Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour – Live from Paris (Dugdale, 2026)
“I just want to know who my audience is,” Katy Perry claims, somewhat disingenuously, after asking if there are any KatyCats in the Paris crowd watching her perform. There are — surprise — quite a few. Maybe everyone. But definitely most of them. Most of those watching the concert movie dropping this September will likely be KatyCats as well. They will love it, because they love her.
What about the rest of us?
I am not a KatyCat, but neither am I a Perry hater. I have a digital copy of the Teenage Dream album, slept through any early pearl clutching about her influence on anyone, read past the headlines enough to not blame her for a nun’s heart attack, and keep a copy of her famous (infamous?) banned duet of “Hot ‘N Cold” that was deemed too risqué for Seasame Street. It never fails to make me smile, and honestly, if Perry did nothing else in her life, I would not begrudge her a fast pass at the pearly gates on the basis of just that video.
Still, she’s a female, which means when she was younger that she was a girl, which means the way our culture treats her, thinks about her, talks about her, and looks at her is all tangled up in a giant ball of confusion, wound around assumption, wrapped in expectation, and gilded with condescension.
By now most people know that Perry was raised in a Christian home, released a not-very-successful gospel album under her given name, and only really made it big time after she wore a whip cream bra and started singing about going “all the way tonight” with no regrets. Maybe there is a seed of truth to the hypothesis that as our culture becomes more sex saturated there is a niche market for those who grew up as child stars or are/were associated with virginal roles and subcultures precisely because their sexuality lies within the societal bounds of permissible but is imaginatively associated with fantasies that are not. That said, we all know it is wrong to blame the performer (or any woman) for the prurient nature of some of their “fans,” right? Whether or not a female performer chooses to lean into such associations might be another conversation, just not one I am interested in having at the moment. Suffice to say that Perry, at least in the aforementioned Teenage Dreams album, struck me as trying to project a fun and flirty persona rather than a provactively deviant one. And I use the word “persona” intentionally because I will die on the hill of the argument that no matter how many “behind the scenes” featurettes or interviews we consume, we know next to nothing about the “real” insert-celebrity-name-here.
Last week my podcast partner, Prisca Bird, made a comment in our review of Cookie Queens, that she worried slightly that our culture’s attempts to commodify “cuteness” might be, in its way, an equally oppressive or confining form of socialization as is the sexualizing of young girls. Girls age out of their cuteness pretty quick, and to the extent they are taught to value some trait that is associated with youth, whether it be cuteness, sweetness, or innocence, they will someday find themselves having to pivot to promoting some other quality.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, back to The Lifetimes Tour. Perry is forty-one. Don’t shame the messenger for stating that fact; she proudly broadcasts her age in an interlude chat with the audience. And if the concern attached to that disclosure — “Will they still love me if they find out I am 41 years-old?” — comes across as playacting rather than sincere, it still speaks to a broader concern about the world we live in and the shelf-life for all things young and beautiful. If I am honest, much of my curiosity to watch the concert film came from wondering how these songs, so fun, so flirty, so … young would land from someone now twice the age of a teenager. Would Perry come across as someone trying to hold on to a moment that was long gone, or as someone who had reinvented herself, who was continuing to grow and mature, and had something to offer beyond just being young and pretty?
Turns out the answer is neither, though I think we are closer to the latter than the former. The songs haven’t changed, but the persona maybe has — and in a good way. Yes, some of the songs are a little long-in-tooth, and yes, stripped of the taboo associations of age, they don’t seem quite so scandalous or provocative or hip. They do, however, have a nostalgia value for those who lived through the moment(s) when they were all that. Audience reaction shots keep circling back to one fan with a self-made glitter t-shirt sporting the “I kissed a girl” lyric. Scoff if you want, but Perry and her music clearly meant something to these people, something worth cherishing and holding onto and not something they grew out of.
Speaking for myself only, I think the sexiest quality in man or woman, gay, straight, or bi, is confidence, and Perry either has some of that or is awfully good at projecting it. She knows who she is, appears to have come to terms with that, and appears to take genuine pleasure in bringing pleasure to others. What can ever be bad about that? Maybe there are concessions here and there to age built into the showmanship aspects of the staging. Perry lets the dancers do most of the heavy lifting. She hangs from monkey bars, rides a giant mechanical butterfly, struts through lights and effects while maybe singing (or maybe lip synching some?) but always projecting and receiving love.
One of the oldest adages in American culture is that a celebrity is someone who is famous for being famous. Perry is not called upon to do much here other than to be Katy Perry, but she does that exceptionally well. Not everyone is going to swoon like a KatyCat, but the only people I can imagine not being entertained at all are those who have decided they don’t like the Katy Perry persona, and really, how many of them are going to be watching? Yes, I sang along with “Firework” and did a little Elmo impersonation during “Hot N Cold.” If I also rolled my eyes at some of the costumes being a little over the top for my personal taste, there was also some envy that response. People of any age who are not afraid to be their authentic selves, who aren’t cowed by what everyone thinks about them or Tweets about them, have both my respect and my admiration.
So bless you, Katy, you are a champion, and I have heard you roar.
