Katy Perry Does Mortality in Her Smartest Era Yet
The aging popstar’s “love frequency” offers unusual aesthetic cohesion against sexist and contradictory demands.
Prior to its September 20th release, the first several singles from Katy Perry’s new album 143 already foreshadowed a new stage in the deconversion-inflected spirituality that so informs her brand of inspirational-cum-testimonial pop: lingeringly chastened by her failed foray into consciousness-raising with 2017’s Witness, Perry now grounds herself in her family, even as she increasingly appreciates her admittedly constrained ability to raise others up through music.
Now that her sixth major studio album is out, these inklings have fed into a fuller form and finally made it clear: Perry has entered her smartest and most conceptually-integrated era yet.
To take the album structure alone, 143 is Perry’s most unified endeavor. Sonically, it almost wholly occupies a space between the rough lurching cool of “Dark Horse” and the house inflections of much of Witness; although track transitions are abrupt and don’t quite match the overall flow of Teenage Dream, the audio identity between any given bits is pretty unmistakable, versus the “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” afterthought-ness of the song-style grab-bags of her previous albums. This sonic palette also finds resonance in the arrangement of songs. As a whole, the core offerings are sandwiched between the bookends of the opening “Woman’s World” and the closing “Wonder,” both marked by important and supremely weird touches employing Brechtian distancing effects. Otherwise, these central tracks roughly trace the thematic arc of a single relationship, from initial encounter and infatuation through suspicions and disillusionment. Cumulatively, this level of organization ends up raising 143 head-and-shoulders above Perry’s previous work, and it makes it her only album susceptible to sustained evaluation as such, rather than observations on obvious visuals or appreciation of the craft of individual songs.
So, what of the album itself?
As she has signaled since the inaugural publicity, 143 is “lots of love and BPM.” Although much of her work conjures up a journey of staring down challenges and entering into triumph, this euphoria is now turned up three thousand percent. For, it turns out, Perry doesn’t just have love when she has “All the Love,” but she’s “higher than high” and “all the love that I ever lost came back to me.” If that’s not enough, she also doesn’t just love you to the umpteenth degree, but she actually breaks through that great dark divide and loves you across “Lifetimes.” You get the idea. Such a mainstream artist is always a strange combination of collaborative production and product persona and the actual person lying behind it all, but you really get the sense that Perry is in a good place. She has a kid, she has a man, she probably has good sex, and she’s looking pretty good on top of it all, in a sinewy Demi Moore kind of way. California party girl? No – Katy is getting her grown woman on, as a friend so pithily observed, and that even before her recent Video Music Awards recommendation for everyone to “pause” for a bit and center themselves and focus on what’s important.
But, even as Perry has signaled dissatisfaction with being boxed in since at least the straitjacketed asylum interlude from her 2014-2015 Prismatic tour, her life course has brought these issues back in a heightened way. Front and center is of course the imposed tension between sexuality and motherhood, made even worse by the expectations of popstar cheesecake that has served as a notable constant among all her chameleonic career phases ever since she inked that first plum contract. For, although we all know that we shouldn’t, we can’t help but talk about what she looks like, now that she’s facing down forty and has a kid.
So, then, what is one to do with this thing that shouldn’t exist, this attractive and radiant and ultimately happy woman who is a unity considered in herself, but who refracts and shatters when put out into the world? One answer is phrased through the periodic reinvention that’s yet another debt of hers to Madonna: Perry purposefully presents herself through clunky cyborg visuals that emphasize awkward heterogeneity, like those that adorn 143’s cover and surface in the “Woman’s World” video. As an answering echo, one might also note the surprisingly heavy-looking mercury-like butterfly wings that have adorned everything from her Video Music Awards performance to her new merch. What is this thing, and how does it fly?
Make of it what you will, especially its occasionally uneven execution. Yet, it has to be admitted that Perry is aesthetically grappling with the contradictory demands that life has forced her to face. To return to the strange Brechtian touches that open up and close the album, Perry ultimately ruins the groove of “Woman’s World” by sarcastically intoning, “That’s right, it’s a woman’s world.” That is, in the theorized manner of playwright Bertolt Brecht and his legendary followers like film director Douglas Sirk, her song does its best to embody generic contours and actually be a hit song that involves the audience, only to go purposefully awry in an attempt to wrench them out of their enjoyment and force a moment of self-reflection: “You know it’s really not a woman’s world, right?” Similar touches of course define the rapid-fire hash of the now-notorious “Woman’s World” video. There, for instance, her face is now tortured by various beauty implements, matching the visual comedy of the out-of-control acupuncture in 2019’s “Never Really Over”. As Perry has explained in a prebuttal that was taped on-set, too, the initial portions of the video did its best to emulate stereotypical pop music, full of exposed glistening muscles and hot dance moves and women women women, all peppered by disconcerting “too too much” moments like plump breasts bouncing back and forth in slow motion while barely wrapped in a cut-away American flag halter. (What?!)
