There are few things worse than an overly self-serious pop star—a singer so subsumed by fame and ego that she can no longer appreciate the glorious frivolity of the genre—but that’s never been Katy Perry’s problem. Perry, who is thirty-nine, first topped the Hot 100 in 2008, with “I Kissed a Girl,” a dumb and awesome song about a quasi-transgressive, ChapStick-assisted smooch. “I Kissed a Girl” evoked Gary Glitter, the Playboy Mansion, mid-career Madonna, and the blasé confessionalism of old Sassy magazine headlines; it was a sly and winking début, especially for an artist who had previously released an album of soaring Christian rock. “I kissed a girl just to try it / I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it,” Perry demurred.
Back then, Perry was funny, dexterous, hungry. In 2010, she released “Teenage Dream,” a collection of empowerment ballads and sonically impenetrable disco-pop produced by a small army of professional hitmakers, including Max Martin, Dr. Luke, Benny Blanco, and Stargate. Five tracks went to No. 1, tying a record set by Michael Jackson. The album’s title track—easily one of the best pop songs of the twenty-tens—is a rich, lashing ode to being young and hot and quaking with desire. The vibe was campy, sexy, hedonistic. Perry seemed mostly unconcerned with broadcasting authenticity or vulnerability: “California girls, we’re unforgettable / Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top / Sun-kissed skin so hot, we’ll melt your popsicle,” she sang, on “California Gurls.” In the music video, she wore a bra containing two cans of whipped cream, which shot triumphant arcs through the air.
In 2013, Perry released “Prism,” her fourth album; it spent seventeen weeks in the Top Ten. The single “Dark Horse,” which features a verse from the rapper Juicy J, nimbly incorporates elements of trap and electro-pop. In 2015, Perry opened her Super Bowl halftime performance by riding an enormous animatronic lion. She was briefly dressed as a beach ball. At one point, two backing dancers performed unsynchronized choreography in gigantic shark costumes. Even the schmaltzy, go-get-’em anthem “Firework,” which went twelve-times platinum, seemed not entirely serious. The song’s preposterous opening couplet—“Do you ever feel like a plastic bag / Drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?”—was as ridiculous as it was rousing. Perry, for the most part, seemed in on the joke.
It’s hard to parse what happened next. Perry released two more records—“Witness,” in 2017, and “Smile,” in 2020—to diminishing returns. There was a seemingly endless feud with Taylor Swift about—it pains me to type this—backup dancers. There were singles; a few of them were briefly hits. Yet in some vague but inescapable way, Perry lost the plot. She repeatedly described “Witness” as “purposeful pop,” a cringey phrase intimating the album had political undertones, but both the language and the message felt limp in the aftermath of the election. (There were, perhaps, more trenchant gestures to be made; Beyoncé, for example, had recently performed at the Super Bowl in a Black Panther beret, her fist raised for Black Power.) Suddenly, Perry could no longer match the ingenuity and boldness of her peers.
While it can credibly be pointed to as the beginning of the end of her commercial domination, I nonetheless loved Perry’s weird, arty performance of “Chained to the Rhythm,” the first single from “Witness,” at the 2017 Grammy Awards. She wore a white pants suit, rose-colored glasses, and a “PERSIST” armband, casually bopping around a white-picket-fence-enclosed house. It was giving Grace Jones, it was giving A24, it was giving—for better or, probably, worse—Hillary Rodham Clinton. Lyrically, “Chained to the Rhythm” is surprisingly astute about American oblivion:
But, at the end of the performance, Perry took it a little too far, holding Skip Marley’s hand in front of a projection of the U.S. Constitution, and yelling, “No hate!” Yikes. Subtlety, it seems, has never been Perry’s strong suit.
Last week, Perry released “143,” her seventh album. (The title is, apparently, slang for “I love you,” and Perry has referred to it as her “angel number.”) She reunited with the Swedish super-producer Max Martin and, more notably, with Dr. Luke, who, in 2014, was sued by the pop singer Kesha after she accused him of drugging and raping her, threatening her family, and causing irreparable harm to her career. The litigation was complicated, and, eventually, concerned Perry: at one point, Kesha sent a text, later subpoenaed, to Lady Gaga, stating that Perry had also been raped by Dr. Luke. In a 2017 deposition, Perry expressed frustration at being brought into the conflict: “I’m a tiebreaker,” she said. “Because when I say that I wasn’t raped, because I was not, that means that someone’s lying.” In 2018, Dr. Luke filed a countersuit, denying wrongdoing and claiming defamation; two years later, a judge ruled that Kesha had indeed defamed Dr. Luke in her texts. In 2023, after almost a decade, the pair reached a kind of legal détente.
