The starter-kit has regular links inside the drawer paper-menu, not paper-items. To style the background-color of a selected paper-menu link, the --paper-menu-selected-item css mixin can't be set to a different color for the paper-menu in app-theme.html. Directly styling paper-menu a.iron-selected class isn't working either, however. What is the standard way of setting the background-color, then?
Edit: Ok, this seems to be set to the --light-primary-color custom property. Does anybody know where this is set? Didn't find the docs for it.