Katy Perry Is Stuck in 2016

We used to know who Katy Perry was. A good Christian girl gone wild, shooting whipped cream out of a candy-cane bustier, cruising in her Jeep, and getting freaky on the weekend. A beach babe in search of good times and cheap thrills. Over a decade ago, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, Perry satisfied our national appetite for youth, frivolity, and hedonism. She represented pop music as a sweet escape, producing some of the best, most era-defining songs of the 21st century. Teenage Dream, her smash 2010 album, tied Michael Jackson for most No. 1 singles; half of its tracks went Top 10. If called forth at karaoke, basically everyone can sing, verbatim, “Last Friday Night,” “Firework,” and “Teenage Dream.”

Who is Katy Perry now? A recently retired American Idol judge, the wife of movie star Orlando Bloom, a new mom, the designer of a whimsical shoe line stocked at Macys. She’s a proud liberal who wears “PERSIST” armbands to the Grammys and remains committed to empowerment politics even though its integration into her music — “purposeful pop,” as she has branded it — precipitated her plunge. Most of all, she’s a 2010s relic, a faded pop star frantically attempting to clamber back to relevance, only to be thwarted by her inability to tell up from down. Did you know she released an album during the pandemic? Probably not.

Well, Katy’s back, and everything about the rollout for her new album, 143, reeks of desperation. Bidding for lowest-common-denominator gay fandom, she’s busied herself resharing tweets calling her “mother”; she enlisted YouTube-controversy machine Trisha Paytas to react to her album. At Paris Couture Week, she dragged a 500-foot-long train emblazoned with lyrics for the album’s lead single, “Woman’s World.” She’s so pro-woman, in fact, she rehired Dr. Luke, the embattled producer behind some of her biggest hits, whom she had ceased working with following allegations that he sexually assaulted Kesha, once her friend. (Dr. Luke denied the allegations and countersued for defamation; he and Kesha settled their long-running legal battle last year. “I never drugged or assaulted her and would never do that to anyone,” he wrote in a statement last month.)

What’s going on? Each 143 teaser has told a different story. At first, it seemed like the California Gurl was going Bushwick, based on an initial promo photo of Katy as an Arca-style femmebot in a white bikini top and giant robo-legs. But, a few weeks later, 143’s cover art dropped, and she is now some kind of woo-woo mermaid teleporting into another dimension. “SLEEP TIGHT FOR TOMORROW THE PORTAL OPENS,” she tweeted. (143, for smartphone-natives, is ‘I love you’ typed on a pager.) She’s been dodging the press — and fans pressing her on why she’s working with Dr. Luke — while previewing songs directly on Instagram Live. What the streams reveal: vacant lyrics, ill-advised guests, very obvious samples — an album that will almost certainly flop.

As confirmation, today we have “Woman’s World,” a paint-by-numbers pump-up anthem about how girls are geniuses, saints, blessings sent from heaven. “She’s a sister/She’s a mother,” Perry sings, as if those are the only two identities she can think of. “Open your eyes, just look around and you’ll discover.” In the music video, Perry dresses up as Rosie the Riveter, boobs bouncing in a stars-and-stripes bikini; she shows off a vibrator — not the most subtle product placement — and douses herself in “Whiskey for Women.” A crashing anvil indicates that it might be satire, but then we are back to bedazzled vagina ornaments. At the end, Perry hangs off a helicopter, brandishing a ring light stolen from a TikToker that’s miraculously transformed into the female gender symbol. What?

Perry is like Barbie in Barbie Land, stuck in a la-di-dah dimension in which Hillary Clinton is still the Democratic presidential nominee, “Male Tears” mugs make bank on Etsy, and the most transgressive thing a celebrity can do is sing “Fight Song.” (Coincidentally, as if bat-signaled by murmurs of a new female presidential candidate, Rachel Platten announced a new album this week.) In an interview with Zane Lowe, Perry guessed people recognize her mostly for “songs with a message, songs that are captions on T-shirts and stuff,” betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of her appeal. She’s always been at her weakest when she comments on capital-S society, as in her “wake-up sheeple” manifesto “Chained to the Rhythm.” What people want from Katy Perry is fantasy, escapism. In the end, “Woman’s World” comes off so forgettable, so cringe, that it overshadows the blatant hypocrisy of having an alleged predator produce it.