Katy Perry: 'All the Awards That I've Won Are Fake'
Katy Perry Woke Up. She Wants to Tell You All About It.
Excerpts from the article:
Ms. Perry, who has a new album,
“Witness,” says she no longer wants
to be the frothy pop star she once was.
And she intends to reveal her true self.
Reacting to a steady stream of criticism (TMZ’s Met Ball headline: “Katy Perry Rocks Ugly Outfit by Jew-Hating Designer”) is a “maddening game,” she said. Referring to what she called “this strange race to be the most woke,” she added, “They want you to stand for something, but once you do, and if you don’t do it perfectly, they’re ready to take you right down.”
“SO. FUN,” Ms. Perry tweeted about the show to her nearly 100 million followers, adding a shout-out “to my LGBTQ family, all the Queens & @
MIGos for showing unity & respect.” But the internet had already cited her for several violations, including appropriating gay culture and purportedly reducing the number of drag queens onstage to placate Migos, which, in her critics’ minds, made her the villain.
“Intention is everything,” Ms. Perry told me, repeating one of her mantras. “All I was trying to do is build a bridge.”
The 2012 tour documentary “Katy Perry: Part of Me” captured a glimpse of the rigors: Her marriage to the comedian Russell Brand was crumbling as the burdens of becoming a superstar mounted. “I was just kind of like a deer in headlights a little bit,” she said. “I was like, does this happen to people? Like, is this normal?
“When people are just talking about ‘Teenage Dream,’ I’m like, please talk to me when you’ve done that. And lived through it. Because it was [expletive] intense. And amazing and beautiful and horrible all at the same time.”
Part of the pressure stemmed from maintaining her hypersexual image, which Ms. Perry takes responsibility for helping create. “I used to be scared of intimacy, I used to use my sexualization as attention, I used to oversexualize myself because that was the only way I knew how,” she said.
(Ms. Perry, who hit No. 1 with “I Kissed a Girl,” later explained why she holds queer women in high esteem: “I admire that they’re doing it for themselves.
They are not doing it for the male gaze.”) It’s easy to read her drastic haircut and new stylistic choices — her live stream finale outfit covered her in neck-to-toe sequins — as a reaction to having worn whipped-cream bras in the past.
Ms. Perry credits her shift in perspective on her sexuality — she calls it “a full sexual liberation” — to resolving issues with her father. “The reality is that I was retriggered on the election,” she said. “I was retriggered by a big male that didn’t see women as equal. And that had been, unfortunately, a common theme in my upbringing.”
“All the awards shows are fake,” she said, “and all the awards that I’ve won are fake,” she added, explaining that they don’t represent the audience. “They’re constructs.”
so, she admits that she has no talent.
