The Perfect Pop Star for a Dumb Stunt
Katy Perry climbed aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocketship with a smile on her face. She held a daisy, in tribute to her daughter, Daisy. She wore a skintight cobalt spacesuit custom-made by the designer Monse; the look had prompted her to say she and her mission-mates—an all-female crew that also included an accomplished aerospace engineer and a onetime nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize—“were putting the ass in astronaut!”
And then she traveled to the edge of space, where she gazed down at the blue marble before her and did the thing she’s been doing since she was a child at her parents’ Pentecostal church: She sang from her heart, about the bounty before her eyes. To paraphrase: She thought to herself / what a wonderful world. She was in the air for 10 minutes and 21 seconds total, and when she landed back on Earth, she kissed the ground like she’d been lost at sea for months. Afterward, when a reporter asked her how she felt about being “officially an astronaut,” Perry said that the experience showed her “how much love you have to give and how loved you are.”
People have been finding this extremely funny. They’ve been mocking her for not being up there long enough, and for being too solemn about the experience, and for reportedly studying string theory to prepare for it. “What an incredibly dumb woman,” someone wrote on X. “As a woman I’m annoyed. As an engineer I’m disgusted.” The fast-food company Wendy’s, of all entities, asked, “Can we send her back”?
The critics have a point. I’ve spent longer waiting for the subway than Perry was up in space. String theory is probably not a necessary prerequisite for sitting in a chair for a few minutes. Space tourism is, at best, folly—silly, spectacularly wasteful, pointless by definition. (At worst, it’s a remarkable way to get blown up.) But then again, so is celebrity. And Perry is a special kind of celebrity—the sort who doesn’t seem to mind looking kind of stupid.
[Read: Why Katy Perry can’t get her groove back]
Beyoncé likely wouldn’t go to space. Taylor Swift probably wouldn’t either. Going to space for no reason—courtesy of a rich guy whom a lot of people don’t like—is risky in the physical sense, as well as in the sense that it’s an invitation to get made fun of online. And those two women are serious, careful people. They’re disciplined. They are always in control. Swift’s Eras Tour was a meticulously constructed monument to the singer-songwriter’s mythology—a spectacle, sure, but one less of pop loopiness than of precision logistics. In Perry’s Las Vegas residency, Play, by contrast, she sat perched next to a 16-foot-tall toilet and had a conversation with a giant turd. If Eras was a novel, Play was a knock-knock joke. It was a psychedelically moronic piece of performance art, and possibly the most fun I’ve ever had seeing live music.
You’d be forgiven for forgetting it now, but when Perry became famous, almost two decades ago, she was not such an oddity. Pop music was—there’s no other way to put it—dumber back then, and so were its stars. But the world got more sophisticated. At some point, we started demanding to know whom celebrities voted for. The new crop of teenage and 20-something female pop stars—Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo—are weirder, angrier, and sharper than their predecessors, marinated as they have been in social media and post-Obama-era malaise. Compared with Perry and her ilk, they are less explicitly pandering to men but seem to care a lot about what their fans think of them. Even the ones, such as Carpenter, who go for over-the-top sexuality do it with a wink and a heteropessimist edge. And as Perry’s contemporaries have entered their 30s and 40s, they’ve matured. Beyoncé might, once, have dressed like a cartoon character and declared herself “bootylicious,” but she grew up. Perry never did: She started out singing songs about being hot and happy, and never stopped.
Her most recent album, 143, is a bouncy, brain-dead paean to pleasure and uncomplicated empowerment. Its lead single, “Woman’s World,” has lyrics like an ad for panty liners and a beat like the preset on a child’s electric keyboard. When it came out last summer, its girlboss-feminist message and male-gazey video felt like something that could have been buried, time-capsule-style, before Donald Trump’s first presidency. (Its sexual politics too: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Perry recorded the album with Dr. Luke, the disgraced superproducer whom other artists have spoken out against.) In every way, Perry felt like an artifact.
That’s Perry, though: Always misreading the room. She is, in a word, cringe. For Millennials, especially, she’s a reminder of just how embarrassing we all used to be: earnest, straightforward, unencumbered by irony or internet nihilism. With her, what you see is what you get. She’s a performer. She’s an old-fashioned celebrity in the sense that she is basically a clown.
But in a moment when so much of fame feels, to me at least, calculated, cerebral, and coolly focus-grouped, Perry is singular. The Perry who happily hopped aboard a billionaire’s galactic pleasure craft is the Perry who’s friends with the toilet, is the Perry who sings about feeling like a plastic bag and living in a woman’s world, is the Perry who showed up to the Met Gala dressed like a hamburger. She’s guileless and goofy, sincere and allergic to subtlety, full of love. What a way to live.