From the Archive: 143 sirens

on womanhood, aging, and the Lifetimes tour

How do you know when enough is enough? How do you quit when you’re ahead? What’s worse, fading into obscurity or soiling your legacy? These are questions that all people ask themselves, surely, but they are pointed for women and needling for famous women. More often than not, the choice comes in the form in a thousand little choices that you make in pursuit of the kind of attention you’ve always been rewarded for seeking before. Suddenly you’re Katy Perry on the Lifetimes tour.

Katy Perry told the internet this week that she feels like a “human piñata,” so I’m going to try not to be too cruel. In reality, she’s the victim of a much larger trap, one that she was bound to fall into given the inconsistent trajectory of her career, her need (real or perceived) to reinvent herself to stay relevant in a pop machine that tried repeatedly to leave her behind.

Hindsight is 20/20; should she have called it after Teenage Dream (2010)? People genuinely liked her candy-colored poptimism in this era, gave themselves over to the infectiousness of her songwriting. She had hits after this period, “Dark Horse” and “Roar,” the latter I’m sure earning her a small fortune, but these aged into deep meme territory. The issue seems not to be timing, either, as “Firework,” which was released in the same period as “Teenage Dream,” sits similarly in the cultural psyche. People can tell, maybe not immediately but eventually, when the art is made in service to capitalism, virality, commercialism.

But I said I wouldn’t dog on Katy Perry too much (I could talk about “WOMAN’S WORLD” but I just… won’t). Pop stars age poorly as a rule, releasing uninspired music or pulling PR stunts that are increasingly out of touch (U2 and the red iPhones come to mind). Some escape with an intact image but a loss of credibility (Elton John, Cher). Katy Perry is just another woman getting chewed up and spit out of the pop music machine.

Like many of her contemporaries, she is also aging backwards. The Substance (2024) is starting to feel prophetic; most women with an online presence have had some form of cosmetic enhancement, celebrities have entirely new faces. Christina Aguilera looks better (read: more conventionally youthful) than she did five years ago, and even better maybe than she did twenty years ago. Every ad on TikTok is about getting thinner or looking younger, through all means of internal and external intervention.

Katy Perry’s Lifetimes tour isn’t just bad because it’s cringey, or overproduced. It’s bad because she has no energy and looks like she’s fighting through the performance. These tours are extremely hard work; pop stars have to perform for nearly two hours with multiple costume changes, there’s choreography, they’re running around a whole stage setup with multiple catwalks, they also have to sing and sing well. If you’ve ever Dua Lipa live after 2020, you know that the shows are exhausting.

There is speculation online that the reason for an uptick in low energy, big budget tours is Ozempic. One of its known side effects is reduced muscle mass, and it shows in these performances. Meghan Trainor’s recent live appearances are painful to watch, not because she doesn’t sound good but because she looks like she is not having even remotely a good time. We are afraid to look older, so we appear frail and weak.

Katy Perry has eight more months of the Lifetimes tour with shows every few nights. Fans have expressed concern for her listlessness; will she get more tired or gain stamina as the run goes on? Are women destined to be enemies to themselves, or do we create these conditions again and again willingly? Go girl, give us nothing.