I'm Clifford Stumme, and I use literary analysis and research to explain the deeper meanings of pop songs. Feel free to leave a comment or to email me at clifford@popsongprofessor.com with questions or ideas!
All tagged katy perry
The sound of Katy Perry's Witness album is pretty awesome. It's custom-made for club dance floors, and several songs may even make the Top 10 (apart from "Chained to the Rhythm," which already has).
I don't know about you, but I've been excited for Katy Perry's new album for quite a while. I'm not a superfan of many female pop stars (or male pop stars for that matter). I prefer homegrown, sincere lyrics that the artists write themselves and that they truly mean. But something grabbed my attention about this new Witness album. I think it was on Twitter, but Katy Perry claimed that this songwriting era of hers was going to be more politically and socially minded. "Chained to the Rhythm" clearly followed that blueprint, but "Swish Swish" (a swagger track) and "Bon Appetit" (a shallow pop sex track) both seemed to contradict her new motivation.
This is one of my favorite songs of 2017 because it's so deep compared to most pop songs. There are several allusions and many metaphors and symbols in here, and it's a very worthwhile song to try to figure out. You may not agree with the politics of "Chained to the Rhythm," but it's worth your time to try to understand it and grapple with the issues being mentioned here. Enjoy everyone!
“Chained to the Rhythm” by Katy Perry is about people who live live far away from difficulty or unhappiness and who aren’t willing to come down out of these “bubble[s]” to see real problems that need to be solved in the world. She doesn’t specify the kind of problems and leaves it to her audience to apply her song to situations on their own though there does seem to be a pretty substantial political charge to this song.
I've always been a bigger fan of Katy Perry's sound than of her lyrics, and I think that sometimes pop stars put their music above their lyrics. In fact, they may do that most of the time. After all, when you think of pop music, do you think of dancing and good times, or do you think of careful consideration of abstract concepts? Well, since you're here on my site, maybe you're one of the few who would say the latter.
It may be suggestive of what this song is about that I almost titled it "What does 'Doubt' by Blurryface mean?" "Doubt" by Twenty One Pilots seems as though it actually could have written by Tyler Joseph's alter-ego Blurryface as it recounts several of his fears and begs God to not "forget about me." The song is slow and methodical and iconic of the fears and anxieties that Tyler is dealing with in this album.
