On Emotion

Did you know there’s actually never been a better time to heal your inner child?

Your inner child. You know. The softest, simplest part of you, whose knee-jerk reactions to discomfort or fear allegedly govern most of the decisions you make.   

There are any number of ways to get in touch with that babiest self, now; to assuage its ingrained fears so you can make better, more rational decisions when it comes to things like bedtime, or vegetables, or the fear of being abandoned.

Weirdly, though, despite this large-scale healing of all our primordial wounds and wants, it’d seem that beyond the veil remains a slew of stickier, swampier emotions.

What is one to do, exactly, about all the yearning? The self-doubt, or the melancholy?

These are hardly primitive emotions, not the way fear and comfort are. But if our inexplicable existentialist blues, or our shameful desperation to be liked, or our fears of missing out aren’t the jurisdiction of the inner child, to where should we extend the healing?

Feelings like these are overwhelming. Unwieldy. Sometimes baseless. Mostly kind of fucking embarrassing.

They are, decidedly, the domain of your inner pre-teen.

Not to worry. Fortunately, whereas inner child work can continue for a lifetime, the labyrinthine emotions and full-bodied cringe of the inner-preteen can be resolved in about fifty four minutes.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s third studio album, released in 2015, is a glittering, full-bodied portfolio of 80s-synth revelation. It, and the B-sides that followed, are two stone tablets inscribed with the tenets of pop music perfection.

It’s a surging, sour-sweet catharsis. It’s that fifth raspberry vodka cruiser rising the wrong way back up your throat. It’s a euphoric scream out the open sunroof. It’s every climax of every John Hughes movie ever.

It’s August 2015, and armed with her pealing saxophone solos and innumerable synthesiser presets, CRJ strides into a cultural climate where hits in praise of strong-and-independent-girlbossery dominate the charts, primed to deliver a shimmery, synthpop summer hit —

And, instead, sets down something violently, radiantly needy.

The inner pre-teen frequently suffers from the sorts of feelings that make one feel like a sad, small, pathetic and goopy little puppy. Obscure bouts of existential melancholy, an interminable ache to feel that they’re wanted, and constant self-doubt in regard to both.

It is afraid to stare directly at these feelings for too long, lest it get swallowed whole; It can’t bear to be seen with them, lest it jeopardise its chances at being liked and included (which have always been on thin ice, as it stands).

The inner pre-teen doesn’t know if it has the structural integrity to withstand a rejection like that. Actually, yes, it does, and no, it doesn’t.

Emotion calls bullshit. Fuck that noise.

Emotion is radioactively desperate. Incandescently needy. And under the spotlight of its billowing, prismacolour soundscape, Emotion doesn’t flinch at ratifying these feelings into the sincere, resounding requests asked of every track.

Run Away With Me. I Really Like You. Gimme Love. Let’s Get Lost. Emerging from Jepsen’s neediness is a set of commands, ones that she refuses to withhold by any alleged reason of embarrassment.

Rather, they’re a focal point, boosted by snappy, sugary instrumentals, spurring drum kicks, those samples of kids chanting ‘hey!’ that were really big in 2015 for some reason, and a surging, saccharine catharsis. I really, really, really, really, really, really like you / And I want you / Do you want me? Do you want me, too?

Or Gimme Love, which, read that title back five times to get the jist of the chorus.

Out of the aches that haunt your inner pre-teen, CRJ derives white-hot pop hooks, though careful not to divorce them entirely from their origin. Did I say too much? I’m so in my head, she breathlessly footnotes in the former; I want what I want / Do you think that I want too much? in the latter.

Jepsen submits her commands regardless of the goopy swathes of self-doubt that must inevitably seep through - and seep they do.

That raw insecurity collects at the bottom of these highly-polished proclamations of pining, manifesting in requests not so much commands as they are pleas. Even so, Jepsen finds no cause to shy away, not when we’ve come this far.

Just let me in your arms. Just let me in your arms. Show me if you want me, if I'm all that, begs the sparkling, sweeping ballad All That. This sort of stomach-curdling candour is perhaps not as neatly gift-wrapped as earlier tracks, but it’s afforded its lustre all the same.

Carly Rae Jepsen is in her prom dress, on your front lawn, throwing rocks at your window, with absolutely no intention of stifling the force of her own longing.

Rather, she pulls focus directly to the glow of its ugliest parts - a testament to the last twenty-six minutes and thirty-three seconds having rendered sincerity and embarrassment to be, for all intents and purposes, mutually exclusive.

