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One of Katy Perry’s last Billboard Nos. 1 was Roar, her eye-of-the-tiger empowerment anthem from 2013. The song found new life three years later, when Perry performed it at the Democratic National Convention and lent it to Hillary Clinton for a campaign-closing ad that aligned values like respect and courage with the song’s mad-as-hell feminism: “Get ready ’cause I’ve had enough.”
These days, Roar and other Perry hits play like artifacts of the era of hope-and-change politics and girl boss feminism – wide-eyed, blandly encouraging, innocuous. Maybe that’s why Woman’s World, the first single off Perry’s new album 143, landed earlier this year like a dispatch from a parallel universe. Over synthesized disco pop, Perry lays out a blueprint for the “feminine divine” while trying to tap the sexy confidence of a Maybelline ad. In her conception, women are flowers, mothers, superheroes, sisters, “confident,” “heaven-sent,” “so intelligent” – anything but complicated.
And still this inoffensive song managed to offend, because Perry made it in part with Dr. Luke, the megaproducer behind much of her earlier output, who has become anathema to many pop fans amid a recently-settled legal battle with pop star Kesha involving accusations of sexual abuse and defamation. The fans weren’t pleased, and, when asked about the collaboration, Perry deflected with an invocation of motherhood in her non-answer self-defence.
That was the most obvious way in which Perry has struggled to connect with our pop moment – one that has a few more things to say than we tended to get from Peak Perry. In her imperial era, she was an avatar of pop’s most reliable themes (mean boys, Friday nights, yearned-for loves) who somehow managed to make a song called I Kissed a Girl that reinforced gender stereotypes. 143 plays like an attempt to return Perry to those glory days. This is an album of anonymous electro-pop, very simple sentiments (“I’ll love you for life”) and hip-hop-inflected “bangers” that tend to be – as she sings in the cringey 21 Savage collaboration Gimme Gimme – “all bark with no bite.”
You’ve mostly heard it before. I’m His, He’s Mine revolves around a sample of the Crystal Waters’ house music classic Gypsy Woman. But instead of describing the self-actualization of a woman experiencing homelessness, Perry’s version is a codependence duet full of strained lyrics like, “You’re creepin’ in his DMs/I’m sleepin’ in his sweatpants.” (Go easy on Perry’s partner on the song, the promising up-and-comer Doechii. With luck, listeners will memory-hole this collab, like the time Kendrick Lamar rapped on a remix of Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood.)
There was a time when Katy Perry really did make this stuff look easy (Hot n Cold), when even her cheesiest material (California Gurls, Last Friday Night) possessed a campy effervescence. She’d belt out bops about youthful, girls-night-out indiscretions over productions as light as those cotton candy clouds on the cover of Teenage Dream.
On 143, Perry tries to keep it simple, but the formula no longer works. The untz-untz EDM that populates about half of the 33-minute album belongs at a retro DJ night, not on a high-gloss comeback record. The lyrics oscillate between evergreen banalities (“Is it a crush? Makin’ me blush”) and moments that kill the magic (“Can’t give me your password to your phone, not start a fight”).
Of course, it certainly doesn’t pay to overthink pop music. But so many women are making music in 2024 that is fun, flirty, feminist and interesting, from Olivia Rodrigo to Sabrina Carpenter to Charli XCX and beyond. In her heyday, Perry kissed a girl for the male gaze; today’s biggest rising star, Chappell Roan, is singing about being knee-deep in the passenger seat with another woman. And so Katy Perry returns feeling smaller – back not with a “Roar” but a whimper.