Even more interestingly, the closing track “Wonder” is perhaps the subtlest and most structurally sophisticated mainstream pop song of recent memory, again making use of this “snap out of it” technique, but now to double down on Perry’s eternal mission of kindling inspiration.
In its unique status as the only album offering by “Firework” producers Stargate and the only song with no credit for Dr. Luke, the key is selective, jarring deployment of the blatantly technologically-manipulated voice of Perry’s young daughter, which confronts the listener as a rare variation on a much-repeated four-part chorus:
One day when we’re older, will we still look up in wonder?
Some day when we’re wiser, will our hearts still have that fire?
‘Cause somebody promised me, our innocence doesn’t get lost in a cynical world.
One day when we’re older, will we still look up in wonder?
Per classic pop song expectations like those fostered by “Teenage Dream” or “The One That Got Away,” “Wonder” should patly run first verse then chorus, then second verse then chorus, and lastly bridge and then chorus and then outro.
“Wonder,” however, begins with an additional insertion of the chorus, and not only that, but it starts with the first question about wonder in the child’s voice, then Perry as adult repeating that same first line as she moves into the first delivery of the full chorus. Then, the song more or less proceeds normally, apart from an entirely-instrumental preview of the driving major key banger of a bridge. Finally, however, when the song does reach that exuberant bridge, it drops very unusual lyrics about aging and unhappiness – ‘Cause time is gonna fly, beauty’s gonna fade, life will let you down – and then, rather than moving into full chorus and extended outro, it immediately proceeds into a severely mutilated version of the final chorus: out of nowhere, the child’s voice suddenly returns, and it asks you not only if you’ll still look up in wonder, but also if your heart will still have that fire, and then – abrupt end to the song, and abrupt end to the entire album.
Are you happy? Perry asks, in one of the freshest and most bizarre artistic choices of her career. For, it turns out, Katy Perry has made a Katy Perry song about death and aging, and she’s really really really trying to reach you with it, in a blindsiding intervention to make you confront the younger version of yourself and your dreams then and where you are now, with all the gaps and sadness that can lie between. If she hadn’t been namechecking menstruation and flexing her Fallopian tubes so much lately – ahem, pregnancy and uterus imagery of “Woman’s World” – you would almost say it’s ballsy. So, instead, you might just say that it shows a lot of ovaries.
And, not only that, but it’s actually relatively clear that this surprising move has been very carefully seeded into the album build-up and release. In social media posts from late June and early July, she recycles “then vs. now” pictures of fans alongside a 2009 tweet where she’s processing her success and it occurs to her that “U guys will grow with me.” More recently, she asked on social media during 143’s first week of release which song “has SURPRISED you the most and WHY?!”, only for multiple (planted?) responses to periodically call attention to “Wonder” and repeat the exact same verbiage about how it “makes me so emotional and nostalgic.” Pop music is a young person’s game, and Perry isn’t just receiving backwards-looking recognition as a Video Vanguard, but she’s also saying the deep truth that no-one wants to talk about, that both she and us are not just growing up, but getting old. Who does that, in pop?
Against her previous work, 143 is of course many things. For example, even as you feel like you’re trapped in Ibiza, often not unpleasantly, no song can quite match the underappreciated “Never Really Over” from 2020’s Smile, let alone the hits from Teenage Dream. Much execution of its ethos is also less than ideal; glimmers of sardonic style and song-cycle structure were apparent in Smile and its sad clown visuals, and yet even this more-developed effort can still fall short. And yet, all that said, it would be a mistake to unfairly dwell on any given bit of 143 as if Perry were “no longer in on the joke” – say, to narrowly emphasize the “girlboss” gestures of “Woman’s World,” versus fairer album-informed criticism that might ask whether it is wise to reinforce female objectification as a prelude to attempted subversion, even if there’s the added wrinkle where (as she says) she doesn’t “do it for the male gaze,” she does it “for the MALE GAYSSSS😘”.
For, if 143 is anything, it is self-aware. Perry knows that she made an album for clubbing, and no-one goes clubbing anymore. Perry knows that she made an album for happy people, and no-one’s happy anymore. You have to remember, between all of the pervasive thematics like 143 as “I love you” and the heart that adorns her personal signature on all of those limited-release album covers, Perry has never said that her post-pandemic and often-aging fanbase was already on her “love frequency”; instead, she’s always been adamant that 143 is her invitation into it.
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