So remember last July, when Katy Perry graced the stage of the Democratic National Convention to give Hillary Clinton her pop princess seal of approval for her presidential campaign? Remember, if you haven’t already struck it from your memory, Katy sporting that horrific American-flag dress at a campaign rally in 2015, like some kind of patriotic pageant queen? Yes. We all remember.
This was our formal introduction to a new Katy Perry. The new Katy Perry, we learned, cares about social justice, engages in political discourse, and writes semi-empowering anthems with one-word verb titles like Roar, and Rise.
Flash forward to 2017, and Perry is diving even further into politics with “Chained to the Rhythm,” (hereon referred to as “Rhythm”) a song that appears to comment on society’s social inequities (and apparently, provide another excuse to make futuristic music video costumes).
Cue the music.
Regardless of my distaste for Perry’s fashion choices, I think her new single is well-written. Chained to the Rhythm is unlike anything Perry has done before, and not just because of the social commentary it attempts — lyrically and structurally it’s a departure from the sugary, feel-good, ‘sing something coy over a catchy beat’ formula she’s followed to a T for her entire music career. A lot can be said about what she may or may not be trying to say on this song, but I’m going to make the claim that Katy Perry has released a self-criticism of the popular media she has created and participated in for the last 7 years.
But before I get into that, let’s take a look at the song and what makes it so different from her other music.
The Rhythm of the Lyrics
Typically in songwriting, you want your lyrics to be sung as you would speak them, with the emphasis on parts of the words & sentences you would emphasize when reading them out loud. Many songs even utilize the melody of the song to further this emphasis, hitting these points of emphasis on the highest, or longest-sustained notes. This concept, called prosody, is actually a key part of what makes catchy pop hits so catchy. It’s a poetic & musical composition technique that heightens the emotional impact of a song by connecting the lyrics more naturally with music in a song. I’m going to use last year’s ubiquitous “Closer” by the Chainsmokers to demonstrate this:
Pull the sheets right off the corner of the mattress that we stole
From your roommate back in boulder, we ain’t ever getting’ older
If you sing along to the chorus, you’ll notice the emphasized syllables (marked by the bold text) match up perfectly with how one might normally read out the sentence. These syllables that are further emphasized by the melody which hits its highest notes at these points. The lyrics feel natural and the rhythm of the words flows with the melody of the song.
In “Rhythm,” however, Katy alters this standard emphasis of words. In the chorus, instead of being “chained to the rhythm,” with emphasis on the first syllable as you would normally pronounce the word, she’s “chained to the rhythm.” This off-beat emphasis feels jarring, and ties into the theme of the song.
The most obvious example of this is “distortion.” She bangs out the whole word in spondaic rhythm: every single syllable of the word is emphasized. Instead of distortion, as we would normally pronounce it, Katy sings dis-tor-tion in a jarring, rhythmic way.
Dance, dance, dance to the dis-tor-tion
The way she forces out words like this (wasted zo-ombie, to the rhythm, happily numb) is even more noticeable because of how sharply it contrasts from her previous work. Let’s look at one of her classics, Firework:
You just gotta ignite the light and let it shine,
Just own the night like the fourth of July.
The prosody in these lyrics is perfectly executed. These words roll off the tongue flawlessly (try reading them out loud normally). Even the melody of the song follows the emphasis of the words. Now try sounding out: “Dance, dance, dance, to the distortion.”
Few mainstream pop songs stray from standard use of emphasis in lyrics, but when they do it’s usually for a reason. Take Lady GaGa’s “Judas” from her Born This Way album. She ends each line in the verses of this song with this same forced lyrical emphasis to draw attention to the tension of the song.
I’ve learned love is like a brick you can
Build a house or sink a dead body
This reflects the tension of the song’s content in a very similar way to Perry’s “Rhythm.”
Narrative & Conflict
So what’s the tension in “Rhythm?” Let’s look at the story the song is telling.
