Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Katy Perry

Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Katy Perry

“This was never the way I planned, not my intention” — Katy Perry, “I Kissed a Girl”

A few weeks ago, there was a video of Katy Perry on TMZ called, “Katy Perry is a Pizza Enthusiast.” It was exactly the type of content you would expect based on the title, and it was not very compelling. But, watching the video — and I did watch it, even though I intensely dislike watching videos on the internet — I realized that Katy is. Compelling, I mean. Very. I am perplexed by this, given that I don’t really like pop music; I’m not attracted to her; I don’t think her voice is that great; and I don’t believe that she is a very good dancer.

In the video, the TMZ staffers mention that Katy recently wore a “pizza onesie,” which I had to see for myself, so I googled it. It’s exactly the type of outfit you would envision from the words “pizza onesie,” and yet there was something about it, the way that she seemed to be dressed as… content. It wasn’t a costume, exactly, but an extension of her persona: She has gone from being a “Pizza Enthusiast,” a girl who orders lots of pies at the club while her boyfriend Diplo spins, likely talking about how great Pizza is the whole time, and wearing a Pizza bathing suit in her new video, to wearing a Pizza Onesie.

Katy Perry is a meme brought to life, but she seems intent not just on being a positive, mindless enthusiast of kittens, sushi, cupcakes, and pizza, but to inhabit the same spaces as those things. It’s as if she is a walking Tumblr, image after image piled on successively, ever-present but with no real archive. Diplo is the perfect partner for this reality. I hope they last. You can just imagine them walking along hand-in-hand, Katy in her Pizza hoodie, the Diplo sound as the background soundtrack a hundred percent of the time.

She was spotted recently, dressed as a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto for (I guess?) Halloween.

Katy Perry is best read not in her lyrics or her performances, but in her videos. Back in 2008, when “I Kissed a Girl” was released, Katy Perry seemed sort of obviously destined for novelty song one-hit wonderdom. The video opens with a long shot of her laying on a bed, stroking a kitten, wearing a nameplate necklace. She spends the rest of it charmingly ad libbing, as if the whole thing was thrown together very last minute. This seemingly slapdash production was the first look many of us got at her, and probably, many of us thought, it might be the last. But it wasn’t, and she’s made nineteen more music videos since then (all of which I have just watched), and though the budgets have likely gone up, Katy Perry’s schtick, which is pretty brilliant it turns out, hasn’t changed since 2008. She seems to be very… genuine about being an entirely manufactured viral entity, made up of crazy costumes, heavy makeup and eye winks. She is an authentic, hundred-percent flash in the pan with serious staying power, and she never ceases to go viral. Her entire video canon depends on a few tried and true memes (cats, food, nerds) but you can almost boil it down to one thing, I think, after watching all of them:

This is a recurring theme in plenty of pop music, but Katy has made her entire videography the embodiment of the philosophy: she’s “super into things” but nothing too serious, nothing too avid, nothing overly earnest. Most of her videos are “jokes,” sick burns perpetrated on dumb boys, though they’re not really that funny most of the time, and it’s all in good fun, hey! No offense meant! The varnish of irony is so heavily slicked on that you couldn’t ever take her to task for any single thing, because maybe she was kidding and then whatever it was that seemed lame is actually so good after all?

The internet has put us all into the mindset of Consumers of Content, and our need for new waves of Content is insatiable. No one I can think of feeds this hunger faster, better, or more consistently than Katy Perry. She gets it. She is charming on Twitter to her 59.5 million followers (more than anyone else on the planet). Her Instagram account is a mishmash of cute photos of herself with animals, of food she is eating, and of more straightforward PR — magazine and record covers. Her minions reblog and make new accounts on her behalf on Tumblr and Vine and Twitter, spreading the word like a beautiful infection across the web, a machine fueled by Katy Perry herself, but also somehow Borg-like and able to function for chunks of time sans her sensory input.

“This is How We Do” is the best expression Katy’s Content Philosophy.

Just take it in. Wait, you can’t, there is so much content, so many signs and styles, and modes of being and red herrings and mixed media and stop. It could drive you crazy, if it wasn’t all so brilliant. In just over three minutes, it piles in flowers, Pee-Wee Herman, kitchen appliances, table tennis, blacklighted dancers, a bathtub full of pearls, pizza, popsicles, platform shoes, Chanel logos, basketball, poolside pizza, watermelon, palm trees, tacos, nail salons, dancing ice cream cones, popsicles, and pizza, Mondrian (???), cereal, a Windows phone, champagne, and Aretha Franklin. This isn’t even everything: this is just what I could write down with a pencil while watching the video. “This is no big deal,” I scratched on the pad of paper.

This is all in direct contrast to another megastar currently in the news — Taylor Swift, who is also apparently a sworn Enemy of Katy. Taylor’s new video, Blank Space, couldn’t be much more Earnest, and even her previous effort, “Shake it Off,” isn’t a convincing piece of humor or satire. Sorry Taylor, Katy wins this one.

Lol nothing matters.

Correction(s): A previous version of this article referred to Flaming Hot Cheetos, a snack made by Frito-Lay. The snack is actually Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Katy Perry is dressed as a Mondrian, not a Rothko??? We regret the error(s).