After a multi-year hiatus, Katy Perry has continued the build-up for her soon-to-be-released album, 143. She recently released her videos for “Woman’s World” and “Lifetimes“. However, rather than staging a comeback, she has only met confusion and inattention, at best.
Of course, there are questions about her working with her old producer Dr. Luke, although both have denied that he raped her, per allegations within Kesha’s larger set of abuse claims. Even beyond that, though, the striking misfire of Perry’s initial song and video “Woman’s World” has left many nonplussed. For, while her reincarnation-themed love ode about finding each other across “Lifetimes” is fairly digestible, isn’t it a little bit delusional to say, “It’s a woman’s world, and you’re lucky to be living in it”? Especially when the video has oiled abs and barely-covered breasts, before something… something… something with a resurrected bionic starlet striding through various disconnected set-pieces and then latching onto a helicopter that jets off towards the horizon?
No artist presents themselves unfiltered, and commercial pressures from someone at Perry’s level only complicate matters further. Any serious discussion of her work should consider her life story, especially her unusual relationship with religion. As is well-known from sources like her 2012 tour documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me, directed by Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz, the singer grew up as a pastor’s kid within evangelical Christianity before ultimately leaving the fold.
Less well-known, however, is that Katy Perry’s public persona bears the hallmarks of what has been theorized as two distinctive emphases found among former evangelicals with a creative bent. First, there’s a continuing devotion to social causes as a transmogrified missionary impulse – think of the “purposeful pop” of 2017’s Witness or her relentless campaigning for 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Then, there’s especially a letting-it-all-hang-out “anything but that” spirituality that resists dogmatism and rigid rules – here, think in particular of her various New Age and therapeutic samplings. Thus, although somewhat Hollywood-typical, these twinned tendencies also speak quite specifically to Perry’s prototypical path of “de-conversion”, especially with the astounding depth that they’re integrated into her character and work. In particular, her songs often bear a peculiar testimonial quality with recurring themes of struggle and personal triumph – something that’s all the more characteristically evangelical when contrasted with other prominent examples of religious influence in pop, like how the megastar Madonna’s concert spectacles hint at Roman Catholic liturgies.
However, just as it would be a mistake to lump all evangelicals together – some have female pastors, and some support marriage equality – so too would it be a mistake to think of Katy Perry as stuck in some monolithic non-evangelical world, as if she has hopped over to the other side of an easy “here and there” divide where the only big development “there” is Reiki therapy going out of style. So, too, would it be a mistake to think of her views as static since, just like anyone in any religious tradition, her perspective can change, too, as she follows her life course.
As for where Katy Perry is now, she’s been pretty explicit about it. For many years now, she’s been following a path of personal growth that she contrasts with a monotonous childhood “Jesus train” centered on what she terms “Jesusjesusjesusjesusjesusjesusjesus”. Part of this new path has been openness to different cultures while learning boundaries around respect and appropriation, and part of it has been rebounding from the pronounced downward swing of her music’s success, beginning with Witness.
Most recently, Katy Perry has been thinking a lot about motherhood since the 2020 birth of her first child, as well as about giving her fans a danceable album as a gesture of love – the title 143, after all, being pager-code for “I love you”, as she reportedly discovered after multiple chance encounters with this “angel number“. Some say that life doesn’t go in circles, but you reach new levels and spiral back to where you came from. In this sense, Perry, it seems, has been re-balancing her humanitarian impulse and recognizing her limited ability to spark social change, even as she finds solace in her family and sees anew the value of being someone who can lift others through music.
To revisit that hash of the “Woman’s World” video, then – something that Katy Perry anticipated, with a prebuttal taped on-set to ward off misinterpretation – the first part is over-the-top “satire” that tries to push objectification of women to ridiculous extremes. After the “reset” and move to “a whole different world” of the bionic starlet, however, this is not some feminist utopia, and if there’s any doubt that she meant that, Perry’s sarcastic spoken delivery of “That’s right, it’s a woman’s world” on the song should burst that bubble.
Instead, this purported utopia is where one woman drives a truck, another washes dishes, and yet another records a dance video for social media. Most of all, it’s where the seeming superhero Katy Perry merely accompanies all of them, just as her music would. The lyrics, too, point to a much smaller view of “women’s world”, including sisterhood and motherhood – that is, if you “open your eyes” and “look around”. Rather than something cosmic, overwhelming, and dominant, these worlds women live in are multiple, not singular, and they’re full of fleeting and fairly everyday moments that nonetheless make them no less valuable. They are like the irruptions of quiet joy into family or like the strong and shining spaces that Perry’s music creates at its best, as she now sees more than she ever has before in her chastened sense of reality.
In this light, it is thus no surprise that the danceable reincarnational love-bliss of finding each other across “Lifetimes” is inspired by a bedtime routine that Katy Perry enacts with her young daughter, eliciting a nightly promise to always try to find her again. Perry has explained her current outlook, “I love the listener, and I want to gift them the love that I’ve received as best as I possibly can[,] and help invite them into this kind of love frequency.”
Of course, whether Katy Perry’s 143 will attain that “love frequency” remains to be seen, especially if it bears the lead single’s tendency towards awkward self-undercutting winks. At the very least, it represents a new phase in her spiritual journey. The perennially quirky but now more mature Perry seeks to rekindle pop-fire from a renewed sense of gratefulness for everything that she was once able to do but didn’t fully appreciate being able to do at the time. You might say she no longer wants so much to change the world; instead, centered now on her family, she wants to be able to give that joy again.