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Illustration | Mia Carnevale
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The first time I listened to Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2015 album E•MO•TION, I was freshly eighteen, sitting on the stoop of my parents’ house, and biting into my first ice cream truck popsicle of the summer. It was the summer of 2016, between grade 12 and first year. After a particularly awful school year, I found myself reverting back to my old coping mechanisms. I refused to acknowledge my feelings lest I revealed some sort of deeper trauma. It was easier to pretend that everything was fine, hold back my tears, and be the goofy funny girl that everyone knew me to be.
Then I heard “E•MO•TION,” the song, and the floodgates opened.
Throughout high school, I pretended that I hated pop music and singers—especially female pop artists. I scoffed at my friends who loved Ariana Grande, while secretly spinning Taylor Swift’s Red on repeat. I tried to give off the impression that I only listened to “serious” music.
I was scared that someone would find out about my shameful love of pop music. But it went deeper than that—I was scared of the connotations that loving pop music carried. I thought that I needed to maintain some level of “cool,” some level of “I’m-not-like-other-girls,” that could only be achieved by listening to “real” music, like classic rock and folk.
But that day, on my parents’ stoop, when I heard “E•MO•TION” for the first time, I couldn’t stop crying. Carly Rae Jepsen somehow managed to reach into the deepest depths of my soul. She pulled out my darkest secrets and insecurities, and forced me to come face-to-face with what I thought was the worst version of me—the one who felt all her feelings. This sudden burst of emotion, rather than inspiring a journey of self-discovery to become a less closed-off individual, scared the hell out of me. I guided myself back into my overt and public bashing of pop music.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when I was at my friend Noah’s house, that I heard another Jepsen song. He played “Boy Problems” and we started dancing around his kitchen. Again, there was an outburst of emotion—this time, joy. When I went home that night, I listened to the rest of E•MO•TION, all 54 minutes of it. And this time I let myself feel everything.
I laughed and cried, felt giddy joy and bitter sorrow. It was stupid, I thought, that I was having such a visceral response to what many would consider “bad” music. E•MO•TION led me on a journey of musical discovery. After Jepsen, I found myself listening to Selena Gomez on the subway, dancing to Ariana Grande in my bedroom, and scream-singing to Zara Larsson in the shower. I even revisited their predecessors, Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, and Hilary Duff. Despite their diverse sounds and images, all these singers had one thing in common—their music conveyed emotions and feelings that I had previously been unable to express.
Pop artists, especially female pop artists, have often been thought of as shallow—incapable of communicating the same emotionality as capital-S “Serious” music. I had also found myself in the school of thought that considered female pop artists to be vapid, stupid, and lacking artistry. My own internalized misogyny made me think that liking female pop artists would invalidate my intelligence, and that if I enjoyed pop music publicly, people would stop taking me seriously.
This continual discrediting of female pop stars is fuelled by misogyny; their artistry is rendered inauthentic and invalid simply because they are women who want to express their feelings. Unabashedly loving a bubblegum pop princess from Nanaimo, BC was the perfect storm of “girly,” poppy garbage to deteriorate whatever cool girl pseudo-intellectual vibe I had created for myself.
As I delved deeper and deeper into my personal pop music awakening, I found that this music, music that I previously would’ve dismissed as “shallow,” was actually able to help me communicate my deepest, darkest emotions. I came to realize that expressing emotions and listening to music that I genuinely enjoyed was better for my mental and emotional health than whatever bullshit identity I was trying to conform to. Listening to and loving female pop artists has taught me that my emotions are not petty and unwarranted; expressing my feelings shouldn’t come hand in hand with shame.
And though I can’t credit my entire emotional awakening—a journey that I’m still on—to Carly Rae Jepsen or pop music, I do owe E•MO•TION and pop princesses for showing me how to be emotional, and that it’s okay to feel every feeling with every fibre of my body. This is something that I am still working on.
On that summer day in 2016, as I sat sobbing on my parents’ stoop, the lyric “all that we can do with this emotion,” echoed in my head. I still fixate on that line whenever I hear “E•MO•TION,” and it reminds me that fully feeling my emotions is okay, productive, and healthy. That in my emotions there should be no shame, and only possibility, growth, and life, because there is so much that we can do with this emotion.
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