Keeping Up with Katy Perry
Once a member of pop’s A-list, a string of career misfires has led Katy Perry to become a laughingstock of the music world. She’s the butt of the joke she was once in on.
In 2017, Katy Perry didn’t want to be Katy Perry anymore. The American hitmaker born Katheryn Hudson was promoting a new record, Witness, with a Big Brother-esque livestream that followed her for four days as she ate, slept, saw friends and played with dogs. Early in the stream, Perry underwent a therapy session; the hour-long conversation generated significant media attention, as she admitted past suicidal ideation, her 2012 divorce and her feud with Taylor Swift. (Perry got so emotional that, at one point, a member of her team suggested that she prematurely end the session; she refused.) A crucial moment of the therapy session was when she discussed the popstar persona she’d spent the better part of a decade carefully manicuring: she was, she expounded, set on helping people “dream just as big” as her, through camp performances and eye-widening outfits. The artifice of her career thus far, she seemed to hint, was the point, an expression of intent from an introverted extrovert – in other words, she was an unconfident person projecting confidence, in the hopes of inspiring others to do the same.
During Witness’ promotion, and just preceding the livestream, Perry cut off her signature jet-black hair in favour of an abrasive, platinum-blonde pixie cut. On this decision, she explained: “I didn’t want to look like Katy Perry anymore.” It – or, at least, its subtext – was an earnest, startling moment in an otherwise performative livestream, which was meticulously constructed to draw out nuggets of ‘authenticity’ from Perry (‘authenticity’ in this context meaning, of course, performative honesty and use of wellness-culture buzzwords like ‘being present’). It’s perhaps ironic that its most notable moment was a seemingly spontaneous, perhaps even accidental, revelation. For a minute, we saw the real Katy Perry, a woman crumbling under the weight of the very career that had gotten her here in the first place.
Perry had branded this Witness era of hers as ‘purposeful pop’ in an attempt to adapt to a musical landscape that no longer embraced the sickly bubblegum trappings of her musical style. This was 2017, the year of Trump, of #MeToo; music was getting grimier and darker to reflect the national attitude. For her part, Perry released the politically charged anthem we all definitely sang at the Women’s March. You know that song, right? ‘Chained to the Rhythm’? No?
The song – the lead single from the similarly tepid Witness – brands itself as conscious and intentional, yet is timidly vague about making any sort of actual statement, delivering empty platitudes about how we’re all ‘living in a bubble, a bubble’. (One performance of the song, at the 2017 GRAMMYs, ended with Perry holding hands with rapper Skip Marley and posing defiantly in front of an image of the U.S. Constitution. Go girl, give us something?) Perry, it seemed, was mistaking seriousness for humanity – for authenticity – yet forgot the reason we all fell in love with her: fun, unserious pop music. With the music she previously played, she looked like she not only knew full well how frivolous her product was, but she leaned into it, delivering each line with a winking grin (or, in one case, a bra spurting whipped cream). With Witness, Perry no longer seemed aware, let alone embracing of, the product she was selling us. For the first time, she was no longer in on the joke – she’d become its punchline.
These days, though, we’ve come to expect Katy Perry to fall on her face. With a couple of exceptions, the last decade of her career has been a series of misfires: she hasn’t had a UK number-one single as a solo artist since 2013’s ‘Roar’; her most recent album, last year’s 143, was a critical and commercial bomb; in April, she briefly went to space and tore a new hole in the ozone layer. In essence, the best thing she’s done in recent memory is her Just Eat ad.
Though – as expected – there’s an undercurrent of misogyny to the internet’s gleeful dogpiling of Katy Perry, the hate isn’t all that unjustified. Her three most recent albums, Witness, Smile and 143, are all Not Good; the latter of those was co-produced by alleged sexual abuser Dr. Luke, making an album supposedly celebrating Perry’s feminine divine feel disingenuous and cheap. On that space excursion, there’s probably not much you don’t already know about how god-awful it was (though, for the uninitiated, this article sums it up neatly). The most recent Perry endeavour caught in the crosshairs of online discourse has been her Lifetimes Tour, videos of which have shown use of AI in a video interlude, Cbeebies choreography and lacklustre energy from Perry herself.
Not an awful lot of this can be defended all that much! Perry is a pop star currently making bad pop music and even worse business decisions. The criticisms I’ve seen are mostly valid. But Perry persists; in an Instagram comment, she admitted to feeling like a ‘human Piñata’ before espousing her usual ‘healing’ buzzwords. Mrs. Perry, perhaps you wouldn’t be a human piñata if you hadn’t given everyone the sticks.
It’s sad because we were, for the most part, once on Katy Perry’s side. During her commercial peak in the early 2010s, she didn’t just capture the zeitgeist – she became the zeitgeist. Her 2010 effort Teenage Dream matched a Michael Jackson record for most number-ones for a single album, and had such era-defining hits as ‘Firework’ and ‘California Gurls’; its accompanying tour, a paradisical peppermint-swirled romp, would have its own exhibit if pop music were a museum.
