired taste at best, is well matched to “Horse’s” insistent ache.