Pop and Rock Music

The pop singer’s latest LP, “143,” has been gleefully panned, but its musical faults aren’t as remarkable as Perry’s failure to read the current cultural moment.Less than 24 hours after its release last Friday, Katy Perry’s seventh studio album, “143,” had already earned a place in pop musical infamy.It debuted on Metacritic, a website that collects and quantifies music reviews, with a score of 35 out of 100, becoming the site’s lowest-rated album since 2011 and the worst-reviewed album by a female artist in its 23-year history. Seemingly the kindest thing any critic said about “143” was that it “falls short of total catastrophe.” Online, dunking on Perry became a semiprofessional sport, as representatives of rival stan armies posted about her supposed downfall with irrepressible glee.But is “143” really that bad? It certainly lacks the sparkle, personality and campy wit that characterized “Teenage Dream,” Perry’s blockbuster 2010 album. (Along with Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” “Teenage Dream” is the only album to spawn five No. 1 hits.) But none of the songs on “143” are as ostentatiously awful as some of Perry’s previous failures, like, say, “Bon Appétit,” the Migos-assisted nadir of her 2017 album, “Witness,” or the track from her 2013 release, “Prism,” on which she sang about a night out doing (gulp) “Mariah Carey-oke.” The defining qualities of “143” are its blandness, anonymity and deadeyed seriousness — rather surprising for a woman whose 2022 Las Vegas residency, “Play,” found her singing beside a 16-foot toilet.Unfortunately, dull, uninspired pop albums come out all the time, and plenty of Perry’s pop star peers have also recently had to reckon with diminishing sales. It was highly unlikely that a new album was going to launch Perry, who in recent years has been appearing as a judge on “American Idol,” back to pop’s epicenter. Despite a lead single (the anthemic synth-pop number “Never Really Over”) far superior to anything on “143,” Perry’s 2020 album, “Smile,” failed to make much of an impression. But it also did not prompt the outsized scorn and schadenfreude that has accompanied her latest release.I can’t say I’ll be putting “143” in heavy rotation, but I also do not think it is the worst album I have heard since 2011, nor the most odious collection of music made by a woman in over two decades. (It is also not a total commercial failure, projected to debut with around 40,000 units sold in its first week.) The album’s anodyne jams might not tell us much about Katy Perry, but the Great Flop of “143” says a lot about the way pop is consumed, evaluated and discussed in this particular moment, when music is just one part of the package. Listeners are more aware than ever how the cotton candy is made, debating the merits of various figures who were once tucked behind the curtain: producers, writers and in some cases even managers and publicists. In a time when an album’s promotion and rollout strategy are often scrutinized as heavily as its content, Perry was already doomed to fail.A mediocre album from a pop star past her commercial peak, “143” probably would have come and gone without much notice were its rollout not prone to so many cringe-inducing gaffes, like the controversy surrounding the music video for the blithe, house-inflected single “Lifetimes,” which prompted a government investigation for filming on a UNESCO World Heritage nature reserve off the coast of Spain.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More