Even levitating in space aboard a rocket, pop star Katy Perry still manages to get dunked on (2025)

NEW YORK – Almost as soon as American singer Katy Perry had returned from a very brief trip to space on April 14 with a group hosted by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sanchez, the derisive comments started.

In American online magazine Slate, Heather Schwedel wrote: “It was one thing to understand intellectually that Katy Perry, (American TV personality and journalist) Gayle King and Lauren Sanchez’s much hyped ‘all-female’ trip to space aboard a Blue Origin rocket would in actuality only be an underwhelming 11 minutes long. But it was another to watch it play out over a multi-hour, breathless livestream that culminated with Perry kissing the Earth like a soldier returning from war and not a multimillionaire returning from the world’s shortest influencer trip.”

Ellen Cushing, writing for American publication The Atlantic, proclaimed Perry to be the “perfect pop star for a dumb stunt”. Various celebrities, including actress Olivia Wilde and model Emily Ratajkowski, criticised Perry and the Blue Origin flight.

Even the social media X account for Wendy’s came after Perry, 40, in a series of posts, among them: “Can we send her back.” On its face, this seemed a little strange. Why was a fast-food chain offering sideline snark about a pop star heading into space?

But a decade-plus after American singer-songwriter Linda Perry described Katy Perry’s music as microwave popcorn, one could be forgiven for wondering if the posts from Wendy’s were an erstwhile purveyor of empty calories picking a fight with another.

After all, Perry is the singer who in her 2010 California Gurls music video, wore a bra made to look like giant cupcakes that ultimately shot out whipped cream.

Of course, there is room for artistes to age and grow. (Compare, for example, the Beyonce of girl group Destiny’s Child with the Beyonce of 2016’s Lemonade, 2022’s Renaissance and 2024’s Cowboy Carter.)

But Perry’s attempts at stretching artistically have mostly involved apeing the work of other more acclaimed women in music and getting clocked for it.

In his review of her 2019 song Never Really Over, New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica wrote: “A new Billie Eilish song from Katy Perry. A new Norwegianish Spotifycore song from Katy Perry. A new Haim song from Katy Perry. A new Pink song from Katy Perry. A new bubble-pop Taylor Swift song from Katy Perry. A new Mumford & Sons song from Katy Perry. A new Abba song from Katy Perry.”

In fact, Never Really Over borrowed so heavily from a 2017 song called Love You Like That by Norwegian artist Dagny, that Dagny ended up with a writing credit on it.

In 2024, Perry was back with a new album, 143. The title, she said, represented her “angel number”.

The first single was Woman’s World, and the music video for it featured Perry done up in a red and white bandana like Rosie the Riveter.

Then, the camera panned back and showed her wearing Daisy Dukes and an American flag bikini top that barely concealed her breasts.

The lyrics discussed how she felt: “Sexy, confident, so intelligent.”

To prove the point, Perry pours whiskey into her mouth, letting it spill all over herself.

The song was co-written and co-produced by American super-producer Lukasz Gottwald, better known as Dr Luke. He was in 2014 accused by American pop singer Kesha of sexual misconduct. Over the next nine years, Kesha and Dr Luke traded lawsuits before settling their claims out of court.

The reviews for 143 were withering. On Metacritic, it has a rating of 37 out of 100, making it the site’s lowest-rated album since 2011 and the worst-reviewed album by a woman in the site’s 24-year history.

Rich Juzwiak, writing for American online music magazine Pitchfork, said the “material here is so devoid of anything distinguishing that it makes one suspicious it’s a troll or cynical attempt for the campy realm of ‘so bad it’s good’”. (Perry will embark on her Lifetimes world tour on April 23, her first in seven years).

So the sight of Perry levitating inside a phallic rocket as she held onto a daisy – a tribute to her four-year-old daughter Daisy with her English actor-fiance Orlando Bloom, that she said in interviews she chose to bring with her because the flowers are often described as “weeds” because they are really resilient – was perfectly in keeping with the image she had designed for herself.

The event was trumpeted as having something vaguely to do with feminism, but in one of the numerous criticisms delivered by celebrities after the spaceflight, Wilde summed up the experience succinctly on Instagram, sharing a photo of Perry with the flower along with the message: “Billion dollars bought some good memes, I guess.” NYTIMES

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