1/20/2024 0 Comments Katy perry on snl swish swishThe main requirement of a Katy Perry album is to deliver a good time, and Witness does it. A surprising amount of strangeness has been injected in, too-enough that the “generic” tag Perry so often receives doesn’t really seem fair. Ace producers working with Perry have ensured the record doesn’t sound like a throwback but, rather, like a big-budget, 3D revival: bludgeoning, sure, but still an effective thrill. The commitment to pure, competent entertainment continues on Witness, easily the most enjoyable major chart-pop album so far this year (to be fair, there hasn’t been much competition). Even her controversial SNL performances, which confirmed her as pop’s tackiest user of people as props, rated as top-notch visual candy in the style of her Super Bowl show. But, but, but: All three songs turned out to be bangers. Lead single “Chained to the Rhythm” insisted that Perry was going political but packed little substance, “Bon Appetit” strung together nauseating food-sex metaphors, and the manic “Swish Swish” unnecessarily fed the Swift feud. ![]() So it is with Witness, whose roll-out has annoyed at every turn. From the gay-baiting on “I Kissed a Girl” in her early punkish years to the racial awkwardness of “Dark Horse” off her most recent album-2013’s Prism-she fails at likability but succeeds at listenability. ![]() Perry is a great pop antihero in that her songs work their way into the brain despite finding ever-new ways to offend taste. Also, as with Swift, Perry necessarily shears these sounds from their original social context-what had been outré, what had been future shock, is now centrist. for a while, and much of Witness resembles recent work by the excellent dance-rock band Hot Chip, who even produced the album’s final track. As with Swift and the ’80s, Perry’s arrival at the early ’90s comes after vanguard types have cleared the way: The rapper Azealia Banks titled an EP 1991 five years ago, the singer Kiesza has been pretending to be Robin S. In this way, there’s no musical tension between Perry and Swift, really: They are both operators of the same industry machine, sifting through the not-so-distant past to serve nostalgia to adults and novelty to youths.
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