I think we all need a reminder on exactly who Katy Perry is.
An article that starts like that could easily be a puff piece that shines a light on just of singularly successful Perry is as a pop star. Something something “everyone loves ‘Teenage Dream’ (2010)”, something something “trap-pop could not exist without ‘Dark Horse’ and thus Katy Perry”, yadda yadda yadda “Donald Trump killed pop”, ending with some vague platitudes about how much pop has changed in the past decade. I could regurgitate stan arguments in her favour and make the 12 diehard fans she has left feel seen. But that doesn’t interest me.
Katheryn Hudson, aka Katy Perry, is to contemporary pop as Paula Abdul was to the scene in the early 2000s. Not untalented, nor forgotten, but outdated. A figure of pop dominance in an era where that doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. But while Abdul had dance credentials behind her, Perry’s bonfires are all distinctly music related. She was a hit maker.
But you don’t build a career off of having hits. You get to have hits once you’ve proven you’re worth caring about. So, what exactly did Perry offer the world in 2008 that made her meteoric rise to success so unavoidable for the next decade?
The answer is basically…edge.
To keep the “context” section brief, the 2000s were a singularly kinetic decade for a lot of music. The big stars became younger, shinier, and more chaotic. The sounds of pop leaned firmly towards R’n’B and Hip Hop. The old adage “sex sells” was more relevant than ever. Which was, if not tiring the public, at least oversaturating the market.
Also, by 2007, the internet had firmly intrenched itself into popular culture at large. Particularly music. Napster had laid the groundwork for what would eventually become iTunes culture, myspace had provided a viable space for independent musicians to promote themselves, and blogging culture had begun it’s slow swallowing of music journalism. The time was absolutely ripe for a new crop of stars to emerge in a music landscape that felt utterly distinct from where it had been at the start of the decade.
Additionally…poptimism. One day we’ll tackle that. But right now we’re focusing on it’s biggest success story.
Within this, you have former Christian pop-rock wannabe Katy Perry. Zooming through her years floating between labels, you get this sense of a girl who kept almost getting her shot. A soundtrack song for a hit movie that went nowhere. Background vocals for rock royalty like Mick Jagger. Dating Travie McCoy and featuring in the music video of Gym Class Hero’s top ten hit ‘Cupid’s Chokehold’ (2006). And by 2007, she was three shelved albums and as many labels deep into obscurity.
To the public, this was not a famous woman. But to the music industry, this was at least a loyal player who was due for her shot. So, with nothing to lose, Capitol Records signed her, and this is how we get ‘Ur So Gay’ (2007), the song that introduced Katy Perry to the world. Part of an EP of the same name that featured a cover of The Outfield’s 1986 track ‘Your Love’ as ‘Use Your Love’ and the soon-to-be-recycled ‘Lost’, this was the song that made Katy Perry famous and established exactly what her persona was.
Pop in 2007 had a slowly dwindling market for starlets who made party music for people who considered themselves smarter than the average radio listener. The edgeless rocker chicks ala P!NK, The Veronicas, and Avril Lavigne, who often made music that was textually the same as their glittery counterparts, but aesthetically different enough for their audience to lap up. The same people who were writing Kelly Clarkson’s empowerment anthems were often behind the music of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Linda Perry’s influence from a handful of hits early in the decade still ran rampant. Katy Perry was one of the songwriters behind some of the songs – see the credits for ‘I Do Not Hook Up’ (2009) if you don’t believe me.
But what Perry offered that differentiated her from this pack was basically…humour. Edge. Personality. All the same things that had made P!NK and Avril Lavigne feel so important in 2001. But P!NK had slowly flattened her sound into something distinct but formless, and Avril Lavigne sold out hard. In their place, the black haired, proto-hipster Katy Perry released a coy track about how her metrosexual (so Y2K!) boyfriend’s ken doll behaviour annoys her.
In many ways, while Perry’s competitors on the radio were the Lavignes and Veronicas of the world, this song fit much more comfortably against the indie pop rising out of Britain at the time. While the 2000s in Europe (and adjacent – Australia) had mostly been home to the kitsch and campy, a certain brand of tart…tart had risen from the ashes. Semi-acoustic, semi-witty, and semi-talented. Think Lily Allen, Gabriella Cilmi, Kate Nash, and even Amy Winehouse. ‘Ur So Gay’ is a track that’s very comfortable beside ‘Smile’ (2006) and ‘Foundations’ (2007), and Perry’s children’s-television-inspired music video was extremely in line with this.
Throw in an endorsement from Madonna, a whirlwind of promotion, plus a place on the WARP Tour, and you’ve got a certified “indie” star, who just happens to be backed by one of the biggest labels in America. Katy Perry mania wasn’t really a thing, but much like how Lady Gaga was slowly absorbing fans who were defecting from the standard pop audience to something more daring, so to was Perry for the wannabe rock fans.
And she did so with ‘Ur So Gay’, a song that is nothing if not “edgy”.
This all might sound extremely odd in 2024. The brand of Perry is, in the nicest way possible, essentially for children. She makes incredibly juvenile music and performs ridiculously theatrical shows in Vegas. Her biggest night of the year is not even music related – it’s the Met Gala! Her entire cultural comfort zone is basically “fun aunt” to a new generation of much more interesting artists.
