Katy Perry’s ‘143’ flops! Will it be able to bring back the shine of the old days?

Katy Perry’s ‘143’ flops: What does Katy Perry do? At the start of the promotion for her comeback single “Woman’s World,” where she showed off her six RIAA Diamond awards, she reminded everyone that she’s one of the best-selling pop stars of all time, with millions of copies sold of songs like “Firework” and “California Gurls.” She has been the host of the Super Bowl halftime show, reviewed wannabe singers on American Idol, and celebrated the coronation of a king. She has done everything, even in heels and backward.

But that’s a whole different question from who Katy Perry might be in 2024. On her sixth full-length, 143, she tries to answer that question. She quit American Idol in May, which made it seem like she wants to become a full-time pop queen again. But the place she’s going back to isn’t easily moved by cotton candy bikinis and winks at cherry Chapstick. Radio is losing its power, so even Perry’s level of fame doesn’t ensure success on the singles charts, and the over-the-top productions she used to be in charge of feel as old-fashioned as a Vine. Perry seems to be aware of how unmoored she is on 143, but that doesn’t stop her from trying to reclaim the cultural position she held in the late 2000s and early 2010s by using the same tricks that worked back then, like cheap but hooky affirmations and wide appeals to the male gaze.

One of Perry’s tricks is getting back together with Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, who co-produced “I Kissed A Girl,” the stomping song that pushed her from Warped Tour to arenas in the late 2000s.
. Gottwald was also a key member of the team that brought to life Perry’s other megahits, including all those Diamond-awarded songs. Going back to Dr. Luke, who Perry left behind for 2017’s Witness and after his long court battle with Kesha, makes sense from a business point of view. Perry’s popularity in pop music has been going downhill for a while now. During her time on Idol, she had no songs in the top ten of the Hot 100 and only two in the top twenty. One of those was “Feels,” a Calvin Harris, Pharrell, and Big Sean collaboration that brought Perry’s voice in from space.

But when it happens on 143, that reteaming usually feels dull, like a boring attempt to bring back the good old days with a few new details. The robotic quasi-celebration of being female in “Woman’s World” sets the stage for the see-Spot-run, cliché-filled lyrics that follow. The fun of the past is stifled by a database of clichéd rhymes. instead of the witchy sounds on that 2022 song. Crystal Waters’ 1991 house-pop hit “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeness)” plays on the 45 of “I’m His, He’s Mine” at 33, giving Perry and the MC/singer Doechii time to drool over a love interest whose best quality seems to be sticking around. There are no stakes in “Nirvana.” Perry screaming loudly, if not lustily, about a union with a partner “in the diamond sky” over a thumping instrumental that sounds as new as music for holding a conference call.

“Wonder” is the last song on 143. It’s a high-gloss jam that sounds like the worst EDM festival pop from the 2010s and tells the next generation to shake off the “weight of the world” and stay “wild” and “pure.” “Can someone promise that our purity won’t be lost in a cruel world?” That’s a good 2024 question, Perry says.
But after the 10 tracks that failed miserably and sweetly tried to force Perry back into the popular consciousness, this one sounds completely empty. Adding her daughter Daisy to the track, which is also the only one without Luke’s involvement (it was produced by the Norwegian pop architects Stargate), seems more like an attempt to avoid criticism than a hope that the next generation will find a way to rise above the worst parts of the present. Daisy has the last word on the album and asks, “Someday when we’re wiser/Will our hearts still have that fire?” to make her point. It’s too bad Perry doesn’t seem to have asked herself that while she was making this jumbled attempt to get pop fans’ attention again.