uncanny flop: meditations on katy perry
By Michael Bednar
The trouble began earlier this summer. An ominous wind not unlike the Santa Anas rattled through the Internet’s pop devotee message boards. Whispers and accusations of flop trembled on the vine. Dr. Luke production credits were confirmed. And then, D-Day, July 11th, 2024: Katy Perry released “Woman’s World,” the lead single from her seventh studio album, 143. An attempt at Girlboss Pop™ a few years too late, the song features chintzy Eurodisco production tailormade for a Walgreens or Kroger playlist, lyrics declaring that women “ain’t goin away” (one would think a group that comprises 49% of the earth’s population would indeed not be going anywhere anytime soon), non sequitur shoutouts to the Feminine Divine, and the haunting opening line, “Sexy, confident…” The single cover art featured Perry in her best Charli-XCX-meets-Arca drag, and the video featured a scantily clad Perry writhing around a construction site, prompting accusations of pandering to the male gaze. This, in turn, prompted Perry to assert that she did it for the “male gayssssss,” not the male gaze; she also published a video to her Instagram admonishing the trolls that “Women can do anything–even satire,” while her backup dancers stood around her looking like Jonestown hostages.
Perry quickly went into damage control, teasing clips from the album’s next single, “Lifetimes,” ad nauseum on Instagram, partying with gays in Spain, showing us how fun she could be, how easily she could brush off the disastrous era rollout. But it was too late–“Lifetimes came and went without charting on the Billboard Hot 100, and Spanish authorities chided Perry for violating environmental laws during the filming of the music video in the Balearic islands. A third single, featuring Doechii and a sample of Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman,” also failed to chart. Upon the album’s release, the critics and Internet pop hivemind drubbed the album ferociously; Pitchfork gave it a 4.5 and the album earned the dubious distinction of having the lowest rating on Metacritic in the site’s history. The prophecy was fulfilled, the whispers became a scream–the Katy Perry dance-pop renaissance, first promised in 2019, was a resounding and undeniable flop.
To say that I am proud of being a Katy Kat, as Perry’s fanbase is called, would be a lie. But neither am I ashamed of being a Katy Kat. That said, I am not here on a contrarian mission to reclaim 143 as some kind of camp masterpiece–aside from a few select tracks, most of it is simply too uninspired and dull to be so-bad-it’s-good. My mission here is rather to convince you that, for those willing to look into the depths of their shadow, Perry’s work can provide surprising pleasures.
Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson was born to evangelical Christian parents in 1985 in Santa Barbara. As a child, she was not allowed to listen to secular music, and her parents feared God so much that they insisted the family call deviled eggs “angeled eggs.” Miss Hudson dipped her toes in the waters of contemporary Christian on her self-titled debut, but a secret obsession with Alanis Morissette led her to the sinful hellscape of secular pop for her second outing, One of the Boys, on which she flirted with Sapphism, further severing herself from the world of white, coastal Californian Jesus freaks. Teenage Dream, her third album, cemented her place in the pop pantheon. The album yielded five Billboard Hot 100 #1s; at its best, it’s a deeply appealing gumbo of adolescent pathos, frothy silliness, and campy sex appeal. Teenage Dream had its fair share of cringeworthy moments, but the sheer undeniability of its monstrously anthemic singles bludgeoned you over the head into submission. Even those who would rather be caught dead than admit to listening to Katy Perry could, with clammy hands, agree that “Teenage Dream” was the perfect pop song.
Her 2013 album PRISM is where the madness begins, where the scuffs on the white pumps appear. However, there are some (probably only myself) who consider PRISM her nightmare masterpiece, one of the finest modern examples of true camp. In the eyes of much of the culture, Perry starts to slip from guilty-pleasure pop goddess status to so-bad-we-actually-don’t-know-if-it’s-good; or, perhaps, so-bad-it’s-good-but-we’re-afraid-to-look-too-deeply-into-the-void-of-PRISM. Lyrically, Perry’s taste for the cliché tips over from standard-pop into the mouth of madness (Gawker listed all 226 of them in a post-release day piece). She borrows a page from Gwen Stefani’s book of cultural appropriation for live performances and music videos–wearing cornrows, dressing as a geisha, putting a bhangra beat on a song, channeling Cleopatra, dabbling in what she called “trap” with a Juicy J feature name-dropping Jeffrey Dahmer (who is apparently straight in the Perryverse). She does her best Xtina over a ‘90s house beat with a Swedish gospel choir, tells her lover that they’re “like a double rainbow,” and decides not to commit suicide on the floor of her bathroom after God saves her (for a second time). She performs at the GRAMMYS as a witch, doing a halfhearted strip routine in a pointy hat with a twenty-foot-tall broom.
