Perry flops with purposeful pop

SOMETIMES, a pop star releases a single so ill-conceived, you wonder if the artist ever had any understanding of their own appeal to begin with.

For Katy Perry, that song is Chained to the Rhythm, a halfthrottle disco ditty that scolds us for dancing our nights away while Donald Trump’s America crumbles: “Put your rose-coloured glasses on and party on.” Perry calls this new approach “purposeful pop”, implying her previous music didn’t have a purpose. Obviously, it did.

Her biggest singles provided affirmation (Roar), promoted uplift (Firework), encouraged abandon (Teenage Dream) and embraced goofiness (California Gurls). The edgeless bluster of her voice often made Perry sound more like a hitmaking conduit than an autonomous personality, but the songs usually got the job done. Purposeful or not, her music has been therapeutic.

On her new album, Witness, Perry is abandoning all of that – her frivolity, her wink-wink sense of humour, that brassiere. “We’re living in a bubble-bubble,” she sings on Chained to the Rhythm, offering to topple divisive American thought silos. “So comfortable, we cannot see the trouble-trouble.”

But throughout Witness, Perry refuses to articulate what that “trouble-trouble” might be. We get the sense that bad forces are on the rise in America, and that we should feel proud of ourselves for noticing them, and… that’s it, congratulations, we’re aware of it.

Yes, perhaps change starts from within, but there’s the song Mind Maze. It would’ve made a good title track for this collection of songs, so bland in their production and so lost in their own doublespeak.

Equally confounding is how frequently Perry lets her words get in the way of her voice. For her choruses to properly take flight, her verses need to feel like smooth rides down the tarmac – but she’s a clunky lyricist, and rhythm isn’t her forte.

And during Swish Swish, an alleged diss-track about Taylor Swift, Perry boasts “A tiger don’t need no sleep,” echoing the “eye of the tiger” cited in Roar. Perry sounds like she’s trapped in a purgatory, pantomiming progress, giving an endless pep talk to her own reflection. She wants to look out into the world, but can’t look away from the mirror. – The Washington Post