I've had Revelation, the new-ish collaborative album between singer-songwriter Dragonette and electro duo The Knocks, on heavy rotation lately; it's loaded with irresistible disco and synth-pop melodies, and sticky choruses about being overcome with deeply intense feelings. And — there's just no getting around it — a big reason I love it so much is because it sounds as if it were borne from the continuously giving tree that is Carly Rae Jepsen's Emotion.
At this point Emotion is the stuff of legend. Released 10 years ago this week, the supercharged, Madonna/Prince/Cyndi Lauper/etc.-inspired album was a critic's darling out the gate and firmly cemented Jepsen's status as a niche star with a fervent gay fanbase. It's been much dissected and evangelized as pure perfection, and while the majority of the population may only remember Jepsen as the "Call Me Maybe" girl, her cultural footprint is far greater than that of a one-hit wonder.
So many now-signature Jepsen elements contribute to Emotion's lasting acclaim, including unabashed schmaltz (saxophone riffs!), a flair for the dramatic (the playful threat of "Here I've come to hijack you!") and sweetly sung acidity ("Buzzfeed buzzards and TMZ crows / What can I say that you don't already know?").
But the album also contains a particular emotion (*ahem*) often underdiscussed when considering Jepsen's appeal: earnest horniness. Nowhere is this more effective than on the pulsating reverb-heavy "Gimmie Love."
The song swoops in immediately on Jepsen's simmering first verse, no intro or buildup, as if we're catching her mid-thought — "Worlds fly by / Drove by your place and stopped again tonight," she breathily coos. A synth line rumbles underneath, and as the verse pushes ahead more sonic texture is added; a pop of drums here, deeper echo there. And then the lush chorus lasers in from another world: a loud clap, then a steady funky groove, as Jepsen's clarion vocals ring out through a wall of sound, pleading for her guy to "Gimmie love, gimmie love, gimmie love, gimmie love."
But it's not just love she wants: "Gimmie touch / 'Cause I want what I want, do you think that I want too much?"
Absolutely not, Carly. Desire what you desire!
There's a delicate dance playing out on this track, as Jepsen oscillates between being honest about what she wants — this guy's body … and yes, love — and self-consciously pulling back with regret for having previously denied this feeling when he was actually around: "I toss and turn, but still I can't sleep right / I should've asked you to stay, begged you to stay." It's a glass case of emotion, as it were, bursting with unresolved sexual tension and yearning so powerful it can no longer be contained. And so it explodes on that bridge, when her vocals reach their most aching apex:
It’s the way we are together Wanna feel like this forever, forever It’s the way we are together And I never thought I’d ever say ‘forever’
Even among hardcore Jepsen fans, I'm not sure "horny" would be as high as the third or fourth descriptor they'd use in discussing her style; she doesn't reach too often for the kind of winking, overt innuendo of contemporaries like Jessie Ware or Sabrina Carpenter. Despite being in her mid-20s at the time, her breakout second album Kiss was marketed as, and certainly sounded like, "bubblegum pop." "Cute" was her dominant image, and this was only reinforced by an early co-sign from teen idol-era Justin Bieber. But cute, of course, does not automatically signal the absence of eroticism, and this facet has been a core part of her image since "Call Me Maybe" — "Your stare was holdin'/ Ripped jeans, skin was showin' " — an obvious performance of lust in both song and video, even if the cheesy execution of that lust is so sharp as to overwhelm almost everything else about it. That earnest desire is also readily apparent in songs like "Want You In My Room," "All That," "No Drug Like Me" and "No Thinking Over the Weekend."
It's no coincidence these are some of the best songs in Jepsen's catalog, tracks which combine a potent mixture of heart-on-her-sleeve vulnerability, ardor, and (sometimes) camp. "…people are much more coy and kind of hidden with their emotions," she told the since-defunct alternative newspaper City Pages back in 2016. "I wanted to be right out there and open about it all, because I think that's kind of what we all are desiring in a secret way."
Indeed. And "Gimmie Love" is the apex, a pure and blissful exercise in commiseration for anyone who's ever burned with an intense passion which goes painfully unfulfilled. It's the kind of song you just can't help but fall into, completely.
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