When in doubt, call the child.
This is the unfortunate stratagem Katy Perry uses the ending of her new album, “143,” in a whimper of a finale called “Wonder” that features a performance by the singer’s 4-year-old daughter, Daisy.
Like a copy of a copy of her “Firework” from a decade and a half ago, “Wonder” finds Perry urging Daisy to remain innocent in a cynical world—to keep the fire burning in her heart, to keep the weight of reality off her wings, to resist letting “the envious say you’re just a weed.” (No, really.) By spotlighting her child’s inexperienced babble, Perry attempts to demonstrate the human stakes of this endeavor while showing us that, as a record producer, she lives by her own advice.
She also, of course, challenges us to laugh.
But I have to scoff: on an album covered in failed sweat, poor little Daisy comes across not as the beneficiary of Perry’s maternal encouragement but as the victim of his creative despair.
Anyone could understand why Perry felt adrift heading into “143,” which comes just months after she wrapped up her seven seasons as an “American Idol” judge. At 39 — and with two largely unsuccessful LPs behind her, 2020’s “Smile” and 2017’s “Witness” — Perry is already past the age at which female pop stars encounter the brutal disinterest of a music industry preoccupied with novelty and youth; in fact, she was battling the perception of obsolescence even before the emergence last summer of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roanboth of which undoubtedly scared a superstar like Ariana Grande, 31.
Perry’s determination to get back in the game is clearly what led her to reteam with Dr. Luke, the songwriter and producer with whom she has made many of her biggest hits — including four of the five No. 1 singles from 2010’s 10-times platinum “Teenage Dream” — despite a rape allegation Kesha made against him in 2014. (Last year, Kesha and Dr. Luke announced they had reached a settlement in their long-running legal drama, with the producer insisting he was “absolutely certain nothing happened” the night she claims he drugged and assaulted her.)
Whether or not Perry anticipated the considerable backlash her reunion with Luke would provoke (he supervised all but one of the tracks on “143”), she was right to bet that the public would forgive her decision as long as she delivered hits: Just look at the relative lack of outrage over Doja Cat’s work with Luke on her hit “Say So” and Latto’s work with him on the Grammy-nominated “Big Energy.”
The problem for Perry is that these songs are bad, and not even in the funny sense. “143” is a strangely cold dance-pop album with dull melodies, utilitarian grooves, and vocal performances that sound vaguely AI-derived; Perry writes and sings without any of the genuine emotional yearning or sharp sense of humor that defined classics like “California Gurls” and the title track from “Teenage Dream,” which is probably why 21 Savage felt entitled to appear on “Gimme Gimme” and rhyme “I heard you gotta jump just to put on your jeans” (OK) with “I’m like Amazon ’cause I got what you need” (oh my god).
I’ll spare you further lyrical quotes, except to point out that the best Perry can do in “Artificial,” which wants to make a message about the encroachments of technology, is to describe herself as “a prisoner in your prison.”
A prisoner — in your prison.
The lack of sauce in “143” is all the sadder because pop music, after years of gloomy rumors, has finally recaptured the spirit and glitz of Perry’s glory days. The success of sparkling hits like Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Roan’s “Hot to Go!” proves that listeners are hungry for what Perry used to serve up, even if it now has to contain the kind of endearing quirkiness—Carpenter’s wacky neologisms in “Espresso,” for example—that Perry paradoxically seems to have avoided in his eagerness to please.
“I want to know the truth, even if it hurts,” she sings in “Truth,” so here it is: “143” isn’t a failure of circumstance, it’s a failure of imagination.