When in doubt, call the child.
That’s the unfortunate strategy Katy Perry uses at the end of her new album, “143,” in the closing track “Wonder,” which features a guest appearance by the singer’s 4-year-old daughter, Daisy.
Much like its year-and-a-half-old counterpart, “Fireworks,” “Wonderful” has Perry exhorting Daisy to remain innocent in a world of innocence, to keep the fire burning in her heart and to keep the weight of reality from her wings, so as not to resist “the haters saying you’re just a weed.” (No, really.) By focusing on his son’s inexplicable antics, Perry attempts to show the human benefits of doing this and to show us that, as a record producer, he lives by his own advice.
He, of course, also dares to make fun of us.
But I have to joke: On an album steeped in sweat, poor Daisy comes across not as the beneficiary of Perry’s maternal encouragement but as the victim of his creative desperation.
Anyone could understand why Perry was eager to go on “143,” which arrives just months after her seven-season stint as a judge on “American Idol.” At 39, and fresh from a pair of failed LPs in 2020 — 2017’s “Smile” and “Witness” — Perry has already moved past the era of female pop stars with the music business’s relentless, innovation-driven, youth-driven approach. She’s busy, they’re busy — in fact, she was wrestling with the old perception even before last summer’s emergence of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappelle Roan, who would no doubt intimidate a 31-year-old star like Ariana Grande.
Perry’s determination to get back in the game is clear, leading her to team up with Dr. Luke, the singer-producer with whom she created many of her biggest hits — including four of the five No. 1 singles from her 10-times-platinum 2010 hit “Teenage Dream” — despite Kesha’s 2014 rape allegations. (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]” the night she claimed he drugged and assaulted her.)
Whether or not Perry anticipated the massive impact of her reunion with Luke (she controlled all but one of the 11 tracks on “143”), she was entitled to say that listeners would have forgiven her decision had she come up with a hit: Just to be outraged by Doja Cat’s work with Luke on “Say So” and Latto’s work with him on “Big Energy” not getting nominated for a Grammy.
The problem with Perry is that these songs are bad, and not even in the fun sense. “143” is a bizarre dance-pop album with dull melodies, utilitarian socks, and vaguely AI-derived vocal performances; Perry writes and sings without any of the real emotional panache or sharp sense of humor that defined classics like “California Gurls” and the title track “Teenage Dream,” so maybe 21 Savage is entitled to strut his stuff on “Gimme Gimme” and rhyme “I heard you gotta jump just to get your jeans on” (Okay) with “I’m like Amazon ’cause I got what you need” (God).
I won’t spare you any more lyrical quotes, except that the best Perry can do on “Artificial,” which attempts to highlight the abuses of technology, is to describe himself as “a prisoner in his prison.”
Prisoner – in your prison.
The lack of “143” is all the more poignant, as pop music is finally returning to the wit and spectacle of Perry’s glory days after a few years of sad whispers. The success of glossy bops like Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Roan’s “Hot for the Road!” proves that audiences are hungry for what Perry used to serve, though now only if it has the kind of appeal (Carpenter’s silly neologisms on “Espresso,” for example) that Perry is unusually reluctant to make.
“I want to know the truth, even if it hurts me,” he sings in “La verdad,” so this is: “143” is not a failure of the situation, it is a failure of the imagination.
