Great music is like a delicious chocolate cake – a deep, richly satisfying experience to be savored slowly and whenever possible. Katy Perry’s songs are candy, but she’s well aware of that.

It’s no coincidence that the music video for her radio-monopolizing “California Gurls” is set in a version of Candyland, or that she’s lying on a cloud of cotton candy on the album cover. Perry isn’t trying to reinvigorate the album format like Arcade Fire, or even to create a multimedia, performance art-style identity like Lady Gaga. She just wants everyone to have fun.

In the world of pop music, there’s nothing at all wrong with that. In fact, having fun is first and foremost the point of pop, and it’s deceptively difficult to do it well. Ke$ha is pretty good at it, but Perry is a step above – her songs can be just as trashy as Ke$ha’s, but Perry seems so much more earnest. Well, earnest isn’t quite the right word – this is still Katy Perry we’re talking about, shameless creator of “I Kissed A Girl” – but she is, in her own way, quite sincere about her music.

You wouldn’t get that impression from “California Gurls,” about as shallow as summer jams get, a pure-sugar West Coast response to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ New York-hyping “Empire State of Mind.” But listen to this album’s title track, watch its non-sparkly, gumdrop-less video. If Perry isn’t feeling intensely nostalgic herself, she’ll at least inspire millions of teenagers and 20-somethings to stare wistfully out the window and reflect upon their love lives. “Teenage Dream” is, dare I say it, a perfect pop song, instantly catchy yet emotionally resonant.

It’s dangerous to open with such a song, and it must be said that “Teenage Dream” the album never again reaches the brilliance of “Teenage Dream” the song. That pensive mood does pop up again, though: “Circle the Drain” laments a former partner’s crippling drug problem; “The One That Got Away” remembers a lost love, presumably a different one; “Who Am I Living For?” just considers its titular question in the abstract, tonally consistent if a little lofty.

But any idea that this is Perry’s serious, important album is quickly dispelled, if not already done by “California Gurls,” by “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” a highly danceable and incredibly dumb tale of debauchery that suggests Perry has spent more than a few weekends with Ke$ha herself. The notion is made laughable by “Peacock,” which combines the hand-clapping peppiness of Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” with the sexual forwardness of Rihanna’s “Rude Boy.”

None of this is a problem, because Perry’s songs can colonize your auditory memory and kick-start a dance party no matter the subject or sentiment – even, as in “Firework,” when Perry attempts an awkward ego-boosting ballad a la Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful.” If Perry paces the release of her singles well, she could be ruling the airwaves for years.

There are a lot of reasons to complain about Katy Perry. Her lyrics are terrible, her voice unlikely to carry many of these songs without digital assistance, her subject matter liable to corrupt the minds and sexual expectations of any young person. But if we can allow for a moment that entertainment must not always also be art, we can see that Perry is valuable in her own right. After all, who hasn’t dreamt of dancing on the beaches of Candyland with Snoop Dogg?