Following a breathless medley of hits at the MTV Video Music Awards last week, Katy Perry clutched her gold-plated Moon Person to accept the Video Vanguard trophy. “There are so many things that have to align to have a long and successful career as an artist.
There are no decade-long accidents,” she defiantly stated. “One of the biggest reasons I’m standing here right now is because I learned how to block out all of the noise, that every single artist in this industry has to constantly fight against — especially women.”
She’s right, in that she didn’t stumble into success. But tuning out the world around her has had a slogging effect on her creative output, at least on her sixth album “143,” out today. In many ways, “143” was set up to fail in the wake of its very rocky rollout (more on that later). It arrives on the back of her quickly forgotten last album, 2020’s “Smile,” a record released at the peak of the pandemic that slumped off the charts as soon as it was released (despite the spark of singles “Never Really Over” and “Harleys in Hawaii”). Perry felt not just out of lockstep with the times — by then, pop music had pivoted away from candy-striped bombast in favor of soul-baring confessionalism — but also with her own creative merits. Much of the spryness of some of her best work had evaporated; even the self-deprecation of Perry posing as a sad clown on the album cover felt forced.