Nothing unites everyone on the internet quite like a shared villain, but the woman who sang “I Kissed a Girl” certainly seemed like an unlikely candidate. No longer! It’s pretty easy to make fun of Katy Perry lately, so much so that even the Wendy’s X account has been dunking on her. “Can we send her back,” Wendy’s replied to a post in April about Perry’s participation in a Jeff Bezos–funded minuteslong trip to space. Perry—net worth in the hundreds of millions, owner of a music catalog worth $225 million, recipient of countless platinum records, proprietor of a shoe line, and, these days, headliner of a worldwide tour—can’t catch a break even from the company that tried to make square patties happen.

Consider, too, a typical scene from her new “Lifetimes” tour. Starting in Mexico, crisscrossing the United States, Canada, and Europe before finishing in Abu Dhabi, this is her first tour in seven years. In May, I attended one of her first U.S. stops, in Oklahoma City. The show was well attended and still undeniably awkward, like the part when Perry invited an 11-year-old onstage to perform with her. Perry presented the girl with her shoe, which looked as if it were trapped in a hurricane of cotton candy. “Want some?” she asked, pulling off a piece of what did seem to be real candy. The kid stared back at her, confused and overwhelmed, unsure if she was supposed to … eat this famous woman’s shoe? During the fan-choice portion of the show, a QR code flashed on the screen for audience members to pick which deep-cut track they wanted Perry to sing. The link didn’t work for me or for those around me. “Did you vote?” Perry asked the audience of thousands when she came back out onstage, her eyes wide with disappointment when we yelled back that we had not. “No? Why not? It was the Wi-Fi? Oh, it’s always that.”

It is a brutalizing thing to age as a pop star. For Britney Spears, it meant a public mental-health crisis and a rash of criticism about everything from her nails to her weight to her dancing. For Jennifer Lopez, it meant plenty of conjecture about her marriages, her plastic surgery, her authenticity. For Madonna, it meant years and years (ongoing) of scorn about her looks and sinewy arms and oversexualized stage performance. The over-40 pop star is a relatively new advancement in our cultural age, and so far, few manage it with grace—Beyoncé and Lady Gaga stand out as perhaps the rare exceptions, and only after one of them was accused of faking a pregnancy and the other of hiding a penis. But is anyone handling it worse than Katy Perry?

Her latest album, 143, is her worst-performing record except for her Katy Hudson debut in 2001. It debuted at just sixth on the Billboard charts and slid off the charts after just two weeks. (2010’s Teenage Dream, her greatest critical and commercial success, spent 400 weeks on the charts.) “The material here is so devoid of anything distinguishing that it makes one suspicious it’s a troll or cynical attempt,” noted a 4.5/10 Pitchfork review. “143 is a spectacular flop, but it’s a strange one—like one of those restaurants that looks nice and has an expensive menu but serves food so mid as to be insulting.”

Perry, now 40, is at a crossroads. Her albums have been mostly duds, her once ubiquitous videos are increasingly forgotten or just extremely regrettable (a fat girl eats a basketball in the “Swish Swish” video, Jesus Christ), and her time as an American Idol judge served only to make her less relevant. Nothing Perry has touched since Teenage Dream has hit the charts, our culture, or our consciousness in quite the same way.

Well, except maybe her misguided venture into space. Even before the launch of her tour, she’s been the butt of an extended joke across the world and across the internet. TikTok in particular is a veritable graveyard of Perry gags about her unnecessary space adventure, mockery that her tickets aren’t selling very well, and jabs about how bad her dancing is. Perry is still a sellable act—at her recent sold-out Chicago stop, she told the thunderous crowd, “Well, I thought I was the most hated person on the internet!”—but as of this writing, there are still plentiful tickets to her Madison Square Garden show in August.

Her real trouble, however, started earlier. For her new album, Perry chose to team back up with Dr. Luke, the very same producer sued by Kesha more than a decade ago for sexual assault, battery, and harassment. (They settled out of court in 2023, with Dr. Luke still denying Kesha’s original claims.) He was the same writer-producer she worked with for Teenage Dream, so you could almost see the logic, but the reunion was a particularly poor choice for this album’s theme: Perry’s contemporary songs about female empowerment were in part created with a man who has been accused of disempowering Perry’s female co-workers in one of the worst ways possible. Her support of Kamala Harris’ girlboss political campaign (and Hillary Clinton’s too) felt desultory as a result. While painting herself as a progressive in public, Perry has been palling around with people like Jeff Bezos in private (and, also, in public).