They’re not, though.

And Carly Rae Jepsen saying as much doesn’t make them any more mutually exclusive, the same way that outright asking to be invited to a party only to hear that numbers are just, like, super tight, sorry, doesn’t make you feel any better about how things are going socially since you moved schools.

The same way that moving schools was never going to be the thing that resolved the occasionally-debilitating melancholy that kept you in bed for the better part of two months at 14, nor provide any hints as to where it actually came from, or how to get rid of it.

No, all moving schools would ever do was present you with a fresh social paradigm you’d exhaust yourself trying to fit into, complete with all-new aches and insecurities to be consumed by, and the new fear not just of the emotions themselves, but that they might bar you from ever properly belonging anywhere.

Whether the blues came from depression, or a proclivity to low mood spells given the ADHD, or a secret more complex third thing, they don’t ever really go away. It ends up not mattering. 

What you do figure out, eventually, when you’re about halfway through Emotion and three-quarters of the way through being 14, is that feeling those emotions more acutely than you ever have, and trying to evade them harder than you ever have, are connected.

Well. It’s not you that figures that part out.

Your inner preteen will always be convinced that if the pathetic goopy monster ever got out from under the bed, it’d either devour them whole, or worse, be totally embarrassing.

So far, Carly Rae Jepsen has dutifully pulled up the bedskirt to check for you, only to find out that, once again, you’ve built it all up far worse in your head. Nothing but dust bunnies. The cute kind, even, the ones you can be friends with. The ones from Totoro.

It’s a nice way to think of things. It’s a great metaphor I came up with. It’s not the truth.

But Jepsen knows that. And the most important thing Emotion does for your inner pre-teen is acknowledge as much.

That, sometimes, the sincere, needy, embarrassing monster is very, very real. And it’s you.

I still love you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I love you. I didn’t mean to say what I said. I miss you. I mean it. I tried not to feel it. But I can’t get you out of my head, the word-vomit starts to rise up in the pre-chorus of Your Type.

It’s an inversion of the earlier template. No more do Jepsen’s winded confessions of doubt seep through the cracks, they pound against the windows. They culminate in a fragile plea so futile it disappears entirely by the last verse: I want you to miss me when I’m not around you. I know that you’re in town; why won’t you come around to the spot that we met?

With both the request and its font of goopiness out of the way, what’s left for the chorus?

Five drum kicks like punches to the gut, and then, oh yeah. Rejection. And the total fucking embarrassment of it all. I’m not the type of girl for you.

For all its faith in its own candour, Emotion concedes that occasionally, all the weepy little puppy feelings turn out just as unappealing and pathetic as you always thought they were.

And reminds your inner pre-teen that, even so, you’ll live; because sincere is no more mutually exclusive to embarrassing as embarrassing is to still being danceable as all hell.

I’ll make time for you, the closing refrain extracts from the bridge. Ringing out over and over (and over and over, so that’s four times total), it bears traces of T.S. Eliot’s own love song profession that there will be time, there will be time.

C.R. Jepsen may profess that I’m not going to pretend / I’m the type of girl you’d call more than a friend, but at the song’s end, that goopy, yearning monster can’t help but make time, no matter how embarrassing, to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions.

That definitely-real T.S. Eliot allusion does more than make me, the author, look perceptive and well-read.

It reminds your inner pre-teen that even feelings that are pathetically mortifying when held up to the light - even the rejection, even your stunted acceptance of it - are universal, and valuable in their own right.

There’s a place for them, somewhere. There will be time to murder and create. It’s not a question of growing out of your pre-teen aches and fears; it’s about growing into them.

I didn’t just come here to dance / if you know what I mean / do you know what I mean? Jepsen asks in the album’s penultimate track. It’s not really a plea, or a command.

It’s a confession that reads something like a patronising femme fatale, or maybe a desperate final gambit. I only came here for you. Cards on her sleeve, heart to her chest.

All the fervency and embarrassment and luminescence and goopiness occupy a single phrase, existing simultaneously, one apparently not negating the other. Funny how that works.

Emotion’s bottom line, then, is that these feelings are intense. They deserve respect. But their ferocity only becomes a problem when you’re trying to evade or deny their existence.

Emotion asks your inner pre-teen to acknowledge them, outright. You come to realise they’re exceedingly ordinary; never anything to have been at war with.

And, even at their worst, they’re still universal. Still valuable. Still danceable.

And then the chorus falls off, and by god, is it danceable this time.

Sophie Rosen

10 November 2023