Reality check
Katy Perry is all ‘woke up’ in her new album, ‘Witness’, moving past her ‘Bad Blood’ feud with Taylor Swift to greater political awareness
Adizzying array of police lights flashed up and down the West Side Highway on a damp Thursday in May. President Donald Trump was visiting the USS 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 was 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 on November 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 Perry, 32, described as “traumatising.”
“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.
And Perry, who released her fourth major label album, Witness, on June 9, stands as one of the biggest successes in the industry, alongside Madonna, Beyonce and Taylor Swift. She has sold 6.5 million albums and nearly 71 million digital songs in the US, according to Nielsen Music; notched 14 Top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits; performed at 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. And 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, organised 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 ac-
cept the changes. For Perry, the stakes couldn’t be higher: She believes she is now revealing her true self. The old Katy Perry is gone. “Every day when I think I know something, the universe shows me that I need to learn another lesson,” she told me in a Manhattan shared workspace.
She said she stopped drinking (for now) on January 15, and she has been attending group therapy with her family. Her parents are Pentecostal pastors, and Perry, who was born Katheryn 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,” she said.
Change is also the theme of the throbbing Witness, an introspective, less pop-driven album that’s a departure from her last two records, Prism (2013) and Teenage Dream (2010). It’s her first LP not to feature work from her longtime collaborator Dr. Luke — “I had to leave the nest,” she said — although she continued her partnership with Swedish hit maker Max Martin.
And she assumed even greater creative control, helping bring in producers like indie-pop duo Purity Ring, composer Dustin O’Halloran and English musician Jack Garratt to create a palette that’s dreamy and clubby, if not as grabby as her earlier records. Perry has always been known as a reliable singles artist, but reviews haven’t been friendly. The album’s most successful single, Chained to the Rhythm, peaked at No. 4.
Perry told me she didn’t play her new music for Capitol Records, her label, until a few weeks before our interview, which is late in the process. If the label minded, it isn’t saying so. “I like to allow her the freedom to keep pursuing her artistic vision, and obviously we support her fully in all her endeavours,” said Steve Barnett, the chairman and chief executive of the Capitol Music Group.
The person charged with helping create Perry’s vision was Lauren Glucksman, 28, who is credited with A&R on the album, stepping into this role for the first time on a full LP. “We have a very honest rapport with each other, we have very similar taste, and ultimately I saw my job as trying to translate what’s in her mind and in her heart,” Glucksman said.
In the knotty world of internet superfandom, the harshest takes often come from deep inside an artist’s nucleus of support. Fans were so concerned about Perry’s shifts on Witness, they lasered in on Glucksman and demanded her ouster from the inner circle.
“People don’t let people grow,” Perry said. “They just want a time capsule. And they want them to be one thing. And we have to start re-imagining that.”
Perry doesn’t need to live in a house outfitted with 41 Big Brother-style cameras to be aware that she is under constant surveillance. She has a well-known strategy for frustrating the paparazzi (wearing the same adidas track suit when she leaves home to make the photographs less sellable), but that can’t stop the kind of gawking that accompanies daily life when you’re trading punches with another wildly famous blond pop star or dating a famous actor who enjoys nude paddleboarding. When she took up a vocal position as a Clinton supporter, she became a target of the alt-right. But as she started revving up for Witness ,it felt like some on the left were also taking their knives out.
A MADDENING GAME
Over the years, Perry has absorbed criticism for cultural appropriation, for being too sexy on Sesame Street, for dating John Mayer. But in the past few months, the somewhat erratic nature of her album roll-out dripped blood in the water. And the sharks started circling.
Reacting to a steady stream of criticism is a “maddening game,” she said. Referring to what she called “this strange race to be the most woke,” she added, “They want you to stand for something, but once you do, and if you don’t do it perfectly, they’re ready to take you right down.”
But Perry bears some responsibility for stoking fires. A chunk of promotional efforts for Witness leant on the headlinegenerating magic of a feud: On Carpool
Karaoke, she confirmed that Swish Swish is about her three-year-old rift with Taylor Swift. For all of Perry’s talk about feminism and unity, it felt like a conventional catfight. But by the time of her live stream, she softened her position. When she performed the song at the Witness
World Wide finale, she changed the lyric “Don’t you come for me” to “God bless you on your journey.” The Katy Perry viewers watched on
Witness World Wide is the Katy Perry I spent several days with: gregarious, intense, bold, endearing and full of contradictions. And she revisited a pet subject: things that are “not real.” “All the awards shows are fake,” she said, “and all the awards that I’ve won are fake,” she added, explaining that they don’t represent the audience. “They’re constructs.”
The old Katy Perry wasn’t a construct, she explained, and she isn’t dead. “I didn’t kill her, because I love her, and she is exactly what I had to do then,” she said. “And I’m not a con artist, I didn’t con people, like, that was just me. And this is me now.” —New York Times News Service