Some pop stars live in dualities. Perry lives in contradictions. Lately, people are noticing. To be a pop star is to accept your position as too sincere, too sexy, too silly, too young, too old, just too much. For a while, Perry was able to sidestep this mortification with a deceptively simple trait: a sense of humor. What set 2010 Perry apart wasn’t her big blue eyes or her breasts or her voice, though they were all helpful in launching her into the stratosphere. What made her unique was her ability to make a joke—about herself, about the absurd world around all of us, and even about her audience. Her music was ironic, a jab in the side of men who wanted a pinup doll instead of a real woman, and a friendly wink to girls who knew that they could always be cute but wanted a little bit more than just that. We used to laugh with Perry, with her whipped cream–filled tits, her who, me? Betty Boop sexuality, her loose disdain for men in songs like “Ur So Gay,” a track that has otherwise aged horrendously. There have always been criticisms about whether Perry is a good singer or a good performer, but for a long time, she was undoubtedly a good pop star. She never took herself—or her stardom—too seriously.

The rub is that over time, that sense of humor has been misdirected, misfired, and, eventually, lost entirely. All the while, her audience has changed dramatically, no longer in need of this particular kind of escapist poptimism.

It’s all amounted to a world where there is no room—or need—for a star like Perry. Three years ago at her Las Vegas residency, Perry performed “California Gurls” while perched on man-sized toilet paper rolls as an anthropomorphic turd danced inside a pool-sized orange toilet. It was so, so stupid, but it was still funny, bizarre, and compelling enough to keep watching. These days, Perry is holding a flower in space and crying about it. Katy Perry used to be the one making the joke. Now? We’re laughing right in her face.

Born to Pentecostal pastors in Santa Barbara, Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson was carted around the country as a kid while her parents set up churches. The couple were notoriously strict, allowing the kids to watch only the Trinity Broadcasting Network or conservative news. According to their daughter, her parents’ religiosity bordered on the paranoid: “I was never allowed to call deviled eggs ‘deviled eggs,’ ” Perry told NPR in 2013. She started singing in her family’s church at 13, before releasing her debut as Katy Hudson with a self-titled gospel album. At 17, she moved to L.A. to work on more-secular tunes.

When Perry started out, she was more like Alanis Morissette than Madonna. You can hear that in her 2008 song “Thinking of You,” which has recently gone viral on TikTok for the absolute meal Perry makes out of the words surprise center. Like a lot of pop acts, Perry started as more of a folk act, slowly finding an audience with a bright personality, a lively stage presence, and a public persona that was all about a good time, all the time.

Katy Perry in West Hollywood in 2002. Lester Cohen/WireImage

Footage of Perry’s contemporaneous show in her 2012 documentary Part of Me looks like a Kidz Bop concert rather than a show for grown-ups. Indeed, a lot of Perry’s audience has always been young girls, and so her performance always spoke to them first. Her clothes were candy-coated, her stage was splashed in neons, and she mastered adorkable when that meant something. This year’s “Lifetimes” tour is slightly more mature as a public performance, but only by virtue of being more choreographed, more controlled, and more expensive. Perry plays a futuristic warrior who has to battle through different levels of a video game to defeat an evil technological creature who’s trying to destroy the world. TikTok has posited that Perry seems sleepy and disengaged during her shows, but real fans know we were never here for the choreography. “She’s not a good dancer. She’s not a good singer,” said Levi Taylor, a 32-year-old Katy Kat. “It’s amazing she’s created a career out of not being either of those things because she’s just been herself. She’s a performer!”

I heard Taylor wax poetic about Perry on the sidewalk outside the Paycom Center, in Oklahoma City, an hour before the show. He was giving his friend an impassioned speech about why Perry had brought a flower with her into space: “People don’t get it. It was for her daughter. Her daughter is named Daisy. What do people want?”

Taylor, a local clad in psychedelic mushroom earrings and a T-shirt from Perry’s much-maligned and mostly forgotten Smile era (big stan behavior), thinks Perry has just become an easy target. “Katy’s been an artist for 25-plus years. It’s going to be messy,” Taylor told me. “All this shitty stuff aside, she’s an artist who always finds joy.”

