Pearls : Katy Perry
"I Think You Can Have It All. You Just Have To Work really Hard, Because Great Things Don't Come Easily"
Not very long ago, she was strumming a guitar on the street and getting paid in avocados. Today she’s the most cartoonishly ubiquitous pop star on Earth. Katy Perry gives Amy Wallace an earful about aliens (real), her world-famous body (real), her “relationship” with Obama, and what the hell she was thinking before she went full geisha at the American Music Awards
It smells like weed in here. Weed and doughnuts.
We’re in the basement of the Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, backstage at the American Music Awards, in a dressing-room suite that would be spacious if not for all the frenzied humanity crammed inside. Katy Perry sits atop a tall director’s chair surrounded by the many, many members of her team: voice coach, two hairstylists, one makeup artist, a costumer, and several others who hover and hand Perry things without her asking: Breath mints. Her phone. Eye drops for her enormous anime eyes. Special pills prescribed by her ear, nose, and throat guy to keep her voice from drying out pre-performance. “It happens,” Perry says. “It’s the nerves.”
She doesn’t seem the slightest bit nervous. Which is impressive when you consider that the 29-year-old diva (who’s never really seemed like one) is trying something different tonight. Perry has always played a dual role in the culture: at once a full-on male fantasy and a symbol of empowerment who inspires young girls. No other artist has so seamlessly blended teenage dreams and grown-up misadventures, singing about hickeys and crushes, yes, but also threesomes, blackouts, and strangers in your bed. Now, on prime-time television, she’s about to twist her image one more quarter turn, transforming from America’s audacious, outrageous cleavage-bot into its selfless, doting concubine. At precisely five o’clock, she will kick off the awards show with a Japanese spectacle featuring fluttering fan dancers, four men pounding on gongs, a forest of rolling topiary, and a metric ton of faux cherry blossoms.
Now the smell of a different type of flora—Cannabis sativa—wafts in from the hallway.... Ah, okay, Rihanna’s suite is twenty feet away. “Everyone is high!” Perry declares, giggling. She means everyone else: “The weed—I’m not friends with it.” She is bare-shouldered, bare-legged, barefooted—bare-everythinged, basically, except for the wig cap on her head and the teensy light blue Hello Kitty terry-cloth wrap that cinches above her breasts and ends where butt meets thigh. “I can’t do that stuff. I’d be like in the corner: ‘Are you trying to kill me?!’ ”
But that sugar-sweet doughnut reek? Perry takes responsibility. The doughnuts are gone—the victims, it seems, of a fried-dough orgy that ended before I arrived.
She starts warming up her voice: “Eee, eee, eee, eee, EEE, eee, eee, eee, eee!” Five notes up, four notes down, a sort of pitch-perfect keening.
“A little whinier and looser,” her voice coach commands. “Make your tongue super-loose.”
“Ex-cuse me?” she responds, batting her lashes, enjoying the vague reference to naughty things one can do with one’s mouth, then blasts out another scale. “Good,” says the coach, dodging a mascara wand and a hot curling iron to play another note on his iPad keyboard. “Now, really whiny. Say: Gwah!”
“Gwa, gwa, gwa, gwa, GWAH,” Perry projects, extending her legs, crossing them at the ankles and resting her heels on the makeup table. As someone slips a pair of glittery tabi socks onto her feet, a blur of others poke at her and tug at her and dust her face with Super White theatrical powder.
“It takes a village!” she trills, and the crew laugh anxiously. Her geisha wig has yet to be secured to her head. Her pink kimono is draped on a hanger. In just twenty-five minutes, she’s supposed to go live.
It’s been six years since Katy Perry announced herself with “I Kissed a Girl,” which became her first hit single (and somehow made Chapstick sexy). Ever since, her immense popularity has stemmed largely from her ability to straddle that divide between Madonna (one of her idols) and girl next door. Far more wholesome than that twisted genius Lady Gaga, Perry still exudes vastly more heat and sensuality than, say, Taylor Swift. Part of that’s due to Perry’s top-heavy physicality, but her sly lyrics and full-throated delivery deserve credit, too. In her music, all of which she co-writes, she handily mixes innocence with lust. She wants to be your homecoming queen and made her mark singing about reading Seventeen and learning how to shave her legs. But she also yearns to melt your Popsicle and see your peacock, cock, cock. When you add in God—she was raised Pentecostal and once recorded on a Christian label—things get even more complicated.
