![]() Political unrest was spreading throughout the country, largely sparked by the 2016 election which would title Donald Trump the president-elect as well as ongoing protests for the Black Lives Matter movement and the Internet uprising of the white-supremacist alt-right. With songs like “Roar,” “Firework,” “Part of Me,” and now “Rise,” self-empowerment bops were becoming Katy’s schtick, but the world in 2016 wasn’t quite what it had been in the years she was ruling the charts. ![]() Some trace Katy’s pop slump back to “ Rise,” an anthemic electronic pop song she debuted for the 2016 Summer Olympics, a year prior to Witness, which peaked at number eleven on the US Hot 100. The following four singles failed to crack the top 40, two of them not making it onto the Hot 100 at all. “Chained to the Rhythm,” the album’s lead, debuted and peaked at number four on the US Hot 100. Since Katy is known as a “singles artist” rather than an “album artist,” the failure of Witness to spawn any chart-topping tracks revealed her true fall from glory. Like her two albums preceding, it debuted at number one on Billboard charts, but today, Prism has sold more than four times as many copies worldwide. Witness was the first in Katy’s discography to be considered a true flop. Two of Prism’s singles reached number one on the US Hot 100, a slight disappointment from Teenage Dream’s record-breaking triumph, but the album marked the last time a Katy Perry track would reach chart-topping status when “Dark Horse” hit number one in early 2014. Prism, the album which preceded the Superbowl, had a weaker commercial performance than Teenage Dream despite its first week sales being her greatest to date. all aimed to be cartoonish and playful, taking the pop theatrics of acts like Lady Gaga and Madonna but replacing their iconoclastic provocations with a reverence for childlike nostalgia.īy 2015, Katy broke records again when she performed at the Superbowl XLIX halftime show, earning critical acclaim for her set while pulling in over 4-million more viewers than the game itself and becoming the most-watched halftime show in the network’s history. ![]() Her clothes, hair, music videos, stage shows, etc. With a Candy Land themed music video, cotton-candy clouds on the album’s cover, and scratch-and-sniff cotton-candy stickers on limited-release records, Katy cemented her status as the most bubblegum of popstars. The Teenage Dream roll-out fittingly centered around a concept both pop critics and fans often deem the genre’s nutritional equivalent: candy. Katy’s debut follow-up album, 2010’s Teenage Dream, broke records when five of its singles reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, an accomplishment only shared by Michael Jackson’s iconic album, Bad. The track and its corresponding album, One of the Boys, cemented the persona of Katy Perry as they introduced her with visual references portraying Katy as a pin-up girl of the late 2000s–a modernized, live-action Betty Boop who’s provocative only as much as she embodies an ironic caricature of female pop-stardom. Her debut single, “I Kissed a Girl,” in 2008 hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 just weeks after its release. With her last two albums’ ( Witness as well as 2020’s Smile) underperformance, it’d be easy to forget how dominantly Katy Perry reigned over pop music of the early-to-mid 2010s.
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