When in doubt, call the child.
That's the unfortunate strategy Katy Perry resorts to at the end of her new album, “143,” in a mournful closing track called “Wonder” that features a special appearance by the singer's 4-year-old daughter, Daisy.
Like a rip-off of her Firework album from a decade and a half ago, Wonder finds Perry exhorting Daisy to remain innocent in a cynical world, to keep the fire burning in her heart, to keep the weight of reality off her wings, to resist letting “the haters say you’re just a weed.” (No, really.) By spotlighting her daughter’s callow trill, Perry attempts to demonstrate the human risks of that endeavor while showing us that, as a record-maker, she lives by her own advice.
Of course, it also challenges us to mock.
But I must scoff: On an album slick with the sweat of failure, poor Daisy seems not a beneficiary of Perry's maternal encouragement but a victim of his creative desperation.
Anyone could understand why Perry felt adrift going into “143,” which arrives a few months after she ended her seven-season run as a judge on “American Idol.” At 39, and with a pair of largely unsuccessful LPs under her belt — 2020’s “Smile” and 2017’s “Witness” — Perry is already past the age at which female pop stars face brutal disinterest from a music industry preoccupied with novelty and youth; in fact, she was fighting the perception of obsolescence even before last summer’s emergence of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, who undoubtedly scared the crap out of a superstar like 31-year-old Ariana Grande.
Perry’s determination to get back in the game is clearly what led her to work again with Dr. Luke, the songwriter and producer with whom she made many of her biggest hits (including four of the five No. 1 singles from 2010’s “Teenage Dream,” which went 10 times platinum), despite a rape allegation Kesha made against him in 2014. (Last year, Kesha and Dr. Luke announced that they had reached a settlement in their long-running legal drama, with the producer insisting that he was “absolutely sure that nothing happened” on the night she claims he drugged and assaulted her.)
Whether or not Perry anticipated the considerable backlash her reunion with Luke sparked (he oversaw all but one of the 11 tracks on “143”), she was right in betting that audiences would forgive her decision as long as she delivered hits: Just look at the relative lack of outrage over Doja Cat’s work with Luke on her smash hit “Say So” and Latto’s work with him on the Grammy-nominated “Big Energy.”
The problem for Perry is that these songs are bad, and not even in a fun way. “143” is a strangely cold dance-pop album with dull melodies, utilitarian beats, and vocal performances that seem vaguely AI-derived; Perry writes and sings without any of the genuine emotional longing or sharp sense of humor that defined classics like “California Gurls” and the title track from “Teenage Dream,” which is probably why 21 Savage felt entitled to appear on “Gimme Gimme” and rhyme “I heard you gotta jump just to get your jeans on” (OK) with “I’m like Amazon ’cause I got you covered” (jeez).
I'll spare you further lyrical quotations except to note that the best Perry can do on “Artificial,” which is meant to make some point about the encroachments of technology, is to describe herself as “a prisoner in her prison.”
A prisoner In your prison.
The lack of sauce on “143” is all the sadder when you consider that pop music, after years of gloomy whispers, has finally returned to the wit and pomp of Perry’s glory days. The success of brilliant hits like Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Roan’s “Hot to Go!” proves that listeners are hungry for what Perry used to offer, albeit now on the condition that it contains the kind of endearing quirk (Carpenter’s quirky neologisms on “Espresso,” for example) that Perry seems to have paradoxically avoided in his eagerness to please.
“I want to know the truth, even if it hurts,” she sings on “Truth,” so here it is: “143” isn’t a failure of circumstance, it’s a failure of imagination.