She would later apologize for some of this careless and tasteless (in the wrong way) culture-hopping; to be more precise, her apology would come during a 72-hour-livestream promoting her follow-up album, Witness. Perry discussed her past cultural appropration and racial justice with DeRay Mckesson, broke down as she told a psychotherapist that she cut her hair short because she “didn’t want to look like Katy Perry anymore,” debated against Caitlyn Jenner about Trump, and did yoga with Jesse Tyler Ferguson. She had teased an era of what she deemed “purposeful pop,” but beyond a vaguely political lead single and the chilling livestream, most of Witness’ songs were resolutely apolitical. She teased a return to dance-pop in 2019, releasing the refreshingly un-cringe “Never Really Over,” but what we got instead was Smile, an album that felt genetically engineered in a lab to play over Target soundsystems (and the title track was indeed used in a Target television spot). Which then leads us to 134.
I know how all the above probably reads, and I know how many people with good taste react when you tell them you like Katy Perry. A longtime friend of mine confessed recently that when I told him, in the early stages of our friendship, that I genuinely liked Perry, he temporarily blacked out, recalibrating everything he knew about me up to then, finally understanding what it might be like for a parent to find out that their child is gay. How could someone with ostensibly good taste like myself sincerely like Katy Perry?
The truth is that Perry’s music has soundtracked some of the most…well, interesting moments of my life: at the top of a stuck ferris wheel at my university’s annual carnival while the four-on-the-floor of “Teenage Dream” pounded in the background, nervously glancing at my friend and praying we would come down in one piece; trying not to cry on the way to work on BART to “Wide Awake” as I contemplated the dissolution of my first early ‘20s situationship; watching the 2016 DNC convention in a friend’s living room, all of us simultaneously experiencing a sinking feeling that perhaps Trump wasn’t going to flop as Katy told us to “Roar for Hillary!”; driving to a lab in a run-down strip mall to get tests done after picking up a mysterious illness after an orgy to “By the Grace of God;” applying for unemployment for the third time in as many years to “Woman’s World;” playing the two-hour remix of “Double Rainbow” on the Calm app in the middle of the night to try to stop panic attacks during one of those extended periods of unemployment.
The truth is that sometimes we need something absurd to listen to for moments like these; perhaps they aren’t the usual touchstones you would celebrate, but I think they deserve a place in our little memory banks, and I can’t think of a better artist than Katy Perry to help us access these messy little madeleines. Plus, we live in an era during which it’s easier than ever to open your phone and find a million different beautiful people with perfect skin and perfect clothing and perfectly curated apartments telling you all the ways you’re living your life wrong, whether it’s your cleaning routine or your diet or your fridge organization or your work ethic, shilling products to you in the name of endless and ruthless life optimization. Katy Perry’s music gives me a space where I can escape the ever-churning tastemaking machine, sink down into the morass, and give myself over to the pleasure of trash. And, if you can look past the worst of her musical tendencies, you may be surprised at what you find–that same friend who was shocked at my sincere love for (some of) Perry’s music recently told me how much he loved “Walking on Air,” a watered-down ’90s house tribute from PRISM, after hearing it on a podcast he was listening to. Quelle surprise.
Katy Perry at her best takes us beyond the land of mere bad taste into the uncanny valley of nightmare camp. I crave this valley, and I think that anyone that says they don’t is just lying to themselves. Perry’s last two albums have flopped mostly because they simply don’t go far enough into that valley; they hover at the merely bad without descending into the primordial muck. But there’s still glimmers of the old Perry here and there–see the music video for “I’m His, He’s Mine,” in which she rides on top of a convertible, spread-eagle and pussy out to the wind. The truth is, 143 is a bad album, but it’s really not that bad. I think that we like to excoriate those we deem the Flop of the Moment so that we can delude ourselves into thinking we will never become the pilloried Flop ourselves. But what if we embraced the flop within, made acquaintances with it, put PRISM on a pair of noise-canceling headphones, closed our eyes, and let ourselves float away on Perry’s double rainbow? Join me, won’t you?
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Michael Bednar (@eyesoflauranyro) is a writer in East Hollywood.
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