YMMV / Carly Rae Jepsen

• Applicability: "Your Type" is a song about unrequited love featuring a narrator lamenting that she's not her lover's "type", and several critics have observed that based on just the lyrics alone, the narrator could be interpreted as queer, with the reason the relationship won't work out is because they're gay or transgender. It helps that Carly herself stated that the song was based on a time she fell for a guy who she later discovered was gay (the same incident that inspired the "Call Me Maybe" video).
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Arguably the main reason why Carly was overlooked prior to the release of E•MO•TION. After the monster hit that was "Call Me Maybe" listeners wrote her off as a One-Hit Wonder trying to make a Career Resurrection, not helping matters was that "I Really Like You" the lead single of E•MO•TION being a perceived as a rehash of "Call Me Maybe". Though well after release it's not uncommon to hear new fans admitting that was a mistake.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Run Away With Me" is phenomenal. From the bombastic opening horns to the incredibly sing-along-able chorus, this is the song that finally made people think of Carly as someone other than the "Call Me Maybe" girl.
  • While we're at it, "Call Me Maybe" is great, too, even if it did suffer from severe overplay. It's a fun, sweet love song, and if you can ignore how annoyingly ubiquitous it was for the entirety of 2012, you can easily understand why it was everywhere.
  • “Cut to the Feeling” is an upbeat, catchy, and all-around joyous song about the intensity of being in love and the desires for closeness that come with it. Its bombastic chorus in particular is one you can’t help but want to start belting along to, in addition to showing off the higher end of Carly’s vocal range.
  • "Party For One" follows E•MO•TION's cue, with 80s-inspired instrumentals and awesome, empowered lyrics.
  • In general, almost the entirety of the E•MO•TION album is considered this, despite its commercial failure - it's stuffed with atmospheric, catchy, 80s-influenced pop and dance songs, and made tons of year-end best-of lists for good reason.
  • Dedicated is generally considered to be this from start to finish.
    • Dedicated: Side B is of similar note, with songs like "This Love Isn't Crazy" and "Summer Love" as prime examples.
• Big in Japan: The reason why E•MO•TION was released earlier in Japan. Taken up to eleven with her remix album for E•MO•TION released exclusively in Japan and her video for "First Time" made available only in Japan.
• Cult Classic: E•MO•TION and Dedicated have squarely put Carly's material in this position, not being overly popular beyond her megahit "Call Me Maybe", but instead being an acclaimed artist with a smaller, devoted fanbase. She's still not too widely known, but E•MO•TION: Side B managed to make it to many critics' short list for the best album of 2016.
• Eclipsed by the Remix: "Shooting Star" from her album The Loneliest Time is a rework of an earlier, unofficial leaked song, "Disco Sweat". "Disco Sweat" was essentially in Camp and So Bad, It's Good territory amongst fans upon its leak, but "Shooting Star" is much, much better, as attested by many.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The guy she's interested in in the video of "Call Me Maybe" has no lines of dialogue or lyrics but the fact that he is gay and is quite good looking made sure Carly has quite a Periphery Demographic with gay men.
  • Arguably Carly in pop music for uber music nerds from sites (like Rate Your Music, who are pretty brutal when it comes to pop music artists) who were blown away by how amazing E•MO•TION is.
• Epic Riff: The horns that open "Run Away With Me." The Memetic Mutation helps.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Swans and Death Grips of all things. Due in part to people discovering their music through Anthony Fantano's reviews. Fans also say they're fans of all three due to the insane amount of energy from their music.
  • Also with Charli XCX and Lorde, which is helped by the fact that she has, in no particular order, met them and expressed interest in doing work with them.
• Growing the Beard: Kiss was a perfectly fine pop album, with a handful of especially catchy tunes. E•MO•TION, however, is widely considered to be Awesome Music, with a more sophisticated style, and a huge step up in the lyrics. Many of E•MO•TION's biggest fans are among those that hope to never hear "Call Me Maybe" ever again. (Her first album, Tug of War, is almost entirely forgotten.)
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • "I Really Really Really Really Really Really Like You". Also the music video where Carly is dancing with Tom Hanks.
  • "Higher" is probably the purest Silly Love Song Carly's made.
