Katy Perry has never cared for subtlety. She wasn’t interested in it right from the beginning, when she arrived in mainstream pop with “I Kissed a Girl” and “Hot N Cold” in 2008 (following a failed 2005 country/gospel album released under the name Katy Hudson). On these singles, the American singer was brash and flirtatious, her breathy vocals setting hearts racing as she leaned into kitsch with a playful wink.
She followed this through on her second record, Teenage Dream, where, in the video for lead single “California Girls”, she wore a glossy lilac wig and ejected squirty cream from a sequin bra. Perry’s music – dance-inflected pop, with her church-trained vocals helming catchy choruses produced by industry titans including Max Martin and Dr Luke – was fun and fearless. Her cutesy, goofy aesthetic was, she said in an interview with Billboard magazine in 2015, “soft-serve sexiness”.
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