And that’s kind of…it? While Perry does make implicit sense as a pop singer, describing why she was as big as she was is a challenge. As a key feature, she sometimes cites her own weirdness, as she did in the acceptance speech for her Video Vanguard Award. But Katy Perry is weird like Olive Garden is exotic: not really at all, and everything is suffocated in cheese. You sometimes get the feeling that there’s a disconnect between who Perry actually is and how she comes off, which is a fatal flaw in these branded times. Fourteen years ago, critic Ann Powers, in a Los Angeles Times review of Teenage Dream, referred to Perry’s “essential hollowness” matter of factly, as if it were part of the price of admission.
But Perry could only be essentially hollow for so long—you get about three albums to say precisely nothing as a top-tier artist whose craft isn’t defined by technical virtuosity. The approachable, adorkable, decently voiced Perry could sense as much—it’s why her first Trump-presidency era release, Witness, was touted by her as “purposeful pop.” The world failed to see the purpose.
Well, who needs purpose anyway? Time to pivot again. Perry’s 143 is, by her own estimation, “just a fun record…it’s not that deep.” A product of the California woo-woo ways of a woman who claims to check her horoscope like other people check the weather, 143 is named after Perry’s “angel number.” (“It’s just a little message from the universe that says, ‘I love you, I got you girl. You’re gonna be ok. I want the best for you,” she explained recently.) It’s also vintage pager-speak for “I love you.” On the heels of back-to-back flops, the aforementioned Witness and 2020’s Smile, telling the world “I love you” could read as evolved or desperate, but, as she says, it’s not that deep. 143 is Perry’s first album after the birth of her child, Daisy, and a few of the songs project unconditional maternal love with a vagueness that aspires to universality.
Dr. Luke is here on 10 of 143’s 11 tracks, alongside Perry for the first time since 2013’s Prism. In a 2017 deposition, Perry said that she suspended her collaboration with Dr. Luke on Witness “because working with him at this moment…would not be received well.” Among alleged offenses, Luke had been accused of rape by another close collaborator, Kesha. But Luke’s defamation case against Kesha was settled in 2023, and even before that, his production on post-allegation hits like Doja Cat’s “Say So” and Latto’s “Big Energy” clearly did not deter listeners. In reuniting with Luke, maybe Perry was gambling on faulty public memory or maybe she was just desperate.
