RAMBLE ON: "Waking Up in Vegas" by Katy Perry

Fuck it, I went and saw Katy Perry in Vegas. I’ve earned it. I deserve this.

In the late ‘80s, years of increased competition sent Vegas into a sharp downturn, and so began a new chapter for the city in the ‘90s: Family Vegas, the Vegas you could bring your kids to. It didn’t work – gamblers don’t drop $12k a night at a water park – and more importantly it didn’t fit. Vegas in the popular imagination is a place where you do things you can’t do anywhere else – certainly things you don’t want to share with your kids – and so, ten years later, Vegas had reverted to type with a new slogan: “What happens here, stays here.” To sell it, they blanketed the airwaves with hilarious images of partied-out tourists struggling to process what the hell they just did, or shamefully hiding their experiences once they get back home. It’s one of the most successful tourism campaigns in history, and not only did it turn Vegas back into Sin City once and for all, it also achieved something remarkable: It turned regret into a selling point.

Regret has always been a key component of the Katy Perry experience (in more ways than one, over the years). Katy – colorful, crass, spectacle-above-all-else – has always been a natural fit for Las Vegas, so much so that it’s surprising she hasn’t had a residency there already; with a permanent venue she can turn her already elaborate live show into a full extravaganza with even more costumes and dancers and props and puppets. The night I saw her, Katy (though a California gurl) emphasized her family’s roots in Vegas; her parents met at a Christian revival in Vegas, her aunt was a showgirl and her grandmother a seamstress in the very Vegas hotel she was now performing in (or, at least, the hotel that used to be there at the hotel she was performing in).

And yet, when she started out, she was playing in much different venues. For her performance of “Hot N Cold,” she started riffing on an electric guitar (I don’t think it was actually turned on) and said she was going to do it “like [she] did at the Warped Tour.” Yes, that’s a thing that happened, in 2008 Katy Perry did in fact perform at the goddamn Warped Tour, alongside Against Me! and Rise Against and As I Lay Dying. That now seems ludicrous, like imagining Cher at Woodstock, but Katy Perry started her career as a different artist. Not wildly different – no one was shocked by her turn as the biggest pop star of 2010 -- but different; more tomboyish, harder-edged, her music driven by guitars and bro-y edgy humor. This version of Katy could never have persisted, but it’s fun to appreciate her kind-of-rock era for what it was.

In 2009, “Waking Up in Vegas” became her third big hit, not as big as “I Kissed a Girl” or “Hot N Cold” but a lingering and welcome presence on the radio. I liked it at the time. I didn’t love it. There’s a lot of the original, brassy and grating Katy in there: “Don’t be a baby,” she says bluntly, “spare me your freaking dirty looks now, don’t blame me.” But the bigger problem was the one that would plague Katy all her career, the phoniness. Katy says it was inspired by a fake Vegas wedding she and her boyfriend once did together, but I didn’t buy it. Like so many of her songs before and since, it felt a little hollow – it seemed more inspired by the commercials for Vegas than by any actual experience.

Having been to Vegas as an adult a couple times now, I find this objection very silly in hindsight. There is no “real” Vegas, the fakeness is part of the charm, the simulation is the reality and vice versa. Who cares if “Waking Up in Vegas” is real or not?

One thing that makes it easier to swallow is that “Waking Up in Vegas” is probably the best-produced song of Katy’s career. Katy was still in her rock phase, and while it’s still glossy, producer Greg Wells keeps the song firmly grounded; it’s one of the few songs Katy ever made that sounds like it could have been recorded live. (Not coincidentally, it’s also one of the few hits of Katy’s career untouched by Dr. Luke, in case you want to listen guilt-free.) There’s an even bigger name on its pedigree; it was co-written by Desmond Child, the songwriter who helped make superstars of Aerosmith and Bon Jovi in the ‘80s and Ricky Martin in the ‘90s. That monster hook can be credited to him – he’d already written the riff and the chorus’s opening line when he first met Katy. Katy was the one who picked out the theme of the song, but her imagery comes straight from the commercials – hangovers, hazy memories of getting married, cash flowing like water, no regrats, baby. It may be plagiarizing the ads, but it’s a perfect fit for Katy, who decided early on in her career to be loud and careless, to speed recklessly forward and worry about the fallout later. This wouldn’t be a one-off either; for the next few years, Katy’s party songs (“Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” “This Is How We Do”) would equate fun with bad decisions – and not only that, they’d tell everyone to keep making them. Katy and her boy wake up broke and wasted and possibly legally bound in matrimony, and her response is, just go to the ATM so we can blow even more cash. It’s no big deal; this is how we do. Next Friday night, do it aaalllll again.

Despite what those ads would have you believe, consequences do actually exist. In 2020, Vegas must have started to feel scummy, so the slogan changed; now it’s “What happens here, only happens here,” deemphasizing the shame and secrecy and hopefully washing off some of the slime. That gross feeling overwhelmed Katy Perry too – years of being tacky and problematic led to crushing guilt, and in turn the disaster of the Witness era (as I’ve documented extensively). At her residency she seemed more self-possessed and happier to be Katy Perry, but I notice she only sang half a chorus of “Last Friday Night” and didn’t play “This Is How We Do” at all.

“Waking Up in Vegas” of course did feature in the setlist – she couldn’t play in Vegas without it. But I think Katy has no reason to regret this one anyway. “Waking Up in Vegas” is a song about being trashy but it’s not a trashy song; it’s a love song. Very much unlike her work with turbopop maker Dr. Luke, Greg Wells’ production is happy and poppy but not overwhelming; it’s clean, Mutt-Lange-ish, background vocals going ahhh-ahhh with a sort of breathless romanticism. If anything, its closest analog from her soon-to-come imperial era was not “Last Friday Night” but her most beloved track “Teenage Dream.” When she sings, “Don’t be a baby,” that’s the classless obnoxious Katy of 2008 coming out, but it’s followed by Katy cooing sweetly “Remember what you told me” -- a shared memory. Besides the commercials, “Waking Up in Vegas” also pulls imagery from 1992’s “Honeymoon in Vegas” where Nic Cage and Sarah Jessica Parker get married dressed as an Elvis impersonator and a showgirl. “Honeymoon in Vegas” is a dumb movie, but it’s cute and it’s romantic; the romance of kitsch is that it’s a secret joke that no one gets but you and maybe one other special person. What happens here happens only here, and only with you. Right now, listening to this, I think I could be convinced that this is the best and most resonant song in Katy's discography.

“Waking Up in Vegas” was the song I was most excited to hear in Vegas. The version she did that night was cool but something of a disappointment. She performed it, as she called it, “Vegas-style,” a big sexy lounge version with kicking showgirls and everything. It was fun, it was funny; it didn’t really work. With the guitars gone and the spectacle amped up, it had the kitsch but not the romance. I’ve never been there with a romantic partner but Vegas really is a romantic place, and it feels wrong to take that out of the equation and keep the focus on the glitter. But again, I wonder if I’m missing the point. I watched the most artificial pop star in the most artificial city in the world and I expected anything else? That’s what you get for waking up in Vegas.