Commercial success aside, though, it’s intriguing to look back on Perry’s cultural apex from today’s lens. Her music encapsulates the whimsical frothiness of mainstream pop music, which was in a phase we might refer to as ‘recession pop’ – devoid of substance but not necessarily of intrinsic quality. The titular track of Teenage Dream exemplifies this: it’s a wide-eyed confection of a song, with lyrics evoking a feeling you didn’t know you had. (Plus, that chorus is killer.) Like the best Perry tracks, it’s light and kitschy without being cheap, and you can practically hear her smile in the vocal booth as she sings “no regrets, just love”.
Even when Perry was being gloriously over-the-top – like in the ‘Candyfornia’-set video for ‘California Gurls’ – she was still being slyly dexterous with her dumbness, spirited with her stupidity. Vogue called her the ‘Queen of Camp’, and that label seems to sum it up; as Susan Sontag’s seminal essay stipulates, Perry’s music was apolitical, artificial and hyperbolic, all to what was then its benefit. For me, the last time Perry really exemplified this campness – at least in its best, original form – was in 2015, when she headlined the halftime show at the Super Bowl. The performance is quintessentially Katy Perry: it opens with her on the back of a giant robotic lion and only gets bigger & brighter from there. (At one point, she becomes a beach ball.) Watching the Super Bowl performance back now is like that last happy moment in a documentary, before a voiceover goes ‘that was before the accident’ and the screen goes black.
Pop stardom comes with a prerequisite that you adapt; the twenty-first century in particular has seen us hunger for each artist’s new ‘era’ (with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour catapulting the term into more widespread use: ‘I’m in my messy era’, etc.) to the extent that new records now have their own visual identity, their own colour. Artists – especially women artists – had to, have to, be professionals at reinventing themselves, balancing a tightrope of originality without losing their fanbase.
We can take 2017 – the year of Witness – as an example. In the wake of Beyoncé’s radical, intentional Lemonade, along with the grey political skies, music was becoming moodier. Kendrick Lamar released his haunting opus, DAMN.; newer artists like Lorde and SZA traversed heartbreak and disappointment, on Melodrama and Ctrl respectively. Taylor Swift tapped into the mainstream’s embrace of hip-hop on reputation. Sampha got introspective on Process. Paramore’s After Laughter spun bombastic anthems out of fatigue and anxiety. Sam Smith; Kesha; Jay-Z: these were stars who were taking themselves more seriously, but sounded like they meant it too.
It’s that second part that Perry never quite mastered. There’s always been a bit of a fundamental disconnect between Perry and the music she put out (she once said that a key influence for ‘Firework’ – a cheesy self-empowerment anthem – was Jack Kerouac’s novel, On The Road) but that disconnect became especially pronounced when the music wasn’t up to scratch. Not only is something like ‘Bon Appétit’ sonically monotonous, but there’s a lack of intention. It’s shallow. Sure, shallowness used to be Katy Perry’s raison d'être, but that was when a) the music was good and b) the culture embraced shallowness. In 2010, Perry’s Teenage Dream got released into the same market as ‘I Gotta Feeling’ and ‘Just Dance’, for an audience who didn’t care for depth. Seven years later and one US president later, though, the music landscape had shifted. Perry, too, had shifted, but not in the correct direction.
I can hear the Katycats coming for my neck as I type. Not all pop music has to have a ‘point’, I envision them screaming, it’s just silly and fun. Let people enjoy things! It’s a criticism I’ve seen levelled at others who have anything bad to say about a pop star with a fervent fan base; a recent example that comes to mind is the Tate McRae fandom, who had sharp words for the TikTok reviewer The Swiftologist when he made a (justified and well-rounded!) sceptical review of McRae’s recent album. The above ‘let people enjoy things’ criticism is flawed, though, for a multitude of reasons. First of all, the subjective nature of art means that every piece of it – every song, every painting, every film – will be liked by some and not by others. Secondly, and also interlinked with art’s subjective quality: if you like that piece of art, you’re well within your rights to both enjoy it on your own terms and not engage with negative criticism of that art. More pressingly, though, this criticism negates the effort that artists should be putting into their work. Diminishing it to ‘just silly and fun’ nullifies the care, craft and intention behind so many pieces of art. When I call Perry’s recent music bad, it’s partially because, yes, it’s bad, but more so because I can tell she’s not too convinced either. She can do better than the drivel she keeps putting out – just look at her earlier records.
It's why the recent ‘WOMAN’S WORLD’ was such a spectacular failure. Perry’s message was one of rediscovering her ‘feminine divine’ and empowering women, but it fell flat. The song’s lyrics draw from the decade-old playbook of girlboss feminism, offering little more than vague statements (‘She’s a sister / She’s a mother’). The production is boilerplate bubblegum pop; the melodies, stale as bread. Even the promotional artwork steals from a PC Music-adjacent lookbook. Worst of all, the track – supposedly an anthem meant to celebrate women – was produced by Dr. Luke, a known enemy of women he’s worked with. More than ever, it was clear that Perry was no longer an artist, she was a businesswoman: intent on selling us her product for her own commercial gain, but with no consideration of the actual quality of the product.
