Less than 24 hours after its release, 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 artiste 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 characterised 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 is 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.

Past hercommercial peak

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.

Gottwald effect?

Then there was Perry’s decision to reunite with the producer and songwriter Dr. Luke, who worked with Perry on four of the No. 1 hits off Teenage Dream. Dr. Luke, born Lukasz Gottwald, had a Midas touch in pop’s mid-aughts and early 2010s, but his reputation was significantly tarnished by a 2014 lawsuit filed by the musician Kesha, who claimed that Gottwald sexually assaulted and harassed her while she was signed to his label. (They reached a settlement in June 2023.)

To her discredit, Perry has been spectacularly mealy-mouthed when she has been asked to account for her decision to work with someone publicly accused of such behaviour. “I understand that it started a lot of conversations,” Perry told Alexandra Cooper on a recent episode of the podcast Call Her Daddy, when asked about Gottwald’s involvement in 143, “and he was one of many collaborators that I collaborated with, but the reality is that it comes from me. The truth is, I wrote these songs from my experience of my whole life going through this metamorphosis.” And, of course, it is easy to be cynical about Perry enlisting a man accused of sexual assault to co-write and co-produce a pop-feminist anthem like the flaccid Woman’s World.

Still, Perry is not the only high-profile artiste to work with Gottwald in the wake of Kesha’s lawsuit. In 2022, Nicki Minaj (Super Freaky Girl) and Latto (Big Energy) both had hits co-produced by Gottwald. He was nominated for the 2020 record of the year Grammy for producing Doja Cat’s breakout No. 1 single Say So.

Amid considerable backlash, Gottwald has stayed busy and even intermittently successful by evolving his production style to reflect current trends, working frequently with female rappers on tracks that utilize easily recognizable and sometimes heavy-handed samples. In reviews of 143, some writers have suggested that Perry’s sin wasn’t working with Dr. Luke per se, but refusing to adapt her hit-making strategy as adeptly as he has. In his review for The Los Angeles Times, the critic Mikael Wood cited Say So and Big Energy to suggest “that audiences would forgive her decision” to reunite with Gottwald, “provided she came with bangers”.

To listen to pop music these days — or even just to participate in pop culture writ large — is to be wracked with seemingly endless and possibly futile questions about ethical consumption. Is it more permissible to enjoy an old Dr. Luke-produced song than a new one that was made with full awareness of Kesha’s accusations? Is it OK to stream a newer Dr. Luke track if everyone thinks it’s a “banger?” When one of those record-tying five No. 1s from Michael Jackson’s Bad is played at a wedding, should you vacate the dance floor in protest?

A convenient scapegoat

It is worth noting that Perry’s latest album was released days after Sean Combs, once one of the most powerful figures in the music industry, was arrested on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. While rumours have long swirled about Combs’s behaviour, the speed at which he has gone from being a celebrated as a pioneering music mogul to accused of horrific crimes has been whiplash inducing. A cloud of sickened anticipation now hangs in the air, as fans are left wondering if any other artistes will be implicated in Combs’s charges, which fan faves might be exposed as problematic and what other secrets may lurk beneath the music industry’s platinum facade.

In the midst of all this moral queasiness, Perry has emerged as a convenient scapegoat for larger cultural ire and anxieties. Perhaps it is a welcome distraction to condemn and joke about Perry’s beaming obliviousness rather than consider the music industry’s systemic problems and widespread complicities in all manners of abuse.

Perry certainly deserves a good deal of the blame for her album flopping. Part of being a successful pop star is knowing how to read the room, and in that she failed completely. But the overwhelming scorn directed at her latest release feels more about the moment than about the music itself. I don’t think 143 is the worst album of the last 13 years, but it might just be the easiest target.

The New York Times News Service