At her peak, her songs were perfect summer earworms or propulsive, satisfying ballads. But what also made Perry so fun to watch back during her “I Kissed a Girl” era was how well she seemed to understand the internet outrage machine. She leaned into the agita around her queerbaiting with her lyrics, her music videos, and with her broader persona. In recent Trump-dominated years, the idea of “bimbofication” has gained traction, a kind of intersectional feminism itself in which women and girls reserve the right to be sexy, misandrist, and clever. Back in 2008, Perry’s success was a kind of response to the Paris Hiltons and Heidi Montags of the world, who were bimbo-influencers before it was widely embraced—Perry could be hot and sly. She wasn’t going full #GirlBoss, nor was she burning her bras and demanding equal pay. Not full bimbo, and not quite an intellectual, Perry occupied a complex third position of a guy’s girl and a girl’s girl. Later, her feud with Taylor Swift would obfuscate just how friendly she was to other women, but even they famously made up in a Swift music video while dressed up as a burger and fries. You can get away with a lot if you do it with a punch line.

The mistake Perry made was when she started trying to teach us a lesson. After a few years playing a ditzy but winking brunette, Perry started to pivot into message-first pop music. 2013’s Prism was still fun and flashy, but with an undertone of needless import. The debut single, “Roar,” was a fight anthem for girls who thought Sara Bareilles’ “Brave” was too aggressive. While still reviewed favorably by critics, Prism was also when fans started to notice some of Perry’s more offensive stunts, like how she shows up in cornrows in her video for “This Is How We Do” while smacking gum. Eventually, she embarked on a mini–apology tour: “I won’t ever understand some of those things because of who I am,” she told DeRay McKesson in 2017. “But I can educate myself, and that’s what I’m trying to do along the way.” It was another in a litany of Perry misfires, including when she dressed up as a geisha for the American Music Awards. Pop music with intention is a fine pursuit, but it falls flat if your history is riddled with myopia. Perry was faltering at the same time our culture was moving toward a demand for more accountability—from men, from the police, from the government, and even from our ignoble pop stars.

By 2017—during Trump’s first term—Perry tried again, with Witness. When she released “Chained to the Rhythm,” a dance-pop anthem that semi-chastises its audience for seeking distractions from modern-day pain, she dubbed it “purposeful pop.” Most people who listened to it deemed it merely condescending. Witness’ cover says it all: Perry, covering her eyes, her mouth open to reveal a bright blue eyeball in her mouth. Perry said that the record was inspired in part by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. “There was a lot of noise about me taking a stand because I was a neutral girl for a while,” Perry said of Witness. “My friend DeRay says, ‘Don’t focus on the king—focus on the kingdom.’ ”

Perry at a Berlin show in 2010 during the launch of the album Teenage Dream. Florian Seefried/Getty Images for Deutsche Telekom

Perry wanted to still be the funny girl, but she also wanted to be profound. While “Bigger Than Me” was a song supposedly inspired by one of the most devastating political losses in American history (until, well, you know), she was also yukking it up in her visuals. In “Bon Appétit,” Perry is placed in front of a bunch of pastry chefs kneading her ass and showering her in mirepoix. Meanwhile, the video for “Swish Swish” betrays someone who has lost the upper hand in her comedy: Perry and a host of D-list internet celebrities play basketball against a team of burly men, the video periodically interrupted by references to memes and celebrity cameos from Molly Shannon, Rob Gronkowski, and Terry Crews (as well as Nicki Minaj, seemingly green-screened in). The song sucks and the video is perplexing, but worse, it’s routinely cruel toward fat people—in 2017 Perry was still making the kinds of jokes you’d have rolled your eyes at in 2007. Most of the video’s crummiest gags revolve around Christine Sydelko, a viral TikTokker whose name in the video is “Shaquille O’Meals.” Sydelko allegedly didn’t know that her entire involvement in the video would be just a bunch of fat jokes.

It’s not that being a pop-star scold doesn’t work. (Perry’s earlier influence Alanis Morissette did it very well for a while there in the ’90s.) It’s also clear that Perry hasn’t totally lost her grip on what’s funny and campy. It’s that combining the two postures—funny girl, big thinker—means she alienated audiences seeking more substantial art and audiences who just want to laugh and dance. As the culture turned toward something more serious and heady, she wanted to make that pivot too. In hindsight, everything from 2017 seems so heavy and earnest and, frankly, pointless. No wonder Perry couldn’t quite get the tone right.

In the “Eterniti” pit at the “Lifetimes” show in Oklahoma City, the crowd seemed evenly split between 11-year-old girls with their very game parents and 45-year-old men with “Blue Lives Matter” hats. The disparity was confusing until you asked around: At this particular stop, the foundation Vet Tix had gifted more than 1,000 veterans discounted tickets to the show—around $4 a pop for many of them. “That usually means it’s not selling well,” a Vet Tix beneficiary serenely told me after Rebecca Black, Perry’s opener, left the stage. (He called her “discount Sabrina Carpenter,” which his wife evidently did not like. “You have daughters,” she said, scolding him and slapping him on the arm.)

