Looking through Katy Perry’s Prism

Tailors her work for the American rites of passage,new album signals a transition

In the video for Roar,the first single from Katy Perrys new record Prism,Perry plays a young woman going native in the jungle after a plane crash,learning to live with wild animals. I got the eye of the tiger, she sings,borrowing a line from Survivor. In her performance of Roar at the recent MTV Video Music Awards,she played a boxer in a ring; that setup made sense of the songs I am the champion line,borrowed from Queen.

The stars of Roar are the rhythm-chant of the tom-toms,which naturally translates to a drum line ensemble,and the short,yelled hey! of a spirit squad.The song,with its processional tempo,and space for collective dancing and signalling,seems perfectly designed for pep rallies. Its a self-empowerment anthem,good for inducing physical activity. And yet by the standards of Perry and her team,its slight and derivative.

Perry has begun her post-bubble-gum longevity plan. Firework,her show-them-what-youre-worth hit of 2010,was just the beginning. And so while keeping a partial grip on the cartooned,airbrushed party world of her past hits,shes started to tailor her work for American rites of passage: the spirit rally,the birthday,the wedding dance,and the psycho-spiritual crisis. So far,its an unsteady operation. Prism is so full of cliché that it almost radiates insecurity.

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Shes still using the same producing team that she has since 2008: Dr Luke,Max Martin,and Cirkut. But where her records used to sound crammed tight into a small space,stylishly and sometimes brilliantly limited by audio tricks and short-range burlesque jokes,now theyre starting to intimate openness: echo,big drums,stadium choruses,eternity,making it count,living by the truth.

Perry has described Prism as more vulnerable and raw and stripped-down than Teenage Dream. That earlier record was arch behind its enormous smile,very aware of its own fake funk and synthetic bubbliness.

There has up to this point been something appealing about Perrys determined interest in Day-Glo teenage-girl aesthetics,a stance so good-natured and almost academic that she can resemble a librarian reading silly stories to children about people who go to parties and forget to go home. Shes a professional and not a demagogue of a social movement. Shes not Lady Gaga,creating cabaret-theatre hyperbole. Shes not Miley Cyrus,enacting transgression and waiting for the echo.

If Perry is acting out healthy vulnerability,shes showing the less healthy side,too. She seems lonelier and looking for validation,more ready to follow the status quo. A fair amount of Prism leans toward sounds that won Grammy Awards last year parade drums,anthems,and retreads from 70s and 80s dance music.

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Perry is too smart to discard her old sound completely. Its there in Birthday,with synthetic funk and a Daft Punk bridge. She sings,let me get you in your birthday suit/its time to bring out the big balloons.

Nothing on Prism quite comes close to the first four tracks of Teenage Dream. But in a general sense this is Katy Perry at her best,not second-guessing herself at all.

Ben Ratliff