We are no longer living in a moment when inspiration or empowerment can be sold or bought in bulk to be effective these things must be vivid, barbed, specific to our times. She may have been painting a different word this time - “ACTIVISM” instead of, say, “EMPOWERMENT” or “CALIFORNIA” - but still using the same wide-swathed brush.
#KATY PERRY WITNESS SWISH SWISH FREE#
The particulars of what Perry wants to free us from remain unclear.
The song was not nearly as radical as Perry thought it was: With its party-ready chorus, one did not have to squint that hard to hear it as a celebration of the things it claimed to be critiquing (“Stumbling around like a wasted zombie / Yeah! We think we’re free / Drink! This one’s on me”).
#KATY PERRY WITNESS SWISH SWISH FULL#
The trouble started for her when, perhaps stunned by Clinton’s loss, she began promising that her next album would be full of “purposeful pop.” In February she released “Chained to the Rhythm,” an entrancing but relatively empty song about the obliviousness of the “bubbles” we all live in. Lately, though, Perry has been faltering so publicly that she’s become an object of morbid fascination. The only other artist to do this was Michael Jackson ( Bad). This strategy has so far worked wonders: Her blockbuster 2010 album, Teenage Dream, made her only the second artist in history to score five no. Many of her biggest hits - like “Firework” and “Roar” - are about summoning an inner power to triumph over an adversity defined loosely enough to appeal to a large number of people. In the past few years, she’s performed at the Super Bowl halftime show, recorded the official song of the Summer Olympics, and opened for Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. Katy Perry has become the person you call when you want to sell inspiration in bulk. “Keep calm, honey, I’ma stick around,” she promises on her latest single, “Swish Swish,” and though few people were doubting that, contractually speaking, it is true: The same month it was released, news broke that she would be a judge on the forthcoming reboot of American Idol and would receive one of the largest salaries in the franchise’s history. The story that Katy Perry sells has changed a few times over the past decade, but throughout the time of her greatest global success, it has had something to do with the come-from-behind win of the underdog - the dark horse’s supposedly unexpected triumph. Like superheroes, the biggest pop stars take the shape of archetypes - stories and ideas that they purport to stand for, scaled up to the size of modern myth. In December 2013, a month after Katy Perry became the world’s most-followed person on Twitter, she released a single called, of all things, “Dark Horse.” It checks a lot of her signature boxes: a late embrace of a once-niche trend (in this case, trap music), a video and televised performance that drew criticism for cultural appropriation, and a hook so mindlessly enjoyable that it hypnotized millions of people into overlooking the aforementioned sins and propelling it to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.
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