The venue expected 10,000 attendees in its 15,000-person arena, and even though many of the concertgoers were adult men with no knowledge of the Perry catalog, the thousands of preteen and teenage girls in the crowd made for an earsplitting audience. Security winced through every teenage screech, even with earplugs.

Throughout the Paycom Center, girls were dressed up either in Taylor Swift runoff clothes (white cowboy boots, bedazzled dresses, denim jackets, and friendship bracelets—I’m sure Perry would love that) or in Perry cosplay. Some arrived dressed as the candy dots Perry wore in the “California Gurls” video, or in grass skirts à la “Roar,” or as Kathy Beth, Perry’s loser alter ego in “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” headgear and all.

But even those showing up in their Friday-night best couldn’t quite muster up much enthusiasm for Perry when asked. A group of eight work friends had come to the show together in matching “Lifetimes” shirts. They still wouldn’t admit to being big fans. “We just thought it was fun,” one of them told me while waiting in line to take a photo in front of a 6-foot-tall illuminated Katy Perry installation. Several attendees had gotten their tickets that day, citing the cheap price. A 17-year-old had come with her mom and sister, seemingly dressed up for the occasion in a sequin skirt and a sweep of blush. Despite being on her way to a Katy Perry concert, she rolled her eyes into oblivion at my idiotic questions about why she liked Katy Perry. “I don’t really,” she said. “It’s just, like, something to do.” Her mom had gotten their tickets that day, for around $60 each, up in the nosebleeds. A Katy Perry concert is certainly something to do, but unlike a Taylor Swift concert, it is not very cool to talk about it.

No one here, for example, was especially enamored of Perry’s space expedition. “My husband is a pilot, and I know how much work that takes,” one woman told me, walking toward the merch line for a $50 tank top. “She’s not an astronaut.” Two 11-year-old girls with front-row seats, vibrating with excitement over their first concert, were still unimpressed about the jaunt to space. “It was stupid,” one said, adjusting her baby-pink iridescent T-shirt. “She could have given that money to animals.”

It’s worth comparing the Perry we got in interviews from a decade ago with the Perry we got in her post–space exploration interview earlier this spring. Perry in 2015, when interviewed about her forthcoming Super Bowl appearance, cutely quoted Marshawn Lynch, saying, “I’m just here so I don’t get fined.” Meanwhile, postspace Perry was speaking in a word salad so impossible to understand that you have to read the whole thing to even wrap your head around its meaninglessness: “I feel super connected to love. This experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you, how much love you have to give, and how loved you are until the day you launch.” She thanked NBC News—with what seemed like genuine gratitude and humility—when it congratulated her for becoming an “astronaut,” an accomplishment that typically requires a master’s degree and 1,000 hours of aircraft experience. She was still holding on to the daisy she had brought for her daughter (to … space). She seemed almost like the kind of character that 2015 Perry might parody in a music video: a beautiful woman floating off into space, divorced from every single reality happening on Earth.

Going to space didn’t just betray Perry as a sincere dork—it also revealed her to be a hypocrite. While plenty of Democrats glad-hand with billionaires, Perry’s version of it—hanging out with Bezos on election night, taking him up on the offer to go skyward and framing it as a feminist cause—was at odds with her work for the Harris campaign. In October 2024, Bezos killed a Harris endorsement from the Washington Post, the paper he owns. In November, 24 hours before Harris would lose the election, Perry performed at her Pittsburgh rally. “I’ve always known her to fight for the most vulnerable, to speak up for the voiceless, to protect our rights as women to make decisions about our own bodies,” she said of Harris during her performance. “I know she will protect my daughter’s future and your children’s future and our families’ future.”

Perry performing during the “Lifetimes” tour in Mexico City on April 23. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Katy Perry

Between those two events? Perry’s Orient Express–themed 40th birthday party in Venice, where Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sánchez, were present. They actually hang out a lot; Sánchez’s 24-year-old model son, Nikko Gonzalez, goes skydiving with Orlando Bloom, Perry’s husband. Midtour, Perry flew to Paris for Sánchez’s bachelorette party.