Perry is not the first major pop star to work with Dr. Luke since Kesha’s accusations—in recent years, he has collaborated with Doja Cat, Nicki Minaj, and Big Boi, and has signed both Kim Petras and Joy Oladokun to his label, Amigo Records. But the backlash against Perry, in particular, was swift and harsh. It didn’t help that “Woman’s World,” the first single from “143,” aspired to be a kind of kitschy, feminist anthem: “It’s a woman’s world and you’re lucky to be livin’ in it!” Perry asserted. The song’s verses are sung with plucky precision—it’s a style that suggests the ongoing and omnipresent influence of Martin, whose production style favors economy and exactitude. The first verse could be a kind of koan, if it weren’t so dopey:
Instead, it felt as though the track should be playing on a loop in a terrible commercial for deodorant. In the music video, Perry was dressed as Rosie the Riveter, now warped by the male gaze, or some simulacrum of the male gaze: minuscule shorts, high-heeled construction boots, a rhinestone-encrusted hammer. The initial response was grim. After a couple days, Perry took to X, posting, “YOU CAN DO ANYTHING! EVEN SATIRE!,” along with a behind-the-scenes clip of her vamping on set, explaining the video’s subtext. “Girlboss shit! You can do it! You go, girl! You were born to shine! We’re having fun being a bit sarcastic with it—it’s very slapstick, very on the nose.” Maybe she really was lampooning the idea that women can do it all and still look super hot, one of the wobbly tenets of so-called girlboss feminism, a strategy that mostly only benefits the already rich, white, and shrewd. But both the music video and her response to it were bewildering.
The rest of “143” is fine, I guess: a little aimless, a little familiar, a little too evocative of a high-end exercise class. “Lifetimes,” which would have been a much better choice for a first single, has a kitschy Italo-disco beat and an easy, pulsing chorus (“I know you feel it / Can you believe it? / I’m gonna love you ’til the end / And then repeat it”), but it also sounds like a song that will soon be playing—endlessly, loudly—at a club without a bouncer, a club at an all-inclusive island resort (off-season), a club that serves chicken fingers. “I’m His, He’s Mine,” which features the young rapper Doechii, celebrates the sort of lunatic possessiveness that can undo an otherwise sane relationship: “I’m every woman he wants and needs,” Perry insists to some imagined foe. Doechii doubles down during the chorus, in an extremely funny line that I look forward to screaming at future romantic rivals: “I’m every woman he knows exists!” I’d think Perry was clowning, were it not, once again, for the video, in which she writhes earnestly on the hood of a moving silver Corvette, dressed in an extremely complicated bikini. My favorite track here is “Gimme Gimme,” which includes verses from the Atlanta rapper 21 Savage. It’s unfussy, spare, almost plodding. Yet Perry’s voice sounds full and confident: “Gimme, gimme, baby, stop wastin’ my time,” she sings flatly. It’s a song about love and sex being transactional—literally transactional, in the sense that the song is also about shopping. “Take my card and go shopping for weeks / No limit, you shoppin’ for free / I’m in Paris, I’m shopping for we,” 21 Savage promises.
When Perry recently appeared on the podcast “Call Her Daddy,” she dodged a question about working with Dr. Luke—I was briefly agog at the sharpness of her pivot, in which she suddenly started talking about the physical wonders of motherhood, adding, “A brain! A heart! I created a whole-ass heart!” (She did speak, more frankly and salaciously, about appreciating a partner who can handle his half of the domestic burden: “Just do the fucking dishes! I will suck your dick!” she shrieked.) Perry remains a provocateur—during a recent performance of “I’m His, He’s Mine” at the V.M.A.s, she and Doechii very nearly consummated their relationship—but her new work just isn’t confessional, radical, weird, or interesting enough to find purchase in the Zeitgeist. Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, pop’s next probable superstars, have taken very obvious cues from Perry, but their records are clever, singular, dynamic, surprising. It’s possible that Perry is doing the same thing she’s always done—now maybe with less ease, less joy—but the culture has shifted in such a way that it feels stilted, muddled, stale. Whether it’s her or us—I don’t know if it matters. As Perry once bellowed during the triumphant, perfect chorus of “Teenage Dream”: “Don’t ever look back, don’t ever look back!” ♦