  • "Run Away With Me", which could be described wanting to be with someone and go anywhere with them.
• LGBT Fanbase: Carly's pretty popular among members of the queer community, male, female, and non-binary alike. Part of it is due to the Twist Ending of her crush being gay at the end of the "Call Me Maybe" video, but part of it may also stem from E•MO•TION having a lot of influences from 80s music, which itself is pretty popular among queer people. (Even those that weren't even alive in the 80s.) Her gay fanbase is prominent enough that there have been articles written about it, and when a photo of the mostly male crowd at one of her concerts went viral due to people's surprise at what they assumed to be a straightforward Testosterone Brigade, a lot of her fans chipped in to point this out. Carly herself has made it clear she loves her gay fans just as much as they love her.
• Memetic Mutation: Lampshaded:
  "I don’t think I’ve seen all of [the parodies], but I’ve seen enough to be pretty blown away. I saw the Cookie Monster one the other day. Sesame Street, man. It doesn’t get any better than that!”
  • The "I Really Like You" video, in which Tom Hanks lip-syncs the song.
  • "Give her a sword!", birthed from a random Tumblr post that quickly gained a lot of traction, to the point where she finally got one!
  • Carly's fans affectionately calling her a queen, often in the form of declaring her the "queen of [whatever she's doing in any given video or picture.]" She's expressed some bemusement of this, and says her band lightheartedly teases her about it, going "Queen of leaning!" whenever she leans against a wall or something—which isn't an exaggeration of the meme at all. She then added that she has no clue how the meme started and is a bit shy about it, but she thinks it's sweet. This naturally led to fans dubbing her the "queen of humility" and "queen of not understanding her own meme."
• Older Than They Think:
  • People who only know her from "Call Me Maybe" would be very surprised to learn that her first album (Tug of War) was released in 2008.
  • On another level, Store from E•MO•TION Side B was originally written for an ''anti-smoking ad'' back in 2011.
• Periphery Demographic:
  • After the release and acclaim of E•MO•TION, Carly seems to have gained a fanbase among more indie/alternative music listeners. Case in point: readers of Pitchfork voted ''E•MO•TION'' as the most underrated album of 2015, the album, its B-sides EP and multiple of her singles are bolded^*Indicating that it's above a certain position on the charts (different depending on the category of release - i.e. album, EP single etc.) on music aggregate site Rate Your Music, which normally isn't very kind towards mainstream pop releases.
  • Critics went nuts for the album too. In the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop Critics Poll^note in which hundreds of professional music critics from across the US and around the world are asked to send in a list of their favorite songs and albums from that year, and then a list is aggregated from the results, E•MO•TION came in third, behind only Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly and Courtney Barnett's debut album.
• Retroactive Recognition: After the success of "Call Me Maybe", some radio stations chose to ride on her newfound fame by playing "Tug of War". Cue people's jaws dropping when they recognize the song from a few years ago and realize, "Holy shit, that was Carly Rae Jepsen!?".
• Signature Song: "Call Me Maybe" is this to the general public, "Run Away With Me" more so to her current fanbase & indie crowd.
• Sleeper Hit: While not necessarily a hit, the Cult Classic status of E•MO•TION could be seen as this. On release E•MO•TION listeners pretty much wrote Carly off as the 'Call Me Maybe girl trying to make a comeback', however a combination of very positive word of mouth (or people forcing their friends to listen to E•MO•TION), critical acclaim and later on the Memetic Mutation such as Run Away With Meme helped spread the popularity of E•MO•TION far and wide across the internet to end up becoming one of 2015 most talked about music releases.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel:
  • While Kiss is decent, it's pretty obvious the album was rushed to capitalize on the success of "Call Me Maybe". On E•MO•TION, there is much more detail to its songs and lack of any Album Filler, and the catchy numbers are even more catchier and awesome than before.
  • E•MO•TION: Side B gets reviews that are somewhere between this and Even Better Sequel; Metacritic gave it an 80 (compared to the original's 77) and it was on quite a few critics' short list for one of the best albums of the year. Not bad for an EP.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Run Away With Me" can be interpreted as a song about someone losing a crush/partner in a love triangle, begging them to reconsider.

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