Perry isn’t the first or only or last celebrity to mingle with the uberrich while wearing the skin of a progressive. Beyoncé, too, campaigned for Harris while on the verge of billionairedom herself. (Her husband is already one, twice over.) But Perry has spent years staking her reputation on being a social renegade, someone who rebuffed her parents’ conservatism and religious fervor. She stumped for abortion and gay rights, she vacationed with the guy who killed a Harris endorsement in his own paper, and she has been entirely silent about Harris’ loss or Trump’s actions since he returned to office.

In truth, though, Perry’s progressive politics have always been flimsy. For the 2022 L.A. mayoral race, she proudly voted for Rick Caruso, a billionaire who spent more than $100 million (mostly of his own money) to lose to Karen Bass. Perry, despite her own staunchly pro-abortion stance (in public, at least), was backing a candidate who had donated to anti-abortion groups and who had plans to “end street homelessness” while also operating several luxury apartment complexes with no affordable housing.

Still, Perry hasn’t handled anything as badly as she has handled her continued working relationship with Dr. Luke. In 2023 singer Kesha and Dr. Luke reached a settlement after almost 10 years of lawsuits between the two of them stemming from allegations she made that he drugged and raped her, and his consequential claim that she defamed him. A year later, Perry announced she would be working with Dr. Luke on 143. Kesha tweeted, seemingly in response, “lol.”

It’s already gauche to work with a producer accused of raping a fellow pop star, but it’s especially off-kilter considering that the first song that came from this Dr. Luke–produced record was “Woman’s World.” Released a few months before Harris would lose the election, Perry’s uninspired, insipid reheating of 2008 pop feminism met a political climate that seemed to disagree with the song’s very message. The Guardian gave it one star, writing, “It sounds less like a roar of triumph than the echoing cry of someone falling down a large ravine.” If you’re going to work with someone who’s been accused of harming women, it’s perhaps ill advised to have that work be a feminist anthem. But this kind of disjunction has become endemic to Perry’s career.

In Oklahoma City, plenty of her fans weren’t plugged in enough to know about Dr. Luke, or about the song’s production credits, or about Perry’s political and personal associations. The ones who were aware seemed downright pragmatic about it. “If every single dollar you had to spend had to be accountable to some social issue, you would not be able to spend one dollar in America,” 35-year-old Stephen Fitzsimmons said while walking into the concert. “I just want to see her sing ‘Firework.’ ”

And Perry gave Fitzsimmons exactly what he wanted. When she emerged from the undercarriage of the stage, connected to futuristic-looking wires like an intergalactic science experiment, singing weakly into a microphone with a butterfly on the end of it, her audience was with her, screaming. Perry transmuted into exactly what she’s known for: not a singer, not a dancer, but a performer.

This crowd knew every word of all her classics, and when she played something more recent, attendees were still gamely dancing on their feet. Go to a Perry concert, bop along with little girls hyperventilating because they’re mere feet from her and adult men who have no fucking clue what’s going on, and it will feel impossible to reconcile this kind of enthusiasm with the culture’s dismissal of Perry and her power. Even as her message got muddled—which, to be clear, the show’s message certainly did—her audience still loves her. For these fans, it wasn’t necessarily ever about just being funny or quirky or sexy or clever or cute. She was so sincere, so truly and firmly herself, so willing to dance around like a dork onstage, that she’s still laudable. They believed, through and through, that Perry is just being herself, and facing consequences for it.

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Perry’s fans and detractors alike think they know her and see her clearly. Of all the footage that betrays Perry’s essence, one clip from her 2012 documentary comes up again and again among her supporters. Sitting in a makeup chair before a stadium show in Brazil, Perry weeps while her staff whispers around her. Her then husband, Russell Brand, now accused of sexual assault multiple times over, broke up with her over text right before she was set to perform. For true-blue Katy Kats, this moment is emblematic of what makes Perry worth rooting for: Despite her devastation, she pulls it together, sobbing all the way to the stage but then performing without missing a beat. She’s just like us, picking up the pieces of her heart and doing her job anyway.

But what feels even more emblematic of who Perry is as a performer is a recent pep talk she gave her team before one of her shows. It’s simple, it’s lightly disillusioned, and it’s exactly right. “You know this is just a fun game, right? Don’t be so serious. This is entertainment; this is show business; we’re storytelling. You’re having fun. You don’t have to be perfect,” she said. It’s another very 2025 lesson: Nothing is that important, because this is all for fun. There are real tragedies around. Perry knows exactly who she is and what she’s here for.

“When you’re perfect, consider yourself dead,” she says, before guiding her team out onstage in front of thousands of excited fans, and even more strangers on the internet ready to call her a loser. “We are not dead tonight: We are living.”