Each verse starts with a question: “Are we crazy?” “Are we tone deaf?” and then launches into clichéd observations of the American dream, from white-picket fences, to utopian ideals, ending with the assertion that we’re too comfortable to see the world for what it really is. Perry is painting a picture for us and is placing us in it.
However, instead of criticizing the images she’s conjured up in the verses, Katy Perry leans into them in her chorus, encouraging us to put our “rose-colored glasses” back on and continue partying, despite the obvious problems.
This is what the tension in the song is built on: the cognitive dissonance of understanding fully that something is amiss but continuing to ignore it anyway. The chorus drives home the themes of repetition and being stuck in a prison of our own creation. The background synth of the song emphasizes this repetition as well, plodding along behind Perry’s voice.
The narrative works towards its climax in the bridge, sung by Skip Marley’s; this is the most pivotal part of the song, and really, Perry has done all the work to set up the context for Marley to hit home the moral of the story.
Instead of willfully ignoring the source of society’s problems as Katy does in the chorus, Skip directly attacks it “Up in your high place, liars, time is ticking for the empire.” He punctuates the climaxing tension of his verse with “they woke up the lions,” an unmissable reference to his own song (hold that thought, we’ll come back to this later). The bridge is the answer to and resolution of the tension of the song. It breaks away from the ‘chained’ rhythm of the music and ‘bubble’ setting that Katy Perry introduces in the beginning.
The song resolves with the repetitive background synth fading out to a chorus singing “we’re all chained to the rhythm.” This time, in a final separation from the jarring offbeat emphasis of the rest of the song, Perry correctly pronounces the word rhythm.
The music video for the song echoes the lyrical themes in its visuals. It shows a fictional theme park “Oblivia” where visitors walk stupefied through a cotton-candy-esque fairground, enjoying fair rides that reflect various social norms. Throughout the song, Katy toys with the push and pull of motion & rhythm, which I think is personified well in the contrasting images of the zombie-like fairground customers and Katy’s confused wandering.
The video makes some pretty overt references to works of socialist-commentary including George Orwell’s 1984 and Suzanne Collin’s Hunger Games series, and also heavily features this hamster symbol that was previewed in Katy’s lyric video for the song.
The overall message of the song is even more pointed in Katy’s 2017 Grammy’s performance, where she debuted the song. In this performance, Katy dances around a spinning house surrounded by a picket fence, leading up to the end of the song where the house & fence disintegrate and reassemble into an image of the US constitution.
I want to make it clear- I like all of this. The music video is a little cliché and overdone, but I think that’s kind of the point. The ‘hunger games,’ dystopian feel of the visual concept fits really well with the lyrics and music and I appreciate the song for what it is at face value.
So what should we take away from this?
Themes: something about the rhythm of social injustices perpetuated in American suburban culture, something about our willingness to turn a blind eye to obvious social inequities, something about being brainwashed into accepting an oppressive dystopian empirical political regime…? (taking it too far…?)
I’d like to take a moment to appreciate how different these themes are from the lead singles of each of her previous full-length releases:
I Kissed a Girl: Homosexual acts are ‘naughty’ and unbecoming of women
California Gurls: Promiscuity and an obsession over physical figure makes California women good sexual partners
Part of Me: Leaving your fiancé will empower you to be yourself
Roar: Leaving your fiancé will empower you to be yourself
Alright, so Katy has never played with sweeping themes of social injustice or political commentary before.
The message Katy wants you to take away from “Rhythm” is about being awake to the world’s social inequities. She’s discussed this in red-carpet interviews and radio talk-shows. “Chained to the Rhythm,” she says, is about starting conversations.
So let’s have a conversation.
Katy Perry as a Suburban Construct
Taking all the above at face value, it’s easy to to read this song as basic commentary on ‘escapism’ and our culture’s tendency to block out difficult social & political realities by creating our own fantasy worlds. This is what most media outlets are quoting as the theme for this song. But it’s only really the theme by extension of the fact that this song is, at it’s core, a critique of the American escapism that Katy Perry embodies.
