The University of St Andrews lacks a Katy Perry Society. After listening to her latest album, 143, it is easy to see why. In 2024, Katy Perry and Taylor swift comparisons seem absurd but, in 2014, they were commonplace. The two were record breaking popstars in their own right and the similarities soon erupted into a bitter feud. Ten years later, their careers could not be more different.
This year, Katy Perry’s career is at a crossroads. Her career first faltered in 2017 following the release of her fifth studio album, Witness, which saw her attempting to combine her previous energetic pop with deep political commentary, and (rather bizarrely) worrying amounts of self-loathing. Commercial and critical reception to the album was subsequently mixed. This artistic turn, combined with an unfortunate haircut, quickly guaranteed Witness a place in the canon of flop eras alongside classics like Madonna’s American Life or Lady Gaga’s Artpop.
Three years later, and at the height of the pandemic, Perry released Smile, a more upbeat project that, although it failed to recapture the same success as her previous works, was a welcome piece of course correction. Perry capitalised on this with a well-received Vegas residency entitled ‘Play’. This also coincided with a critical re-evaluation of Teenage Dream, which is now considered to be one of the defining pop albums of the 2010s. Nostalgia was now on her side. Maybe the world had been too cruel to Katy Perry?
All this, combined with the career resurgences of fellow 30-something popstars Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, seemed to suggest that the stars were aligning for a return to superstardom for Katy Perry. Instead, at this crucial crossroads in her career, she released 143. The results of Perry’s attempt to recapture her past glory is less than stellar.
The album’s rollout was already marred following the reveal of disgraced music producer Dr. Luke’s involvement in the album. This is despite Perry having previously cut ties with him following the allegations made by Kesha. Not a good start. The actual musical quality of lead single (and opening track) ‘Woman’s World’ did little to help. It features such groundbreaking, girlboss feminist statements like ‘Sexy, confident / So intelligent / She is heaven-sent / So soft, so strong’, laid upon so bland an instrumental it could have been made by AI; the outcome is just not good. Needless to say, the combination of supposedly empowering, cringeworthy lyrics (the result of six whole songwriters) and an alleged rapist’s behind the scenes work on the track is not a winning one.
The second single, ‘Lifetimes’ is not much better, feeling more like a half-baked demo than a full single, consisting of the same lifeless refrain repeated over and over for over three minutes. Perry hopes her love can span multiple reincarnations but the final product is just endless mediocrity.
Credit: Instagram/@katyperry (foreground) & Callisto Lodwick (background).
What quickly becomes clear on 143 is the clear absence of any artistic progression over the past decade on behalf of the singer and songwriter. Out the eleven tracks on the standard edition of the album, only one actually has a bridge. You get the sense that there was a distinct lack of effort from nearly everyone involved. Katy Perry has never been an artist known for her lyrical prowess (do you ever feel like a plastic bag?) but historically, the songs and presentation were good enough to overlook these duds.
143, however, lacks both style and substance. It’s difficult to take songs like ‘Artificial’, which was probably intended as a commentary on our modern reliance on technology, seriously given such thought-provoking lines like ‘I'm just a prisoner in your prison’. Another lyrical low point is the song ‘Gimme Gimme’ which contains the absolutely horrific statement: ‘Stimulate me with your fantasies / Say the right thing, maybe you can be / Crawlin' on me like a centipede’. Although the intent may have been sensual the result is anything but.
‘I’m His, He’s Mine’, a title that immediately contradicts the feminist platitudes of the lead single, is another creatively bankrupt attempt at creating a catchy TikTok hit. Even the choice of sample on which the track is built around (Crystal Waters’s ‘Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)) lacks originality. Just three years earlier, PinkPantheress used the exact same sample in her track ‘I Must Apologise’ to infinitely better results. Even a charismatic guest verse by Doechii, which might just be the highlight of a rather dim album, can do little to rescue this trainwreck of a song.
A common defence of mediocre pop music is that those who dislike it simply hate fun. Fun, however, is not a feeling I walked away from this album feeling. Instead, the overwhelming emotion radiating from this project is one of sadness. Perry’s intended comeback is hollow, uninteresting and most importantly dated. While recycling music of previous decades is nothing new for the pop genre, there is a clear difference between retro and stale. Rather than crafting a nostalgic throwback to the sounds of youth, the aged sound of this project is a result of complete stagnation, an artist stubbornly planting themselves in the mud and refusing to accept that the world is moving on without them.
The ultimate result feels a little like an essay written by ChatGPT. In Katy Perry’s case it is easy to see the same mix of despair and laziness a student might feel after spending the last two weeks procrastinating on coursework that’s suddenly due in half an hour before ultimately deciding on the easy way out. The result is also the same: an unoriginal, poorly executed, and hollow piece of work that cannot hold up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny. I can’t even be that mad about it. I’m just disappointed.
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