Katy Perry is the happiest she’s ever been
Adizzying array of police lights flashed up and down Manhattan’s West Side Highway on a damp Thursday in May. President Donald Trump was visiting the U.S.S. Intrepid, snarling traffic outside the Javits Convention Center, where Katy Perry was performing at a corporate showcase for her new partner, YouTube. The last time she had been in the building was election night, when she had been preparing to toast the victory of Trump’s opponent.
For Perry, who prominently supported Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that party Nov. 8 began “with everybody looking fancy and beautiful and high on their horses,” she recalled in an interview several weeks after her YouTube set. The mood rapidly shifted when word started to spread that Clinton was not on her way there — news that the 32-year-old Perry described as “traumatizing.”
“It was a revelation, it was a reckoning,” she said of Clinton’s loss. She started downing drinks and reached out to the nearest person for physical support: Lady Gaga, also there to celebrate the election of the first female president. There they were, “Gaga and I just looking at each other and being like, ‘[expletive] it, we need to touch each other,’” Perry said. And for a minute two of the biggest pop stars in the world held hands.
Alliances aren’t easily made in the superstar stratosphere, where elbows are often sharp. Perry, who released her fourth major-label album, Witness, on June 9, stands as one of the biggest successes in the industry, alongside Madonna, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. She has sold 6.5 million albums and nearly 71 million digital songs in the United States, according to Nielsen Music, notched 14 Top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits, performed in the 2015 Super Bowl halftime show and landed a gig as a judge on the revamped American Idol, which is to return in September on ABC.
But she said she had an awakening on election night tied to misogyny in her past. She is undertaking a strenuous effort to prove she isn’t the same frothy Katy Perry as before, making over her look, her music and her vocabulary. For 96 hours, timed to the album’s release, she spread that message of “unity and communication” via filibuster — a nonstop YouTube live stream called “Witness World Wide,” organized into segments (a therapy session, meditations, a cathartic chat with RuPaul) where the words “safe place” came up a lot and Perry worked out to her own album. Thanks to Madonna’s restlessness, female pop stars are expected to reinvent themselves every few years, but there’s no guarantee that listeners will accept the changes. For Perry the stakes couldn’t be higher: She believes she is now revealing her true self.
“Every day when I think I know something, the universe shows me that I need to learn another lesson,” she revealed in a Manhattan shared workspace. “So I stand here today, more so than any other day, saying I know nothing. I literally know nothing.” (Perry often veers into platitudes, but she is consistent: During
the live stream, she wore an “I Know Nothing” T-shirt for yoga.
“I feel very empowered, extremely liberated, from the conditioning of the way I used to think, spiritually liberated, politically liberated, liberated from things that don’t serve me.”
She said she stopped drinking (for now) on January 15, and has been attending group therapy with her family. Her parents are Pentecostal pastors, and Perry, who was born Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, was raised in a strict religious tradition. “I went to that dark place that I had been avoiding, and I dug out the mold. It was not fun, but I did that — I’m still doing that.”
Caryn Ganz, NYT