I couldn’t put my finger on what made me so uncomfortable about this song at first, but it arrived when I thought a little more about the satirical imagery Katy Perry espouses in the music and visuals for this song. Whether she intended it to or not, this song isn’t just criticizing society at large for being chained to the rhythm, it’s pointing the finger at symbols of pop culture like Katy Perry herself.
But don’t take it from me- you want to see an escapist world of white picket fences, rose-colored glasses, pastel-colored fantasy parks, and ignorance of social inequities? Look no further than literally every single Katy Perry music video over the past 7 years. From Roar, to California Gurls, to This is How We Do, Katy Perry has thrived on feeding the fantasies of suburban, middle-class Americans for years, encouraging the toxic social norms that “Rhythm” decries.
In fact, the visual consistency of the tongue-in-cheek images in “Rhythm” and the very, serious & cringe-worthy images of past Katy Perry music videos is so goddamn uncanny, I can’t believe nobody is talking about this.
Katy Perry has set up “Chained to the Rhythm” as a statement about how traditional suburban American values are too blinded to reality. The references to white picket fences, theme parks, and comfortable bubble-living drive this point home. So, I guess, we should really look at how intensely suburban Katy Perry is.
Traditional suburban weddings (Hot ‘N Cold), high school parties in picture-perfect suburban neighborhoods (Last Friday Night), multiple episodes of sitting quietly in a suburban house reminiscing about former lovers (Thinking of You, The One That Got Away) — Katy Perry leaves and breathes the suburban ‘bubble.’ The majority of her music videos take place in a suburban setting. Hell, in “Wide Awake” we see young Katy in the depths of suburbia wearing a pink dress and skipping over to her pink bicycle. It really doesn’t get more suburban than that.
Her lyrics and imagery have never denounced or questioned inequitable social norms — in fact you could argue they’ve done the opposite. Objectification of women, traditional gender roles, subtle racism, and empowering people to feel happy with societal status quos are ideas Katy Perry’s previous work has suggested. On one of her lesser-known tracks, ‘Not Like the Movies,’ Katy wraps all of this up in a whimsical worldview, inviting her listeners join her in escaping reality’s harsh inequities in a desire for movie-like fantasy:
Just like the movies.
That’s how it will be.
Cinematic and dramatic with the perfect ending.
Not only does Perry’s discography portray a fantasy world nearly identical to the one she’s created in “Rhythm,” it also reflects her past inability to determine what are culturally appropriate references to make in her music. Remember that time she performed “Unconditionally” at the 2013 AMAs dressed as a Japanese geisha, conflating multiple distinct asian cultures’ visuals? Or that time she released a song “Ur So Gay” which hinged on insulting a lover for not being masculine enough- insinuating that the quality of a man is based on his adherence to social norms?
Katy may now be singing about Americans being blind to social injustices, but it could be said that she’s really built her career on producing music totally blind to these very injustices.
To drive this point home, I just have to point out that the cover art from two of her past albums has literally included satirical symbols (picket fences & cotton candy) that are used in “Chained to the Rhythm” to represent social or political injustices.
This all goes to say that reading “Chained to the Rhythm” as a basic criticism of escapist American culture and Americans trying to ignore the realities of our world is impossible without acknowledging Katy’s role in American culture. Art must be considered within its culture context of its creator — in this case our creator is the the poster-child for 2010s pop culture. So can we take a criticism of popular culture seriously when it comes from it’s very source?
Maybe there’s nobody else better to take it from.
Katy Perry is not the artist who shines on “Chained to the Rhythm.”
Take a look at this interview at the Grammy’s, where Katy struggles through a garbled explanation of what ‘Chained to the Rhythm’ is about. Now I don’t expect Perry to have an academic or detailed perspective on media or popular culture, but I will argue that her co-writers are perhaps being a little more pointed than she is.
I’ve argued that this song is very self-critical, but I haven’t yet discussed the minds other than Perry who were behind this song. “Rhythm” was co-written by a number of big names, but also by Skip Marley himself. This isn’t surprising at all when put the song in the context of Skip’s other work, which it’s about time we discuss.
