The Clean and Happy Hustle of Katy Perry’s Lifetimes Tour » PopMatters

When it comes down to Katy Perry’s concerts, the embattled pop star embraces maturity and manifests “I love you” with a family-friendly extravaganza.

“Where’s my Scorpios at?!?!” yelled Katy Perry, quite possibly the hardest working woman in show business, strutting over towards a portion of the arena that she had deemed insufficiently hyped. It was a Monday night in Chicago, and the house was sold out or damn close to it. 

Shimmery blue “California Gurls“ hair, Left Shark, the Mario-like mushroom cap from her Las Vegas Play residency, and even several Blue Origin-like spaceflight outfits. There were the costumes worn by her fans, an odd and disproportionately Latin mix of like 30% gays and 70% chaperoned pre-teen girls, two groups so often pigeonholed as self-involved and catty, but not these, these ones were the wholesome ones, the trusting ones and the open ones, all quietly radiating unassuming but persistent good vibes.

“TE AMO” screamed a home-made sign held up often from the floor near the stage. All those fans were there for a good time, no matter what the world might think about Katy Perry. However, was her singing that good? you might ask, having come across social media dust-ups about this song or that song that she belted out as part of her sets.

Aha, gotcha! That is not the question to ask about Perry’s Lifetime tour! Rather, you should ask, “How does she not get motion sickness?!” The director Werner Herzog has been famously quoted as saying that filmmaking “comes from your knees and thighs”. In a similar vein, it just might be easier to list all of the quasi-athletic feats that this quote-unquote “pop star” doesn’t do on her new tour. 

Perry rockets up and levitates amidst metal hoops, she rotates on stage-grounded carousels, she flips end-over-end multiple times in succession, she lopes along that long infinity symbol-shaped stage in high heels of a pretty ungodly height, she hangs upside down with her legs splayed out, she does the splits, she twerks briefly and modestly but at a rather remarkable velocity. Move move move, it was always like, although a careful watcher would always see her pause to don this or that safety harness whenever it was strictly necessary.

Every once in a while, a pop star does something so different that they break through registers, like how Michael Jackson moonwalked and got a call from Fred Astaire. Now, after her surprisingly formative Play residency, it’s clear that Katy Perry has “leaned into” straight-up Vegas, as she’s set out into the world with her next schtick.

To look past the Discourse™ of her collaboration with the brand-tainted Dr. Luke and the missteps of her current album 143’s lead single “Woman’s World” and its accompanying video, this has been a fascinating albeit somewhat inchoate era for Perry.

The high-tempo dance music of 143 is decent enough, but the larger context is where it’s at. Life never goes in circles, but it does occasionally spiral back around so you can revisit an old place from a new level. Still coming off that life-lesson when her “purposeful pop” of 2017’s Witness failed to change the world, Perry has retreated and reevaluated, centering herself amidst her family and finding a new appreciation for how her uber-mainstream music can create small spaces of joy and hope.

On a more granular level, in terms of visuals and submerged thematics, Katy Perry has also attempted to reconcile motherhood with her previous party girl persona. She has even tried to nudge her aging fan base towards accepting their fading looks and life’s disappointments, while still choosing to be grateful. With so many halting motions in so many different and oft-pensive directions, a tour named Lifetimes could be many things: a retrospective heart-on-your-sleeve bawlfest, a boisterous BE HERE NOW celebration, an intervention to place audiences before eternity and make them think about a life worth living?

Any of those slants are plausible, and elements of all are present, but, surprise, surprise, Perry’s Lifetimes tour has most of all turned out to be just a good-hearted frothy spectacle. Perhaps its most unexpected element is its relatively tight “jukebox musical” structure, presenting the concert as a giant video game. In its slightly corny Matrix-derived set-up, an AI supervillain has trapped the world’s butterflies and harnessed their energy to maintain its ascendance and keep the world in an alienated thrall. Who could ever fight him? Why, none other than the cyborg KP143, but only after she levels up with two hearts gained from questing in her choice of two of five different areas!

Straightaway, you can see that this is a simplification of some of this era’s elements that have been more thoughtfully deployed elsewhere. The disparate composite robot and the metallic butterfly don’t continue from earlier as gestures towards contradictory demands on women and hard-won happiness. Instead, they’re incidental plot points disconnectedly riffing on existing visuals.

Other minor imagery is confused. For example, the gigantic infinity symbol that composes the Lifetimes tour’s stage somehow also serves as the supervillain’s emblem. Indeed, the set pieces seem more calculated to elicit ‘wow’ after ‘wow’, rather than put you off-kilter and inspire thought. Despite all their high production value and the enjoyment they continually deliver, not a single one can match the visceral, symbolic, redolent, and reinterpretative staging of Madonna. For instance, her recent Celebration tour’s disconcerting orchestration of “Erotica” with shadowy boxers (“erotic – erotic – put your hands all over my body”).

