What is Katy Perry doing?
"Sexy confident..........."
Her career has been in freefall for a decade now. She’s working with Dr. Luke. She has sexual assault allegations of her own. She maybe killed a nun? The point is, there are plenty of very valid reasons for people to dismiss Katy Perry’s new record, 143. But that’s not quite what’s happening, is it?
Look at it this way: Katy Perry hit her cultural peak in 2010. Some of the other big hits that year were by acts like Train, Jason Derulo, Taio Cruz, B.o.B, and Enrique Iglesias. What do they all have in common? Nobody has even thought about them in years.
The same can’t be said for Katy Perry. No matter how hard she flops, people paying attention. 143, which feels poised to become her biggest disaster yet, is also getting a level of attention that feels almost preposterous for Katy Perry to be getting in 2024.
My apologies if you saw this post’s title and thought it would be one of my scalding takedowns. I completely understand what Katy Perry is doing, and I like it.
To be clear, I would never “stan” Katy Perry. But I also wouldn’t “stan” Nicki Minaj, and I could easily write a whole essay about all the things I like about her.
To understand what’s really going on here, we have to go back to her biggest disaster to date: Witness. Where Prism was a bad album that spawned a ton of lasting hits, Witness was a kinda-good album that seemed to hit people with one baffling creative decision after another, from the “Swish Swish” chorus to the “Bon Appétit” video where Katy Perry is cooked and eaten.
In looking at the 143 rollout, I saw some of the same creative impulses. The “Lifetimes” video, which may have been filmed illegally on protected lands. The “Woman’s World” video, which had everyone scratching their heads about what it was trying to say. In her appearance in a recent LAD Bible video, she can be seen spitting out gobs of candy and donning a cringeworthy British accent.
The ignorant out there can continue to laugh, as if it’s all a big blunder. But we’re all adults here, so let’s cut the shit: this is all intentional. Katy Perry has a well-documented fascination with all things gaudy and grotesque that goes back to the very beginning of her career. She’s being gross and distasteful on purpose. She’s the John Waters of soccer moms.
Through this prism (no pun intended), nothing about the past decade of her career is confusing. “Woman’s World” is to empowerment anthems what “Bon Appétit” was to sex-metaphor pop jams—an outlandish parody. People have long agonized over when she’s being serious and when she’s joking. The truth is, she’s joking even when she’s serious.
Remember, this is Katy Perry we’re talking about. The whipped cream bra lady. The one who went to the Met Gala dressed like a hamburger. Somehow, we’ve reached the point where we talk about her clearly-intentional creative decisions as if she lost a bet.
And none of this is to say that it’s all good. A lot of it is, in fact, bad. I happen to enjoy her recent swath of singles (sort of), but that doesn’t mean I’d go to bat for, say, Smile. I just think it’s a common pitfall that the public falls into when discussing famous women—their knee-jerk reaction is to assume she can’t be doing it on purpose.
People scratched their heads at the “Woman’s World” video. It starts with a “California Girls”-ified take on Rosie the Riveter iconography. People wondered if the Rick Caruso fan club president behind “Ur So Gay” had suddenly swung to the right. And then, people who got what the first part of the video was going for were flummoxed when she reemerges as a half-naked robot-legged phoenix version of herself and… seemingly stays the same oblivious, vain self-parody she was before.
If you ask me, this portion of the video doesn’t negate the first half, but it does bring the focus back to Katy herself. She’s aware of her own image as a shallow has-been, and of the inherent folly of presenting herself as a feminist hero, even ironically. On its own, the song reads as a platitudinous anthem on par with “Roar” and “Firework,” but the video doesn’t just add a layer of irony, but one of bitter self-pity. Sorry, but I think it’s interesting!