YMMV / Katy Perry

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation:
  • "E.T.": Multicultural relationships are okay, or rape equals love? This mainly depends on whether or not you're listening to the Kanye West version.
  • The party line for "Chained To The Rhythm" and "Witness" is "becoming more 'woke'", but the videos and Todd in the Shadows suggest it's less that and more self-loathing of her persona and music in general.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: The lyrics of "Smile", Katy's thinly-veiled "coming back from Witness" song, lend themselves to two opposite interpretations due to the fairly harsh way Katy expresses agreement with the audience that Witness was a low point:
  • The intended message, which is "Witness was a flop and put me in the lowest point of my career, but even though it really hurt, it was a learning experience and I'm back to feeling good about my work."
  • The unintentional bitter message, where the negativity is parroted sarcastically: "I was trying something with Witness, but none of you liked that and you called it an ego trip, so here I am, back with the smile and bubbles you want from me".
• Anvilicious: The video for "Chained to the Rhythm" is not subtle with its ignorant-masses symbols, featuring imagery such as the "American Dream Drop", a park ride that drops picturesque houses rather violently, human hamster wheels, a gas station setpiece with open flames in it, and bomb rides.
• Audience-Alienating Era: Witness in 2017 caused her mainstream success to crash, being roundly criticized for overproduction, scattershot writing, lacking the catchiness of her best work (which many blamed on the lack of her longtime collaborator, the disgraced Record Producer Dr. Luke), and sounding like everything else on the radio in the mid-late '10s. Katy's promise that the album would be taking a more political direction towards "purposeful pop" was a very tough sell from her, since it also left her open to criticism of her own problematic career choices. Meanwhile, a four-day YouTube live stream to promote the album was filled with all manner of bizarre non-sequiturs and strained attempts at atonement (in response to previous accusations of cultural appropriation) that had people buzzing for all the wrong reasons. Her new pixie haircut was also incredibly polarizing, on top of it. While Witness debuted at #1, it crashed hard with an 89% dropoff in sales during its second week, all the while her accompanying concert tour struggled to sell out the arenas that she was able to pack during her Teenage Dream and Prism days. It is so notorious that in some circles a Witness era is now a synonym for this term for artists.
• Awesome Music: "Fingerprints".
  • Also, "Waking Up In Vegas" and "Teenage Dream". "Firework" too, if this does not, hmmm...fire you up nothing will.
  • E.T. also deserves mention.
    • And "Part of Me", "Wide Awake", "Not Like the Movies" and "Thinking of You".
  • "By the Grace of God" also deserves special mention, what with its inspirational production and lyrics.
  • "Electric" for being a super upbeat song based on the Pokémon series.
• Broken Base:
  • All four of her albums (five, if you include Katy Hudson) are very different from each other, leading to a lot of disagreement as to which one is the "real" Katy. Also, One of the Boys and Teenage Dream are best known for their upbeat pop songs, even though both albums include a lot of very serious songs. Currently, she is very popular with gays, but also very popular with Christians, and very popular with teenage and younger girls (who don't even understand her lyrics), leading to a lot of disagreement as to how to interpret various songs, as well as which of her songs is best.
  • Also, her singing. Is she actually good, or is it all just Auto-Tune? Some of her live performances have been good, and unlike contemporaries such as Britney Spears, she is willing to perform without altering her voice live. Then you hear some of her live performances, like her Good Morning America performance of "Hot N Cold," and, well...
  • The song that made her famous, "I Kissed A Girl" obviously has gotten much more heated debates as time has gone on. Is it a tacky and exploitative song using Girl on Girl Is Hot to appeal to the masses more so than to the LGBTQ crowd and moreover was just proof in her savviness and being ahead-of-the-curve enough in knowing what to exploit for the most attention more so than any artistic merits, or is a song that, while perhaps still problematic and having some questionable intentions, was a key moment in helping normalize same-sex relations in pop culture?
  • "Chained to the Rhythm" is one of her most divisive songs yet, not surprisingly given its nature as a Protest Song as well as its subject matter. Funny parody yet terrifyingly accurate and timeless? Or completely pretentious and a harsh Take That, Audience! out of nowhere? A third camp agree with the message but wish that it was sung by anyone other than Katy, or wish the song isn't in the disco-dancehall genre as it lessen the impact.
• Critical Dissonance: Teenage Dream generally received mixed reviews upon release from music critics. This album ended up tying Michael Jackson's Bad in amassing the most #1 Billboard singles for one album (with 5). The album itself sold over 3 million copies alone in the US alone. It received gold and platinum certificates (even going 4x Platinum in Australia, Canada and the UK) in several other countries as well.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Katy's dancing sharks during her 2015 Super Bowl halftime show—backup dancers Scott Myrick and Lockhart Brownlie—gained an online following overnight. It doesn't hurt that they're both quite hunky out of costume.
