Once, during a time of wrenching economic crisis, there was a young woman whose ebullient spirit and jubilantly nonsensical song-and-dance numbers brought joy to millions, and made her a record-setting pop-culture phenomenon. But after the recovery, when public life started calling on different energies, the culture no longer had much of a place for her. She had to find another direction for the rest of her adult life.
I’m thinking of Shirley Temple, the 1930s tap-dancing cherub whose movies like The Little Colonel and songs like “The Good Ship Lollipop” fixated and transported Americans during the Great Depression. But if you thought I was talking about Katy Perry, I wouldn’t be surprised—not only because this is supposed to be a review of Perry’s new album 143, but because parallels with Temple have popped up throughout Perry’s career.
In 2009—after she “Kissed a Girl” on her breakthrough One of the Boys but before she drenched the world in whipped cream with 2010’s Teenage Dream (still the only album besides Michael Jackson’s Bad to produce five No. 1 singles)—Perry herself said: “I’m not looking to alienate my fans, but I can’t be that grown-up Shirley Temple girl wearing the stupid strawberry in her hair all the time … because I’d kill myself, or someone else would for me.” When Temple died in 2014, Perry tweeted in her memory, “You were the original cherry on top Shirley Temple!” And even in 2018 the designer Galia Lahav celebrated Perry showing up in their “Shirley Temple jumpsuit” at a charity event.
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, her wide-eyed persona went instantly out of date, and she’s been floundering like a left shark ever since.
In Temple’s own career, when the 1940s and the Second World War came along, she briefly tried to carry on in movies. But she soon recognized her image didn’t translate to the new times, or to her adult life. She adjusted, reading children’s fairy tales on a successful TV program for a few years, and then eventually (as Shirley Temple Black) moving on to a decades-long respected career in international diplomacy.
Likewise, in the Great Recession, Perry’s hit after hit embodied both the mass hunger for escapism and the optimistic mood of the Obama presidency. But when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, her wide-eyed girly-girl persona went instantly out of date, and Perry has been floundering like a left shark ever since.
Reliably literal-minded, she shifted to a woke “Purposeful Pop” stance with her 2017 album Witness. It was a fiasco on multiple levels. (Remember when she did a 72-hour live YouTube marathon in her house that included full sessions with her therapist?) Next, in 2020, she had the terrible timing to release a record called Smile in the first months of the pandemic and IT was soon, and justly, forgotten.
Her peers from the golden age of 2010s radio diva pop also went through wobbly phases when it fizzled—see Taylor Swift’s Reputation, and Lady Gaga’s Joanne. But they quickly recovered their mojo in ways that felt true to themselves. Perry and some others—Pink, for example—not so much.
She launched her latest comeback attempt this summer with the single “Woman’s World,” a fingerpainting-level girl-power strutter that happened to be co-written and co-produced by Dr. Luke, who Kesha, in a lawsuit, accused of sexual assault. (The producer has always denied the claim.) The queasy combination provoked some of the most savage reviews I can remember in years. (Might it singlehandedly have put an end to poptimism?) A rehash of Lady Gaga songs that were already rehashes of Madonna songs, the track was so unfun that someone somewhere decided to counterbalance it with a music video that mocked songs like “Woman’s World” and white pop feminism in general. Perry went gamely along as usual. I actually think the video is funny in spots, but given that the song itself has less than zero sense of humor, the blend only baffled people further.
The next two singles were less disastrous, except that they failed to attract much notice at all. “Lifetimes” is a passable dance track that merely seems several years too late to catch the same wave as Dua Lipa and Beyoncé’s tributes to house and disco. It feels like Renaissance for Dummies. The most notable reaction came from the Spanish government, who investigated its video for having done possible ecological damage to a fragile dune ecosystem while allegedly filming without permission. Capitol Records denied it had done anything wrong, but the metaphor felt fitting: Katy Perry as an invasive species pushing into environments where she doesn’t belong, namely the 2020s.
