She is defining the zeitgeist for young America with clever lyrics and chic fashion
SHE COULD have been just another poppet off the production line of pretty young American singers, scheduled to be a one-hit wonder at most, but from the moment she Kissed a Girl, Katy Perry was destined to be different.
Depending on which version
of her life you prefer, Perry is either the most carefully constructed pop star of recent years, or she is a supremely talented singer-songwriter who is defining the zeitgeist for young America with her clever lyrics and chic, colourful, retro fashions. She's not as bananas as 1950s film star Carmen Miranda, but anyone who saw Perry's appearance at the Grammy awards earlier this year will confirm she wears a lot of fruit-inspired attire – kooky and kitsch, but somehow endearing, too. There's also something of the 1950s pin-up about her – the same tension between wholesomeness and sexuality.
Next weekend Perry appears at T in the Park, Scotland's premier rock music festival which is not exactly known as a popular haunt of American popstrels. You might think an audience in love with indie rock might give Perry the sort of reaction English comedians used to get at the Glasgow Empire, but there is enough edge in Perry's appeal to suggest the savvy crowd at Balado will be singing along to her recent mammoth hits, Hot 'n' Cold and especially I Kissed A Girl.
The latter song, the first single to be released off her two-million-selling album One of the Boys, took the charts by storm last year, spending seven weeks at number one in America and going to the top in more than 20 countries, selling more than six million units and earning Perry a best female pop vocal performance nomination at the Grammy awards.
Based – she insists – on a true incident, the song tells of Perry with "drink in hand, lost my discretion... I kissed a girl and I liked it, I kissed a girl just to try it, I hope my boyfriend don't mind."
The catchy tune and the suggestive lyrics – they were dubbed 'lezploitation' – proved a winning combination for the iPod generation, but outraged middle America. Some conservative commentators went ballistic at what they thought was promotion of lesbianism. One church noticeboard carried the slogan: "I kissed a girl – and went straight to hell." The result was that the curious bought the single to find out what all the fuss was about – bingo for Ms Perry and the Capitol record label, which had the courage to produce her records after a previous label dropped her.
It was her bosses at Capitol who set Perry's career on fire after several false starts. Claims that they manufactured her seem well wide of the mark, however, not least because surely nobody in the music business would have selected Perry's Japanese-inspired fruit-loaded fashions when the trend – take Lady Gaga – is for female singers to look like pole dancers, not skiffle-era beauty queens.
Capitol did insist that Perry co-write much of her album with highly successful songwriters such as her collaborator on I Kissed a Girl, Britain's Cathy Dennis – she wrote Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out of my Head – which led to allegations that she was being created, rather than creative.
Yet the song works because of Perry's voice and her delivery of those lyrics. Older music followers will have realised immediately what Perry was doing. Like Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Marc Almond and a host of others, she was toying with sexual mores.
Nevertheless, the appearance of being caught in two minds about her sexuality might well be a reflection of a more general duality in Perry's life. At just 24, Perry can be said to have lived two lives already.
Born in California, her parents, Keith and Mary, were both born-again Christians and ministers who tried to get their children to live an avowedly Christian lifestyle that included singing in church, an activity at which Perry excelled. The singer says that she was the black sheep of the family but insists that her parents were always supportive of her determination to make a career in music, even after she discovered Queen and was transformed overnight into a wannabe pop singer.
Perry went along with overt Christianity up to a point – the age of 17, in fact. By that time she had gone to Nashville and learned some basics about the music business before recording a gospel-style album for a Christian music label. It did not sell, and Perry disappeared from view.
For the next few years she worked with various producers on several projects, none of which came to fruition. In 2007, she signed to Capitol, and with clever marketing on the internet, they prepared the world for Katy Perry.
Contradictions abound. Her natural hair colour is fair, yet in a reversal of the usual trend, she dyes it black. She loves to party, but professes to want to just spend time with her cat. She says she hates conflict, but had a well-publicised spat with British singer Lily Allen. Perry suggested that she was a "skinnier version" of Allen which the Brit took to mean she was calling her fat – cue the sort of catfight insults you would hear in primary school. Perry apologised, it should be said. Perry recently told one reporter of her love for her staid home town and yearning for a quiet life: "I want to be married and buried there. In Santa Barbara, people live longer; they live at a more paced pace." Yet she has happily indulged in a high-profile on-off relationship with one of American music's lesser bad boys, Travis McCoy of the hip-hop band Gym Class Heroes.
A child of the internet age, her Twitter utterances and website blog showcase a young woman with determined views, but also a love of distinctive fashion and downright bizarre videos.
She can certainly play the pop diva and garner publicity. Her latest wheeze was to post on the internet a self-taken picture of herself posing naked in her bath underneath a strategically-placed pizza, and she showed that she knows how to please a male audience – at the San Remo festival in Italy in February she stripped on stage to show off a basque in the colours of Italian football champions Inter Milan.
Perry's biggest rock hero is Freddy Mercury, a perfect example of what can go wrong for those who destroy themselves with the magnificent triviality that is celebrity. Perry says she wants to be "an entertainer" like Mercury, but will she survive the concomitant pressures of fame?
She is intelligent, of that there is no doubt, but will Perry be smart enough to walk away from celebrity before it burns her, or can she ape that chameleon of renewability, Madonna?
At T in the Park, as happens at every other gig she plays, the audience won't be able to help themselves and will soon be dancing along to Perry's music. Resistance, it seems, is futile.
You've been Googled: •Perry's real name is Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, but she changed her stage name to Perry – her mother's maiden name – to avoid confusion with the actress Kate Hudson.
• Her born-again Christian parents would not have been ideal role models for Perry had they not found religion. Before their transformation, her mother dated Jimi Hendrix and her father traded drugs with LSD champion Timothy Leary.
• This year her younger brother played an April Fool joke by texting her to say he had got a girl pregnant. Perry fell for it and blasted him. But as her blog admitted, she had used the same joke about herself the previous year.
• Perry has been known to swear like a trooper. Yet she claims to say her prayers to God every night.
• An American tabloid reported just before last Christmas that Perry had got engaged to boyfriend Travis McCoy lead singer of the Gym Class Heroes band. Perry, who wore a 'promise' ring given by McCoy used her website to say "NOT engaged".
The full article contains 1370 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