• Fan Nickname: She's dubbed "Fruit Sister" by her fans in China because of her fruit-themed visuals, a nickname she's happily embraced.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Recently it's Taylor Swift's fans vs. Katy's fans, massively heightened by the release of diss tracks like "Bad Blood" (Taylor never named who it was about, but Katy quickly flipped out over it, making it clear) and "Swish Swish".
  • The Katy Kats and Little Monsters had a tense relationship for awhile, but it blew up ever since "Applause" vs. "Roar" and never died down since. Both sides often wait until the other underperforms to go in for cheap shots and proclaim the singer as being "over." Unlike Swift, Gaga and Perry are good friends and the former defended Perry's 2013 controversial American Music Awards performance of "Unconditionally", in which she was dressed as a geisha.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some of the Katy Kats would rather forget the official video for "Birthday" exists, preferring the lyric video instead. Even Perry agrees with them as she had a much higher opinion on the lyric video than for the official (which she wanted to disown in the first place).
  • The same goes for Witness, as many people (even Katy herself) consider it her worst album and the one that badly damaged her mainstream success.
• Faux Symbolism: At the 2012 Grammy Awards, she performed "E.T." (a song about her love story with Russell Brand), the power went out mid-song and she then started singing "Part of Me", a song about her break-up with Travie McCoy reworked to fit her divorce with Brand.
• Fetish Retardant: "Bon Appetit" is a sex song using several food puns and metaphors to talk up Katy's desirable qualities. It's paired with a sterile, uncanny video where Katy is prepared in in a restaurant by chefs, framed in some weird and dehumanizing ways, before she and the chefs turn on the rich dinner guests and cook them into a pie. While the video may exist as a critique toward objectification and oppression, it doesn't pair well with the lyrics that seem to play the sexy factor entirely straight.
• Fridge Horror: Despite the light-hearted tone of "Last Friday Night", one person took a deeper look at the lyrics and comes to the conclusion that the subject has alcohol issues and may have been date raped.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Katy Perry is very popular in Northern England and Scotland.
• Growing the Beard: Arguably, Teenage Dream. Her first (non-Christian) album did reasonably well, but Teenage Dream scored 5 #1 hits.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • "The One That Got Away" became this after her divorce from Russell Brand.
  • A lot of the lyrics in "E.T.", considering it's about Russell Brand and she ended up divorcing him, such as "they don't understand you", meaning her friends warned her about it.
  • Katy Perry: Part of Me invoked this, with numerous quotes from Katy about settling down & raising a family.
  • "Not Like The Movies" is an already sad song made even more so due to said divorce.
  • Watching the video of "Teenage Dream" is this after she was accused of sexual misconduct by the man in the video.
• He Really Can Act:
  • As the insane prison guard in Raising Hope. She's near unrecognizable as well, having a facial hair problem and a bushy perm.
  • In her and Zedd's "365", Katy takes well to the role of the uncanny and tragic robot-girlfriend test model who gets her heart broken when her partner feels no affection for her.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: "Swish Swish", hinted to be a jab towards her then-former friend Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" becomes this as she and Swift reconciled in late 2018 and appeared in the latter's music video for "You Need to Calm Down".
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "E.T." was serviced three months before the release of the Magic: The Gathering expansion set of New Phyrexia, whose mechanics and storyline fit strangely well the lyrics. Lines like "Infect me with your love and fill me with your poison" can make you wonder if Katy is actually a Phyrexian sleeper agent.
  • In 2019, Katy released the single "Never Really Over", which is based on a song by a Scandinavian artist (Norwegian signer Dagny's "Love You Like That"), is about getting back together with an ex-boyfriend, and has a video featuring her traveling to a New Age-ish commune for a spiritual retreat. Barely a month later, the horror film Midsommar came out, in which a young woman in a loveless relationship with a jerk of a boyfriend accompanies him and his friends to a Scandinavian pagan commune for their midsummer festival, and which ends with her very decisively ending her relationship by letting the cult set her boyfriend on fire as a Human Sacrifice. Needless to say, the mashups came quick.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The outfits from "California Gurls".
  • "I kissed a girl and I liked it!"
  • The twerking ice cream cones from the "This is How We Do" video.
  • From her 2015 Super Bowl performance, we have these sharks, the left of which had garnered a lot of press due to its uncoordinated dancing skills.