Then came “I’m His, He’s Mine,” a superficially more appealing track until you realize that it’s little more than a hollowing out of Crystal Waters’ early-1990s house classic “Gypsy Woman,” stripping that song for nearly all its parts except its social significance, and reducing it to a catfight-over-a-dude cliché. It’s not even a very original theft, given that “Gypsy Woman” has been sampled easily 100 times before. And any objective judge would say that Perry is the loser of this dull fight, on her own album; guest rapper Doechii takes it without breaking a sweat. Doechii could be a reason to pay attention, but she put out her own far superior mixtape a few weeks ago, and you could be listening to that instead.
Now that the full 143 album is here, I have no redeeming developments to report. Astonishingly, Perry has stuck with “Woman’s World” as the lead track, and it closes with “Wonder,” the most cloying bit of mommy-pop you’ve ever heard (including using her 4-year-old daughter Daisy’s auto-tuned voice at the top). The chorus attempts to rhyme “wonder” with “older” and leaves my mind woozily murmuring, “wolder, wolder, wolder, wolder … ” As so often happens with celebrity parents, the songs about parenthood here feel uncomfortably self-centered, about the relationship’s emotional benefits for Perry, rather than really about her kid.
A couple of tracks, “Crush” and “Nirvana,” are somewhere between inoffensive and pleasant. Otherwise the kindest thing I can say is that it is mercifully brief, at 11 tracks that total about 33½ minutes. It could be a useful record if you have half an hour or so of dishwashing to do. My kitchen is somewhat cleaner this morning.
However, if Laura Snapes in her July review of “Woman’s World” said she felt like the song made her “feel stupider every sorry time” she listened to it, here you have to multiply that by 11. By the time you read this, I only hope my less cerebrally compromised editor has been able to salvage something from whatever’s dribbled out of my battered brain like streams of dye sluicing down Rudy Giuliani’s temples.
I’m honestly not accustomed to a high-level pop album being this genuinely bad. Mediocre? Off-base? Sure, that happens. But I don’t think 143 would seem impressive coming from a random upstart, let alone a onetime member of the pop pantheon. It takes a village of highly paid idiots to fail this completely, and not all of them are even accused sexual predators.
Yes, Dr. Luke’s production on “Woman’s World” was not a one-off. He is a co-producer on every track here but one. That’s quite a statement. Either Perry believes deeply in Luke’s innocence (and it’s fair here to note that he hasn’t been convicted of anything—Kesha and Luke eventually reached an undisclosed settlement in 2023), or she was so desperate to regain her past hitmaking glories with him that she was willing to auction off her nominally feminist soul. If it’s the latter, then the devil double-crossed her.
Either way, this album makes it seem like Perry’s past decade isn’t just a case of bad luck and poor decisions. It makes one question how good she was in the first place, or how much was just being in the right place at the right time. Nothing wrong with that—luck and ephemerality are part of how pop works, even part of its magic. The bubbles that burst fastest glisten brightest, or some such. It might be more appropriate to think of Katy Perry as the equivalent of a one-hit wonder, only an outlier at seven or eight hits instead.
So I think it’s time to call it: I doubt Katy Perry is ever coming back as a hitmaker. Only as a nostalgia act. And unlike Swift or Gaga, she doesn’t seem set to transition to any other major musical mode. Maybe children’s entertainer, along the lines of her Pee-wee’s Playhouse–inspired Las Vegas residency Play in 2021–22? Or, on the Shirley Temple Black model, perhaps a President Harris will have some openings in the foreign service next year.
Unfortunately, I doubt Perry has the finesse. She’s too gaffe-prone. There was that business with the nuns. And with the disabled veteran. The blackface-styled shoes. And the shilling for Elon Musk. In any case, critics and journalists need to stop trying to issue prescriptions to her. The added pressure doesn’t seem to help. This is a woman with millions upon millions of dollars, a handsome actor fiancé (Orlando Bloom), their no-doubt-lovely child, and a dwindling storehouse of lingering goodwill. She’ll figure it out, hopefully, before she squanders too much more. As Temple Black knew well, you can’t spend your whole life doing the tootsie roll on a lollipop ship. You might cover the world in cream, but eventually, it curdles.
