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Josie Buden is an aspiring Intimacy Director, and the proud owner of an IMDB page, a very large bicycle, and a copy of Katy Perry’s Sweet Treats for The Sims 3. They are currently working on a lesbian rom-com play about the people who harass you into buying Italian food on Lygon St, to produce next year for pride month. So, if you’re a theatre person please find them they’re desperate for help and expertise pretty pretty please.
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It is, as always, a difficult time in the Katy Perry fandom.
She has won her place in the celebrity pantheon, gone platinum multiple times over; yet, as we enter her next album cycle, we do so with mounting dread. Her long-time collaborator-producer Dr Luke is back from MeToo purgatory (proving, once again, how limp the consequences are when powerful men abuse women) with the truly baffling Woman’s World. Beyond the obvious irony of hiring a rapist to produce a female empowerment anthem, the whole song feels displaced from time. It sounds like it was written during and for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
But there’s still a juvenile humor to the thing, to the music video particularly. Trying to even explain the confused, baffling... thing that is the Woman’s World video would derail this article, but, for my money, the most interesting, most telling moment is the fourth and third to last shots.
A deeply confused Gen Z girl screams “who are you?” at Perry as she ascends on a helicopter, and, in triumphant reply, she yells back, “I’m Katy Perry!”
What is going on here?
Katy Perry feels... tired. Desperate. She has made her many many millions, she could just retire to her stolen nunnery, yet she seems desperate. Desperate enough to quit an extremely successful Las Vegas residency and dedicate herself to this next album cycle.
Katy Perry has decided, it seems, that she needs more. More success, more legacy.
She seems determined to push ever forward, spinning her tires, digging ever deeper into the mud and muck, unwittingly proving every critic correct.
Taylor is the songwriter, Charli the queer icon, Carly the critical darling, but Katy wants to be the Popstar. Her 2010 album Teenage Dream is rightly considered one of the best pop albums of all time, bearing five platinum singles (which was a big deal back then) and a suite of no less commercial yet deeply affecting album tracks. It is, in hindsight, the peak of her career. It is a peak that almost anyone could be proud of, happy with, but for Perry, it seemed to come too early. Teenage Dream was her second album (technically third if you count the failed indie gospel album she did as Katheryn Hudson) and she was in her mid-20s. That album cycle left no rocks unturned, no blood from stone unsqueezed, no opportunity uncapitalised. I have one of those opportunities, Katy Perry’s Sweet Treats for the Sims 3, framed on my desk with a copy of the poem Ozymandias.
It was developed by Maxis for Electronic Arts (EA) alongside a special edition of the Showtime expansion, which notably added a faux-Hollywood town, a concert-and-performance focused “Singer” career, and a small suburb’s worth of live music venues. It’s not known if Perry’s people approached EA, or if it was the other way around, but either way the synergy is undeniable. The fantasy Showtime promises is one of glamour, extravagance, attention, hordes of cheering fans, and pyrotechnic stage shows. In my mind it doesn’t really rate; if you have the money you should buy the Late Night expansion, but it does successfully sell the fantasy of, well, being Katy Perry in the Teenage Dream era. On the cover she echoes Marilyn Monroe, but shinier, with higher contrast.
Sweet Treats is... so, for context, The Sims 3 had two types of expansion content. There were Expansion Packs, which added new gameplay, new careers, new worlds, new supernatural life-forms, and a suite of new furniture, clothes, items, etc., and there were Stuff Packs, which only had the furniture, clothes, and reskinned items.
Sweet Treats was a Stuff Pack sold for the price of an Expansion Pack, inexplicably themed after the (then two year old) music video for California Gurls.
This is the kind of shit that’s obviously cooked up in some kind of corporate lab, but it has Perry’s name on the cover, so I doubt she’s completely blameless. It gave her the opportunity not just to make money but to sell the idea of herself to a younger generation, to scream, as she would later do from a helicopter, that “I’m Katy Perry!”
The trouble, of course, is that “Popstar” is a moving target. Fame is hard to find, harder to control, and that particular kind of fame implies constant movement. It is the exceptionally rare few that maintain it for the length of time Perry seems to want, or perhaps need.
There’s this tension she seems to be under between controversy and commercialisation. Commercial success seems to be her end goal, but controversy is what transformed Katheryn Hudson into Katy Perry. That sharp, uncomfortable edge is what defined her debut album One of the Boys, it’s what sent I Kissed A Girl septuple platinum and made her into a household name. That song defined her as an artist, set her soaring career trajectory, cemented her somehow still ongoing relationship with Dr Luke, but it’s not the song she wanted to debut with, not even the album.
Before One of the Boys in 2008, with I Kissed A Girl, Hot n Cold, and, the, uh, unforgettable Ur So Gay, she spent three years working on an album called Fingerprints. The exact details of Fingerprints’ demise are messy, obscure, and legal, but suffice to say it was stripped for parts. Some of those went to other artists, some went nowhere, and some made it onto One of the Boys.
That last category notably includes the title track, Fingerprints, which sneaks onto the very final spot in the tracklist.
And yet, when it came time for the promotional circuit, Fingerprints was the first song she ever performed live. On her debut Hello Katy Tour it was Fingerprints that started the show.
To clarify, it was never a single. It never had radio play.
So her persistence here seems confusing—if you’ve never listened to it, if you haven’t been paying attention.
Fingerprints is her missing link. Her oldest surviving song. Her statement of intent for the project that was “Katy Perry”. It’s a desperate, determined manifesto from a girl in her early twenties declaring that nothing will ever be good enough. To be clear, by all estimations, she wrote this song at 21. You hear it in that performance, her first performance, you hear the need in her voice. Years of work, of set-backs and false starts led to that point, to the conviction that she had to get it right.
I can imagine Taylor Swift being content, theoretically, to slowly whittle down her fanbase, turning inward toward the role of “Songwriter” or “Artist”. But Katy Perry needs the lights, the pyrotechnics, the glitter, the stage, the spotlight - that’s why she took a Las Vegas residency instead of resting on her laurels or holing up in her stolen nunnery to write the next album. That’s why she seems obsessed with her own name—from the Hello Katy Tour to Katy Perry’s Sweet Treats to the helicopter shot in Woman’s World. If a songwriter, or a queer icon, or a critical darling stops making music, they won’t lose that status, but a Popstar requires a stage, an audience, an endless present tense.
She said it when she wrote Fingerprints, back in 2005. She needs, at some level, to leave her mark on the world, for us to remember her.
And maybe that drive would be admirable, if it wasn’t coming from a woman who conquered the world once and decided that wasn’t enough.
I just hope, for Katy, for Katheryn Hudson, for the woman behind the empire, she figures out how to make it work.
A version of this piece was originally published in Gnome Magazine Issue 3.
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