Last December, Skip Marley released his single “Lions.” It’s a pop-reggae social justice anthem pointedly calling out conservative rhetoric used in the last presidential election.
The connection between “Lions” and “Chained to the Rhythm” is undeniable; Marley heavily influenced “Rhythm.” Its structure, content, and thematic elements mirror “Lions,” especially Marley’s part of the track. In the context of this song, Marley’s bridge on “Rhythm” is really just an extension of his own solo career.
Let’s revisit the bridge again:
It is my desire
Break down the walls to connect, inspire
Up in your high place, liars
Time is ticking for the empire
The truth they feed is feeble
As so many times before
They greed over the people
They stumbling and fumbling
And we’re about to riot
They woke up, they woke up the lions
This is the only part of the song that explicitly points to an ‘other’ group of people who are controlling social-political outcomes. If you remove this verse, the only specific antagonist Katy can point to a the vague concept of ‘the rhythm.’
Marley adds a focus to the song which drives home the point and makes it relevant to current events. He also places responsibility on the listener that Perry timidly avoids in her verses. Rather than just waking up from the hypnotic state the rhythm puts us in, Marley is asking us to participate in an effort to subvert the rhythm itself.
This is even expressed visually in the music video. Marley breaks the fourth wall by physically pointing at us, the audience, when he steps out of the television screen in the scene harkening back to the “minute of hate” in George Orwell’s 1984. He’s the only character in the video who isn’t under the dystopian spell and he represents resistance to the status quo. Even Katy’s character, while supposedly also resistant, just kind of wanders around the theme park taking it all in; she may be aware that something’s wrong, but until Marley literally beckons her to resist, she still follows everyone else reluctantly.
Now, obviously, I don’t know to what extent the lyrics of this song were a collaboration of everyone involved in the songwriting process. All I can say is that Marley’s verse is undeniably connected to his own solo work, evidenced by the fact that the climax of this whole song is an explicit reference to “Lions.” Marley’s presence on this track represents the only forward motion present of its aural and visual elements. Even the background synth and beat of the song are dull and repetitive in Katy’s verses, then change to an operatic, upward-moving chorus, increasing in volume and power during Marley’s bridge. The bridge is the part of the song that very literally unchains itself from the rhythm.
As I mentioned at the top of this review, this song is well-written. All of the elements I’ve delved into make it the jarring, thoughtful, break from pop boredom that it is. My criticism is really on the context in which Katy Perry has created this work.
The Future of Political Katy Perry
Katy Perry is serious about “Chained to the Rhythm.” She legitimately wants to start conversations about our nation’s political landscape. And she’s succeeded. Despite my criticism of her past work, it must be said that “Rhythm” is all the more poignant coming from Katy as opposed to another, less mainstream artist.
But we need to acknowledge that Katy Perry is more than just a person writing and singing songs for fun. She’s a popstar and a brand — a business, and a profitable one at that. Perry has worn and discarded many different hats depending on what both her and her management have determined will entice her target demographic to buy into that brand. She’s traded in identities before: after her angsty soft rock phase of 2008 aged, she switched to a sugary, dancey pop image more reflective of the new decade.
Chained to the Rhythm could be the reveal of a new hat for Katy Perry to wear — or it could be the birth of a more politically aware pop icon. Only time will tell, and until then, I will likely approach her new image with caution.
I’m edging dangerously close to a much larger discussion on what the role of a pop music artist IS in our society, but I think that’s an argument for another day. If Katy Perry wants to be respected as a social justice icon it’s just a reality that she’ll be working against an escapist and culturally ignorant brand she’s constructed for herself. She has quite a large box to break out of, and there’s nothing wrong with breaking out of it now. Perhaps “Rhythm” is an admirable start, but she’s still a long way off from having fully convinced me yet.
If this is the path Katy’s taking, she should remember what she told us in 2008:
Shut up and put your money where your mouth is
Get up and shake the glitter off your clothes now
That’s what you get for waking up in Vegas