But that’s the thing. Whether the current iteration of the Perry brand is authentic or not, it’s a decided turn from what made her famous. The Katy Perry that burst onto the scene in 2007 was not an essentially “nice girl”. She was just as childish as today, but riskier. This was a former Christian artist who referenced her religious trauma in ways that explicitly made her more daring than her contemporaries. At least, it did initially.
When she released her debut album ‘One of the Boys’ (2008) just 7 months after the ‘Ur So Gay’ EP, the edges had not been sanded of. Despite the Dr. Luke penned hits and pinup aesthetics, this was not the pop-washing of Perry. In part because she was already quite a willing popstar, and also because…this record is extremely revealing in many of the worst ways.
‘One of the Boys’ is the type of debut album you don’t get anymore. Shame exists. While it contains four rock solid hits, the meat of the record is pop-rock that feels both too young for her, and too personal for anyone else.
Take the title track, a Liz Phair-esque ode to changing yourself to make a boy like you. To use contemporary slang…she’s begging to be picked. It’s interesting to start an album like this, but it isn’t the song a woman in her mid-twenties should be singing. And not for any sort of “grown women should be independent” nonsense – because everyone is allowed to yearn. But this is a track that is using the words and sounds of childhood in the year it was made. She literally references school because this is a teen fantasy. It would not have gone amiss on Hannah Montana.
Except for the line about Lolita. That was just bad. It’s also something that feels incredibly Perry on the album. And off, considering how often she’d slip into a cutesy voice that feels retrospectively demeaning.
The album is full of these little quirks when Perry is allowed to lead her own songs. ‘Mannequin’ offers overly precocious lyrics about how the annoying boyfriend she has is more wood than man. It’s a silly premise for a song, but she sells it like she’s never felt anything more awful in the world. ‘Lost’ is equally melodramatic and filled with confused metaphors and clunky lines. ‘Fingerprints’ is an anthem to misplaced ego and the fear of anonymity – a fitting end to an album that bears all the marks of teen angst held by a woman of 25. Because half the reason the pop rock acts of the early 2000s sold out was, shockingly, very rarely can adults pantomime children without looking ridiculous.
The best of the record is the balled ‘Thinking of You’, a track about thinking of an old lover while in the arms of a new. It’s sappy and sweet in an endearing way. Perry would essentially remake it with more of a pop sheen as ‘The One That Got Away’, which became a sizeable hit. Everything she did in 2010 became a hit.
‘One of the Boys’ feels so distinct in Perry’s discography for the amount of humanity that surrounds it. That is often revealing in an odd way, considering how plasticine her persona is now. She does acknowledge the singles as part of her career, but in everything from aesthetic to tone, this is not even a fragment of who she’s willing to be to the public anymore. The sardonic, sassy, often rude persona of Katy Perry in 2008 – the type of person who would tell people to kill themselves on early Twitter – is not who she presents herself anymore. And that switch happened pretty much in line for the next album.
Perry’s sister in pop, Lady Gaga, had also released an album in 2008. There’s no stabs at teen pop rock on it. Instead, it’s electropop paired with extravagant visuals that placed Gaga immediately in the same conversations as pop legends like Madonna and Elton John. Whether she went on to deserve those comparisons is anyone’s stance to take, but the truth was, they immediately sprung up. As did a culture of copycats. This was the end of the teen-pandering pop rock that Perry had attached herself to.
Katy Perry was introduced to a pop landscape that was defined by sex goddesses and girls-next-door. She was quirky and relatable and hot. But she was also too old and too new to establish herself in a culture that quickly became fascinated with the odd and fantastical. She pivoted hard to the extreme version of what had worked on ‘One of the Boys’ with ‘Teenage Dream’ (2010) – ditching the baby voice and teen cosplay for an album that began mining for personal nostalgia in candy-coloured wigs. And she took Dr Luke with her – the only reliable hitmaker she would ever collaborate with.
Dr. Luke’s contributions to her music are basically the end of Perry as an identifiable presence in her music. The coquette ‘I Kissed a Girl’ and ‘Hot n Cold’ both almost lampooning the sincere bitchiness of ‘Ur So Gay’. By the time she was wailing about ‘California Gurls’ next to Snoop Dogg, she had completed the shift from indie pop starlet to the biggest name in music. Her five historic number one singles are a testament to just how well this worked at the time. But those two early successes laid the groundwork.
In particular, ‘I Kissed a Girl’ feels poignant to bring up here, if for no other reason than Luke’s other starlet protegee’s presence in the music video. That famous cameo by Kesha, who would go on to accuse Luke of sexual assault amongst other abuses. During this time, allegations via text messages between Gaga and Kesha would leak via Luke, alleging of the same sexual assault happening to Perry, which she would deny.
Kesha would later be found guilty of defaming Luke for having this conversation.
If the Dr Luke association gives Perry a lot of unfortunate baggage to carry on her pop legacy, ‘Teenage Dream’ is a record that can hold it. ‘One of the Boys’ cannot. Despite the fact that Luke only appears twice on the record, it’s on the only two songs anyone will remember. Katy Perry’s introduction to the world was as your older sister who clearly wasn’t over high school. A pin up who sassily waggled her fingers at you.
And from that she built an empire that shortly crumbled into ruin.
If it makes her feel any better, she lasted about as long as Gaga.
Loved reading this. Something vaguely ironic about how Perry went for mainstream kitsch and fell flat on her face by the third album in parallel to Gaga, who went for mainstream wannabe-upscale pretentiousness and also fell flat on her face by the third album.