Many have theorised that, owing to the singular tankage of her career in the past few years, someone on Perry’s team is sabotaging her from the inside. But I’d argue that the only one to blame for the landslide of Katy Perry’s reputation is Katy Perry. For instance, the Dr. Luke saga was entirely avoidable; not only was she wholly knowledgeable of his alleged history, but an artist of her stature and her resources could pretty well work with any producer she wanted. This is someone who is committing that cardinal sin of artistry: laziness. Perry seems to believe that, when it comes to an album like 143, whatever she’s made is good enough. Good enough to sell records, good enough that everyone will be singing the lyrics on tour, good enough that its listeners will overlook both her lack of effort and her (wilful!) involvement of an alleged sexual abuser.
When asked about her decision to work with Dr. Luke, Perry offered a paltry non-answer: “Look, I understand that it started a lot of conversations, and he was one of many collaborators that I collaborated with, but the reality is it comes from me.” She quickly changed the subject to talk about her daughter, Daisy, going back into promotion mode. The audience, Perry forgets, is different than they were in 2010; more politically aware with less time on their hands, they’re more discerning about the content they consume. ‘Good enough’ just isn’t good enough anymore.
Listen, I get it, Katy Perry. Your net worth’s comfortably nine figures, and you’re already a household name thanks to your early hits. But surely it’s not worth the faff to half-ass another album, particularly not one that’s actively eroding your reputation. You’ve got shoes to sell and a singing competition to judge, after all.
It’s a proper shame that Perry’s career has led to this. Prior to 2024, there was a real market for her 2010 brand of light-but-not-unintentional music. The trouble is, though 143 on surface level fits in amongst current pop trends (big choruses, stupid lyrics), it’s both incredibly boring and incongruous with the nuances of her contemporaries’ music. Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, two new additions to the pop A-list, clearly take clues from Teenage Dream-era Katy (Carpenter’s performances in particular bear more than a passing resemblance to Perry’s maximalist shows and their puckish presentation), yet these new artists aren’t beloved only for the artifice or the big hooks. There’s real intention and craftsmanship behind the music – Roan’s hard-won queer acceptance and Carpenter’s humour-ification of modern dating – that makes it so transfixing to listen to. They’re dynamic, versatile, but crucially they have depth. (Dare I say, they’re also not hypocritical about catering to gay fans while making fun of their stereotypes in song - but that’s another essay entirely.) Perry’s pop contemporaries make records and put on shows that are both inspired and inspiring. Perry is neither.
I don’t have a concrete answer as to whether or not the Katy Perry hate train has too many carriages. The criticisms are valid, but Perry has been visibly affected by the online dogpiling. (I’ve also seen hate directed towards Perry’s four-year-old daughter – in the year of 2024? Come on, people!) If Perry were truly remorseful, though, she’d come out and publicly disavow working with Dr. Luke, and issue an apology. (I’d also like her to issue a separate apology for releasing ‘WOMAN’S WORLD’, but a man can dream.) That, coupled with some better music – perhaps something truly authentic – could plausibly salvage what’s left of her positive public image.
As it stands, though, Perry represents the out-of-touch celebrity in 2025 – too elevated from reality to reckon with the obliteration of most people’s goodwill towards her, and too rich to properly care. Part of me (pun intended) feels like the last eight years of her career - i.e. Witness onwards - have been an elaborate sketch or experiment, and the real Katy Perry is waiting to hatch Substance-like out of her skin at any moment. Her downfall has been the stuff screenwriters would kill for; indeed, we’ve all been playing the hungry spectator for some months now, thirsting for the newest Katy Perry mishap we can all grill to death online. As her former chart rival Lady Gaga might comment, we love to hate her. (Then again, it’s to Perry’s credit that we can’t stop talking about her - it’s part and parcel of being a diva.)
Speaking of Gaga, I’ve been thinking a lot recently of this clip of Perry at her concert in Mexico – one of two sold-out shows at the 62,000-capacity GNP Seguros stadium. I wonder how it must feel, as Katy Perry, to observe Gaga unravel MAYHEM, watch her interviews clearly outlining the care and passion she put into the record, see her spirited and elaborate live show where she looks like she’s having a ball. A small piece of me feels bad for Perry – maybe the eight-year-old me who loved hearing ‘Roar’ on the radio – but I know that this is the bed she’s made for herself.
Another Katy Perry moment I keep coming back to is her response to an Onion article about her. The Onion, a satirical publication, joked that she would soon release a song called ‘Stop Making Fun of Me’. (I laughed!) Perry commented that the photo accompanying the headline was ‘clearly photoshopped’ and she’d ‘never let my Botox go that long’, with the irony being that the photo does not appear to have been edited from its original use in an interview last September. Perry, at the end of the day, is just like us: chronic overthinker, victim of too many lazy days at work. But unlike us, her laziness is squarely in the public eye, and her fame is souring into notoriety. On one song, Perry once told a detractor that their ‘game [was] ‘tired’ and that they ‘should retire’; relistening to it now, it feels like she was speaking to her future self.
So many great lines in this, but just wanted to especially call out this one:
You know that song, right? ‘Chained to the Rhythm’? No?
Lmfaoooo