Lay me down at your altar, baby, she sings in “Spiritual,” a bonus track, written with her sometime boyfriend John Mayer, off her latest album, Prism—which has sold 771,000 copies (and garnered two Grammy nominations) since it debuted in October. Your electric lips have gotten me speaking in tongues. Somehow, though, when she sings about sex, it doesn’t come off as raunchy so much as...uplifting. Positive. And downright good for you. No wonder she has more Twitter followers (48 million) than anyone on earth.
“Fifteen-minute warning!” Perry’s assistant manager, a petite woman named Ngoc (rhymes with “sock”), calls out.
The kimono is on now. So are the fake eyelashes. Angular and immense, they stand out against Perry’s now ghostly skin. She decided on the geisha act, she says, because she loves spectacle, and she loves Japan (she calls it “the capital of adorableness”), and she thinks the theme fits the song she’s about to sing, “Unconditionally,” which she wrote for Mayer the last time they broke up. (They’re together again now.)
“I was thinking about unconditional love, and I was thinking: Geishas are basically, like, the masters of loving unconditionally.” She’s so earnest, I don’t have the heart to point out that in the gamut of human interactions, the courtesan-patron relationship is, um, maybe the most conditional relationship there is? (Days later, when asked if she followed the mini furor that her performance ignited—some said it amounted to singing in blackface—she tells me she respects the debate but thinks her critics misunderstood. “All I was trying to do is just give a very beautiful performance about a place that I have so much love for and find so much beauty in, and that was exactly where I was coming from, with no other thought besides it.”)
The middle child of two traveling ministers, Perry moved around a lot as a kid and developed a canny intelligence that owes more to life living than book learning. By the time the family settled on the poor side of wealthy Santa Barbara, Perry—whose given name is Katheryn Hudson—was more focused on singing and growing up than on studying.
“I lay on my back one night and looked down at my feet, and I prayed to God. I said, ‘God, will you please let me have boobs so big that I can’t see my feet when I’m lying down?’ ” At age 11, “God answered my prayers,” she says, glancing south. “I had no clue they would fall into my armpits eventually.”
Contact Katy Perry
Website | MySpace | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest | iTunes | Spotify
Contact GQ Magazine
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Sources : Katy Perry Photo | Katy Perry Article
Not very long ago, she was strumming a guitar on the street and getting paid in avocados. Today she’s the most cartoonishly ubiquitous pop star on Earth. Katy Perry gives Amy Wallace an earful about aliens (real), her world-famous body (real), her “relationship” with Obama, and what the hell she was thinking before she went full geisha at the American Music Awards
It smells like weed in here. Weed and doughnuts.
We’re in the basement of the Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, backstage at the American Music Awards, in a dressing-room suite that would be spacious if not for all the frenzied humanity crammed inside. Katy Perry sits atop a tall director’s chair surrounded by the many, many members of her team: voice coach, two hairstylists, one makeup artist, a costumer, and several others who hover and hand Perry things without her asking: Breath mints. Her phone. Eye drops for her enormous anime eyes. Special pills prescribed by her ear, nose, and throat guy to keep her voice from drying out pre-performance. “It happens,” Perry says. “It’s the nerves.”
She doesn’t seem the slightest bit nervous. Which is impressive when you consider that the 29-year-old diva (who’s never really seemed like one) is trying something different tonight. Perry has always played a dual role in the culture: at once a full-on male fantasy and a symbol of empowerment who inspires young girls. No other artist has so seamlessly blended teenage dreams and grown-up misadventures, singing about hickeys and crushes, yes, but also threesomes, blackouts, and strangers in your bed. Now, on prime-time television, she’s about to twist her image one more quarter turn, transforming from America’s audacious, outrageous cleavage-bot into its selfless, doting concubine. At precisely five o’clock, she will kick off the awards show with a Japanese spectacle featuring fluttering fan dancers, four men pounding on gongs, a forest of rolling topiary, and a metric ton of faux cherry blossoms.
Now the smell of a different type of flora—Cannabis sativa—wafts in from the hallway.... Ah, okay, Rihanna’s suite is twenty feet away. “Everyone is high!” Perry declares, giggling. She means everyone else: “The weed—I’m not friends with it.” She is bare-shouldered, bare-legged, barefooted—bare-everythinged, basically, except for the wig cap on her head and the teensy light blue Hello Kitty terry-cloth wrap that cinches above her breasts and ends where butt meets thigh. “I can’t do that stuff. I’d be like in the corner: ‘Are you trying to kill me?!’ ”
But that sugar-sweet doughnut reek? Perry takes responsibility. The doughnuts are gone—the victims, it seems, of a fried-dough orgy that ended before I arrived.
