Aisha Tukur
She was one of the world’s biggest pop stars – but her new album has been plagued by controversy and failed singles. Here’s why she’s stumbled – and what it says about music today.
The comeback has a special place in pop culture. From Judy Garland’s career-reviving 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall to Cher’s reinvention as a chart-topping dance diva with 1998’s Believe, it’s a story that never loses its emotional piquancy. There’s something moving and even comforting about seeing a great star return to the top, particularly because it doesn’t happen every time. For this reason, the narrative’s sad flipside – the failed comeback – is every bit as fascinating. It reminds us that to miss the target is fundamentally human and that nothing in life is guaranteed.
This is the prevailing wind that Katy Perry faces today as she releases her seventh album, 143. Its controversial lead single Woman’s World stalled at number 63 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 65 in the UK when it arrived in July, while its more anodyne follow-up, Lifetimes, had to settle for a number 15 placing on the less prestigious Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100. These are crushing results for an artist who has more diamond singles denoting US sales of 10 million units – six – than any female artist bar Rihanna. “Katy Perry is one of the biggest names in pop music, so when these songs didn’t cut through, it created an interesting story for the media,” says Hugh McIntyre, a music journalist with Forbes. And that story is: Why is her new music not connecting with the public?
The problems all began with the Woman’s World rollout in July. Two months after its release, it’s difficult to regard the song as anything other than dead on arrival. In an Apple Music 1 interview, Perry said she wanted it to reflect her “feminine divine” and feel “empowering” in a similar way to her signature hits Firework (2010) and Roar (2013). When she sings “it’s a woman’s world and you’re lucky to be living in it,” it’s a characteristically plainspoken expression of that message. Perry shrewdly acknowledged in the interview that people associate her with “songs that are captions on T-shirts and stuff like that”.
A message gone wrong
However, many fans and critics felt that Perry’s feminist message was fatally undermined by her choice of collaborator – producer Lukasz Gottwald, better known as Dr Luke. Perry worked extensively with Dr Luke on her three most successful albums – 2008’s One of the Boys, 2010’s Teenage Dream and 2013’s Prism – but he was absent from her subsequent albums, 2017’s Witness and 2020’s Smile. Both of these were written and released within the timeframe of his lengthy legal battle with pop singer Kesha. Though Perry has never commented in a press interview on her decision to sever ties with Dr Luke, she said during a 2017 deposition that she chose not to work with him on Witness because she didn’t want to appear to be “taking a side”.
At the time, their legal battle was still sending shockwaves through the music industry. In October 2014, Kesha had filed a lawsuit against Dr Luke claiming he had drugged and raped her on two occasions in addition to “sexually, physically, verbally and emotionally” abusing her. Dr Luke countersued Kesha for defamation and said she had fabricated claims to extricate herself from a recording contract. In February 2020, a judge ruled that Kesha had defamed Dr Luke when she claimed in a text to Lady Gagathat the producer had raped Perry; the producer denied this allegation and Perry said it was “absolutely not” true during her deposition. Kesha and Dr Luke’s extended dispute was eventually settled in June 2023 when both parties posted a statement saying they had “agreed to a resolution”.
It feels like she’s trying to engineer a pop song that everyone will like – from 12-year-old kids to their 40-year-old parents – Hugh McIntyre
However, Dr Luke’s name remains controversial, even as some industry gatekeepers have welcomed him back into the fold – since 2021, he has picked up multiple Grammy nominations for his work with pop-rap star Doja Cat. Music journalist Rhian Daly believes that Perry “really misjudged how working with Dr Luke again would go down”. Though Daly acknowledges that Perry is “not the first artist to collaborate with Dr Luke since Kesha’s legal battle”, she also notes that Doja Cat in particular has since distanced herself from him. In 2021, the rapper and singer told Rolling Stone that there is music of hers “that he’s credited for, where I’m like, ‘Hmm, I don’t know, I don’t know if you did anything on that'”. She also said: “I don’t think I need to work with him again.” By contrast, a representative from Perry’s label told Rolling Stone in June that “Katy knew exactly the album she wanted to make and put together the team to make it happen”.
As a result, Perry launched her 143 album campaign under a fog of controversy; many fans found it confusing at best that she would craft a song about female empowerment with a man who has been publicly accused of abuse by a woman – albeit that the complaint was dropped and never went to a court. The song’s lyrics were also called into question. In her songwriting, Perry has always favoured mass appeal over sophistication – her 2010 hit Firework features the couplet: “Boom, boom, boom / Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon.” But even so, the lyrics of Woman’s World feel reductive, particularly given the huge issues of womanhood and gender equality she is writing about. “She’s a winner, champion, superhuman, number one,” Perry sings on the pre-chorus.