  • "They ask you how you are and you say that you're fine, but you're not really fine."^Explanation In November 2014, Katy appeared on the Australian show, The Program, to discuss her divorce with Russel Brand and her new album at the time. Her interview reveals she dealt with stress by being a Stepford Smiler. The clip itself has been used in memes to represent suppressed depression played for laughs.
  • "My favorite part is when she goes justbecauseitsoverdoesntreallymeanitsoverandifithinkitsovermaybeyoullbecomingoveragainandillhavetogetoveryoualloveragain" (or alternately, "Justbecauseitsoverdoesntjsvsaidgsnwhwsgshsvsbsbsgdusbsb")
  • "Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?"
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: She ended up getting some flack for doing a Japanese-themed show that was deemed insensitive to the culture, but several japanese people interviewed in the aftermath admitted to liking the show.
• Nausea Fuel: The music video for "Bon Appetit", especially the Fan Disservice and the I'm a Humanitarian ending.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Check out this Carbon Leaf video from 2006.
  • The same year (two years before her debut album as Katy Perry), she appeared toward the end of P.O.D.'s "Goodbye For Now".
  • In Gym Class Heroes' second video for "Cupid's Chokehold", she was the girlfriend that Travie meets without the aid of Cupid's arrow. (She was also dating him in real life at the time.)
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • According to some people, "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" is very similar to "Make Love" by Daft Punk.
  • The vocoder and synth saxophone breakdown at the climax of "International Smile" owes heavily to Daft Punk's "Digital Love".
  • "Roar" is most certainly this to Sara Bareilles's "Brave". It's the exact same beat.
    • "Roar" also shares similarities to Delirious?'s "I Could Sing Of Your Love Forever".
  • "Birthday" sounds like one of her own songs, "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)".
  • "California Gurls" is essentially Kesha's "Tik Tok" with tweaked instrumentation and writing. The fact that both songs share two writers (Dr. Luke and Benny Blanco) explains a lot.
• Signature Song: Perry has many popular songs, but "Firework" is arguably her most iconic song after being her Super Bowl halftime show closer, with Perry on a shooting star being raised in the air during the closer. This was also helped by the performance at Joe Biden's presidental inauguration. Her two major hits from Prism, "Roar" and "Dark Horse", though, and songs that have massive popularity on streaming as well, especially "Last Friday Night", "The One That Got Away", "I Kissed a Girl", "California Gurls" and "Hot n Cold", qualify as well. She has many classics, all in all.
• Special Effect Failure: The opening of the "Chained To The Rhythm" video is an establishing shot of the amusement park. For a split second◊, almost the entire park vanishes, leaving behind a handful of rides and bits of rollercoaster floating on air. It may have been intentional, but if it is, it's impossible to distinguish from a mistake.
• Tear Jerker: "Never Really Over", Jesus CHRIST. It's definitely a breakup song, about nostalgia and looking back on the good times in the aftermath of the end of a relationship, but it gets more poignant when one considers, as Todd in the Shadows suggests, the subtext of Katy herself looking back on her career after Witness. Either way, it's one powerful song.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • Scoring 5 #1s on one album? It's unlikely Katy Perry will be able to redo that record.
  • The underperformances of Prism's fourth and fifth singles, "Birthday" and "This Is How We Do," (and quick burn-out of second song "Unconditionally") have often been attributed to the continued monstrous longevity of "Dark Horse." This has become known in fan communities as the "Dark Horse" effect (i.e. Swedish DJ Avicii having his American popularity completely cannibalized by his own ultra-long-lasting hit, "Wake Me Up!")
• Unexpected Character: She was added as a playable character in the Freemium cell phone game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, for which she also made a new song, "Immortal Flame," and a costume based on her "Witness" tour.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • Most of her videos are this, but the epitome is "Wide Awake".
  • Super Bowl XLIX was already an exciting game by halftime, but Perry and the fantastic stage she had in her halftime show brought the house down.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Much of the brim of Katy's popularity seems to stem with the fact that she's the Candy Queen of pop music and thus very popular with young children. She's won a few Kids Choice Awards, has had her songs covered by Kidz Bop and featured in the E-rated Just Dance games, and lots of kids have showed up to her concerts. While some of her songs, like "Firework", are perfectly harmless, others...include consistent swearing, sexual overtones, drinking and harshly worded take thats. Not to mention the skimpy outfits she wears in music videos and live performances. The album cover for Teenage Dream alone emphasizes on her material not being appropriate for kids, because it features her in the nude (albeit with clouds of cotton candy covering her breasts and bum).

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