From this mish-mash – a mish-mash that you should just run with, lest you kill your buzz and deprive yourself of a very good time – perhaps the two most interesting bits were a glimpsed retrospective panorama and the virtues associated with the heart quests. Briefly but tellingly, Perry charted her own lifetimes not with her first major studio release, but with her preceding Christian music career as Katy Hudson.

Although other pop stars like Lizzy Grant-cum-Lana Del Rey are a bit queasy about their stillborn careers conducted under different names, Katy Perry healthily refuses to disown past versions of herself. Of course, though, Perry isn’t quite that self any longer, and in a pro-gay nod that will probably be remembered by all the baby lesbians in the audience, the first heart-quest saw her earning STRENGTH on the closing words of “I Kissed a Girl”: “I liked it.”

Even more interestingly, the second heart that she earned bore the slightly odd virtue of FREEDOM.  Now, if you had to brainstorm virtues for a plucky cyborg to bring into combat, you would surely think of so many other virtues first, beyond STRENGTH, perhaps PERSEVERANCE and INGENUITY, and maybe even GRACE. It would be a while before you listed FREEDOM, if you ever got down there at all before your brainstorming sputtered out.

One can only assume that this unusual virtue is very central to Katy Perry’s current spirituality, born of the past number of years contemplating the limits of her control, and bearing fruits like her recent tranquil navigation of the online hatred that was so unrelenting that she had to step forward and assure concerned fans that she’s grounded and okay.

Indeed, beyond its narrow videogame conceptualization, the Lifetimes tour showed Perry treasuring this FREEDOM. Although this era has ironically provided Perry with her worst press ever, she has nevertheless been insistent on bringing people into her “love frequency” When you snap out of the trance of the Lifetime tour’s staging marvels, it is striking how often and how close Perry comes to the audience, whether spending time on different bits of the gigantic and extended stage, or making use of multiple contraptions to zoom out towards various far sections of the arena.

If you have chosen to reach out and put yourself there, she will be there, for she has chosen to share her presence with you and give you whatever happiness that might bring you. “One – four – three,” she said in her closing words, citing the album’s title that is antiquated pager-speak for “I love you.”

Although Katy Perry has been lazily accused of being a stalled-out and immature hand-me-down from over a decade ago, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Perry has, of course, made mistakes in recent years; for example, she didn’t quite see how grating it would be to undertake what is essentially space tourism for the mega-rich, but publicized through Silicon Valley-like flimflam where somehow everything that’s being sold is suddenly for the betterment of all humanity.

Yet, the unnatural stridency of the hatred towards Perry should alone force any reasonable onlooker to wonder if a projection phenomenon is at work. When they hate on her, could Perry’s cloyingly-knowing spewers of kneejerk “common wisdom” somehow in fact be talking about themselves, rabidly seizing on any perceived fault to pawn off their own inadequacies onto her? Indeed, in comparison to the phantom punching bag of maladjusted internet jibes, the actual Katy Perry in person practically exudes self-awareness and a well-adjusted thoughtfulness, with nothing showing this more than her behavior around children.

She was not going to sing “Peacock”, and she is sorry for all the times that she sang it. Perry told a Chicago fan who shouted out to her from the audience to request a phallus-themed song from Teenage Dream. When actual little girls were brought onstage from the audience at another point, too, she was nothing but encouragement, praising their dreams and how they could play musical instruments. 

Of course, first, though, she had offered them cotton candy plucked from her edible pink furry boots. “Don’t worry, I’m not a stranger,” she was like, “I’m Katy Perry,” a canned wink-wink line that was about as saucy as she got all night.

For, if Perry was once the squirting whipped cream can bra of Teenage Dream or the crushed beer can bra of Play, drolly lactating a beer, now her edibility is desexualized and thoroughly tamed, downgraded from bras to boots and boxed and packaged and made acceptable for the little ones. Now a mother, Perry has woken up more than ever to the fact that she’s a role model at her concerts, and she’s clamped down and started behaving like one.

Thus, in perhaps the most surprising development of them all, Perry has not only spiraled back to giving simple mass joy with a new appreciation for her ability to do so, but she’s also in a way repristinated her Christian music roots, albeit in secularized form. With all of its Scorpio-talk and erratically surfacing self-empowerment narratives, the Lifetimes tour is at heart a positive, family-friendly extravaganza, bundling up fairly affordable feel-good entertainment with just the slightest overlay of non-controversial moral edification and uplift.

For, you see, through her ongoing personal evolution, Perry has not only sought to put out positive energy into the universe, but she’s also tried to cut down on the negative as well, as she has very carefully thought through the circumstances that life has put her into and all the ways that she could meet the moment.

So, now, then, when this grown-up Katy Perry shows us love, she means good, clean fun, Vegas-style, and she really does mean it with a high degree of intentionality.  Just because she’s “done a lot work around knowing who I am, what is real and what is important to me,” does every outcome have to be profound, or dour? Maturity brings freedom and is the mother of transformative self-reflection.