Katy Perry: Youth Group Kid Extraordinaire

The key to understanding Katy Perry's teenage dream is knowing where she came from.

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Katy Perry is a pop music anomaly. You can’t talk about popular music in the 2000s without bringing her up, but it’s hard to know where she fits in. On paper, she’s enormously successful. She one of the best-selling artists of all time! She played the Super Bowl! She’s the first artist to send five songs from the same album to the top of the Billboard 100 since Michael Jackson! But in 2024, she feels more like a cautionary tale — the California Gurl who flew too close to the sun and can’t figure out how to get her wings back. A (largely positive) LA Times review of Teenage Dream by Ann Powers refers to her “essential hollowness” which feels a little cheap. Isn’t all pop music essentially hollow? But I know what Powers means. You start prying up the floorboards of Perry’s neon hooks and sparkle-spackled choruses and there’s even less there than one might expect. 

Perry’s latest attempt at a career comeback is 143, a doomed-from-the-jump exercise in essential hollowness that makes Teenage Dream sound like Rubber Soul. Perry returns to her most reliable bag of tricks to infuse the album with everything that made her an Obama era force: glitterbomb camp, pin-up sexiness, bumper sticker feminism, an ill-advised reunion with her trusty co-writer Dr. Luke — and deploys them with the force of a Dollar Store whoopee cushion. 143 has been thoroughly and deservedly savaged by critics (Pitchfork: “worse than awful.”) But while most critics seem baffled by why this once-generational hitmaker can’t write another “Firework” or “Teenage Dream,” I’ve got a theory. Because as you probably know, Katy Perry got her start as a Contemporary Christian artist named Katy Hudson. And once you absorb that, her own personal arc and her place in the debatably grand narrative of 21st century pop starts to come into focus.