Katy Perry Did Katy Perry Proud at the Super Bowl
She beamed majestic confidence, a pose that cleverly masked her lack of discernible expertise
Katy Perry is the superlative pop star for our time. She’s not particularly great at anything—she’s not even a prescient tastemaker—but she’s been exceptionally shrewd over her meteoric rise through the pop apparatus at portraying the image of greatness. Of course it helps that she’s got mad hits.
This is why Perry turned out to be the perfect choice to perform at the 2015 Super Bowl Halftime Show. She mowed through six of her titanium smashes — which themselves belong equally to her foolproof team of producers and songwriters as they do her — without doing much to speak of, besides being an excellent Katy Perry: Katy Perry dancing clumsy-on-purpose along with some cheeky stuffed animals, Katy Perry gliding across University of Phoenix Stadium in a giant “The More You Know” star, Katy Perry riding regal atop a giant silver tiger in an outfit that honors the sartorial influence of Guy Fieri.
Indeed creating the image of Katy Perry is something, perhaps the only tangible thing, that Katy Perry does with aplomb. Perry primarily used her Super Bowl showcase to beam majestic confidence, an attitude deserving of the biggest stage in contemporary popular music, and a pose that cleverly masks her lack of discernible expertise. But what Perry knows perhaps better than any other hitmaker today is that’s how we roll in the social media generation: The appearance of unassailable merit is far more valuable than actual merit itself. On those terms, Katy Perry did Katy Perry proud on Super Bowl night.
On the flipside, Perry’s primary surprise guest, one who has no obvious connection to her save a throughway remix appearance a couple years back, served as a perfect foil to her karaoke potency. Missy Elliott, who Perry brought out for a three song mini-set in the middle of her own, is all technical prowess. She’s a dizzying rapper, a fluid singer and a primary architect behind both her own hits and, indeed, numerous sounds and aesthetic elements that continue to define our current pop landscape. Missy is perhaps the undervalued Prince-like figure of her generation.
And in standing with those traits, unlike Perry’s hits which sound very much of the 20-teens, the ten and fifteen-year-old songs Missy performed at halftime still sound like the pop music of the future. “Get Ur Freak On,” the 2001 hit she rendered flawlessly on the Super Bowl stage with Perry playing hype-woman, is still the greatest pop single of the 21st century, at least in this writer’s opinion.
The upshot of the performances at Super Bowl XLIX halftime? While Perry’s music got a sizable 85% bump on Spotify, her featured act, Ms. Elliott, has seen her streams multiply a Timbaland-sized 676%. So in retrospect, maybe Katy Perry’s greatest halftime feat, even greater than introducing the world to Left Shark, was exposing her young audience to Elliott’s music. Many of Perry’s fans likely think “Work It” is the hottest new jawn of 2015. And that’s just great. The fact that the fans are biting, as these stats seem to suggest, means that perhaps KatyCats are hungry for a little Missy meat to balance out Perry’s signature serving of carbs.
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