She starts warming up her voice: “Eee, eee, eee, eee, EEE, eee, eee, eee, eee!” Five notes up, four notes down, a sort of pitch-perfect keening.
“A little whinier and looser,” her voice coach commands. “Make your tongue super-loose.”
“Ex-cuse me?” she responds, batting her lashes, enjoying the vague reference to naughty things one can do with one’s mouth, then blasts out another scale. “Good,” says the coach, dodging a mascara wand and a hot curling iron to play another note on his iPad keyboard. “Now, really whiny. Say: Gwah!”
“Gwa, gwa, gwa, gwa, GWAH,” Perry projects, extending her legs, crossing them at the ankles and resting her heels on the makeup table. As someone slips a pair of glittery tabi socks onto her feet, a blur of others poke at her and tug at her and dust her face with Super White theatrical powder.
“It takes a village!” she trills, and the crew laugh anxiously. Her geisha wig has yet to be secured to her head. Her pink kimono is draped on a hanger. In just twenty-five minutes, she’s supposed to go live.
It’s been six years since Katy Perry announced herself with “I Kissed a Girl,” which became her first hit single (and somehow made Chapstick sexy). Ever since, her immense popularity has stemmed largely from her ability to straddle that divide between Madonna (one of her idols) and girl next door. Far more wholesome than that twisted genius Lady Gaga, Perry still exudes vastly more heat and sensuality than, say, Taylor Swift. Part of that’s due to Perry’s top-heavy physicality, but her sly lyrics and full-throated delivery deserve credit, too. In her music, all of which she co-writes, she handily mixes innocence with lust. She wants to be your homecoming queen and made her mark singing about reading Seventeen and learning how to shave her legs. But she also yearns to melt your Popsicle and see your peacock, cock, cock. When you add in God—she was raised Pentecostal and once recorded on a Christian label—things get even more complicated.
Lay me down at your altar, baby, she sings in “Spiritual,” a bonus track, written with her sometime boyfriend John Mayer, off her latest album, Prism—which has sold 771,000 copies (and garnered two Grammy nominations) since it debuted in October. Your electric lips have gotten me speaking in tongues. Somehow, though, when she sings about sex, it doesn’t come off as raunchy so much as...uplifting. Positive. And downright good for you. No wonder she has more Twitter followers (48 million) than anyone on earth.
“Fifteen-minute warning!” Perry’s assistant manager, a petite woman named Ngoc (rhymes with “sock”), calls out.
The kimono is on now. So are the fake eyelashes. Angular and immense, they stand out against Perry’s now ghostly skin. She decided on the geisha act, she says, because she loves spectacle, and she loves Japan (she calls it “the capital of adorableness”), and she thinks the theme fits the song she’s about to sing, “Unconditionally,” which she wrote for Mayer the last time they broke up. (They’re together again now.)
“I was thinking about unconditional love, and I was thinking: Geishas are basically, like, the masters of loving unconditionally.” She’s so earnest, I don’t have the heart to point out that in the gamut of human interactions, the courtesan-patron relationship is, um, maybe the most conditional relationship there is? (Days later, when asked if she followed the mini furor that her performance ignited—some said it amounted to singing in blackface—she tells me she respects the debate but thinks her critics misunderstood. “All I was trying to do is just give a very beautiful performance about a place that I have so much love for and find so much beauty in, and that was exactly where I was coming from, with no other thought besides it.”)
The middle child of two traveling ministers, Perry moved around a lot as a kid and developed a canny intelligence that owes more to life living than book learning. By the time the family settled on the poor side of wealthy Santa Barbara, Perry—whose given name is Katheryn Hudson—was more focused on singing and growing up than on studying.
“I lay on my back one night and looked down at my feet, and I prayed to God. I said, ‘God, will you please let me have boobs so big that I can’t see my feet when I’m lying down?’ ” At age 11, “God answered my prayers,” she says, glancing south. “I had no clue they would fall into my armpits eventually.”
Contact Katy Perry
Website | MySpace | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest | iTunes | Spotify
Contact GQ Magazine
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Sources : Katy Perry Photo | Katy Perry Article
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