There’s a lot to be said for knowing when to throw in the towel or walk away from a good thing before it sours. Look at Adele: she toured and took up a Las Vegas residency after making her comeback with her album 30, in 2021, but now it’s time to disappear back into the shadows. She told fans in Munich last month that she would “not see you for an incredibly long time ... I have spent the last seven years building a new life for myself, and I want to live it now.”
Katy Perry might be wise to start taking notes. Adele’s fellow star has become something of a cautionary tale of how not to manage your pop career. Although the Californian is responsible for several bona-fide bangers, from Hot N Cold and Teenage Dream to Firework, the thread arguably began to unravel with the release of Smile. That 2020 album was a critical flop, but it was no skin off her nose: after building a career that has encompassed everything from a long stint as a judge on American Idol to her own Vegas residency, plus a multitude of advertising deals, there were plenty of nixers to keep the lights on in the Perry household.
Now the 39-year-old is preparing to re-enter the fray – but the lead-up to this week’s release of 143, her seventh album, has been a disaster. First there was the tone-deafness of working with the producer Lukasz Gottwald, aka Dr Luke, who was embroiled in a long-running legal dispute with the musician Kesha after she accused him of rape and abuse. Although Gottwald denied all allegations, and a civil case was settled in 2023, the irony – some would say distastefulness – of his cowriting the album’s supposedly feminist-leaning lead single, Woman’s World, was not lost on fans. Then the video for its second single, Lifetimes, shot on the Balearic island of Espalmador, was criticised for reportedly infringing on an environmentally protected area. Both singles have performed disastrously. It’s safe to say bad juju now surrounds the pop princess.
The controversy and titillation that Perry has embraced since early in her career have usually paid off: her debut single, I Kissed a Girl, was initially slammed by the LGBTQ+ community but was later embraced as a celebration of bisexuality. You could argue that the warning signs were there early, too, with the likes of Ur So Gay, a song that makes a juvenile playground taunt the basis of its lyrical hook (“You’re so gay, and you don’t even like boys”). Perry has always trodden a thin line between frivolous and puerile – and her lyrics have never been in the running to win awards.
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But Perry has shown a masterly ability to spin blunders into positives. One of your dancers makes a monumental cock-up during your Super Bowl half-time performance? Make “Left Shark” a thing! A long-running feud with the biggest pop star on the planet? Make a big deal of rekindling your friendship with Taylor Swift and appearing in one of her videos! An ex-husband who has become a conspiracy theorist accused of rape, assault and emotional abuse? Replace Russell Brand with another famous English man – the thankfully wholesome Orlando Bloom – and brush over that ill-fated marriage!
It remains to be seen if she will recover from her association with Gottwald. “I understand that it started a lot of conversations,” she said this month, trying to sidestep the issue. “He was one of many collaborators that I collaborated with. But the reality is, it comes from me. The truth is, I wrote these songs from my experience of my whole life going through this metamorphosis, and he was one of the people to help facilitate all that – one of the writers, one of the producers. I am speaking from my own experience. When I speak about Woman’s World, I speak about feeling so empowered now: as a mother, as a woman, giving birth, creating life, creating another set of organs.” Right, so.
The Woman’s World video also caused a rumpus. Fans didn’t buy her slightly belligerent line that her adopting the famous Rosie the Riveter persona while dressed in a variety of titillating outfits was satire. “Having to explain a joke means it didn’t land,” remarked one. “This feels like a parody of feminism gone wrong,” wrote another. “This feels like it’s mocking women instead of empowering them.”
Despite all her missteps, Perry has proven a canny businesswoman. She’s now said to be worth $500 million, having sold a portion of her music rights for a reported $225 million last year. So buckets of money. Perhaps the problem is that what Perry may not have in spades is the likability factor. From the damp squib of Smile to those recent cringeworthy ads for Just Eat, much of what she has done over the past few years seems only to have tarnished her once pristine pop crown. And it’s difficult to imagine her now making an album that has as much impact as Charli XCX’s Brat, or anything by Dua Lipa or Billie Eilish, or reinventing herself the way Swift (whose reaction to Perry’s MTV VMAs speech last week went viral) did with Evermore, her folk sidestep.
Former admirers have been less than diplomatic here, too. “Katy, just retire, your comeback was an embarrassing flop,” one brutally commented under a recent Instagram post. A permanent retreat into the sunset may not be necessary, but it could serve Perry well to take that leaf out of Adele’s book and step back to enjoy the fruits of her labour for a few years with Bloom and her young daughter.
The album’s title is supposed to be Perry’s secret code for “I love you”, but for now it’s more a case of: “Maybe we should start seeing other people. We’re on two different paths right now. We’ve both changed and grown apart. I think we need some space.” You get the message, Katy: it’s not us, it’s you.
