Little Miss Sun Shine

You either hate her music in spades or love it to pieces. You either think her voice soars righteously or that it’s the by-product of an Auto-Tune perfect-pitch machine. You either feel like you have to denounce her as a corporate stooge or sing her praises as a total original. You’re either tickled and/or turned on by the way she dresses, all retro, va-va-voom, burlesquelike, with happy, smiling cupcakes on top, or you’re like those cleavage-despising PTA moms who got her duet with Elmo banned from Sesame Street. It’s one of the things about Perry. Almost everything she does, or says, or wears, or doesn’t wear, calls for extreme reaction. She’s polarising, in a way that does her record sales good and allows her to say stuff like, “Whenever people ask me about having bad reviews, I’m like, ”˜Have you seen the run I’ve had? Have you seen the numbers? Numbers do not lie!’” which could lead critics to wonder if she knows the difference between quality and quantity. It never stops. Someone leaks her celebrity contract rider, in which it is written that chauffeurs shall not make eye contact with or request autographs from the artist, which causes great, snorting disapproval, like Perry personally had anything to do with it, which she didn’t. It’s endless. When all she wants to do is play her music.

“Since the age of nine,” she says between rehearsals one day, “all I’ve wanted to do is share my perspective and hopefully help people through my music, whether it just makes someone smile or a song becomes someone’s mantra for life or a motto or whatever. I want to make music that’s fun and has feeling and emotion to it. Like if I’m going to make a dance song, something like ”˜Firework,’ I want it to have purpose, so that you’re dancing with purpose, so it’s not so materialistic and void-feeling and leaves you inspired rather than feeling kind of empty. I’m not a dummy. I know ”˜California Gurls’ isn’t going to save the world. But I got a lot of heart from my upbringing, and I put a lot of heart in my songs.”

Sounds pretty goopy. But go have a look at some of her early videos, when she was still a pigtail-wearing blonde and full of earnest, wide-eyed, questioning curiosity, or even the later ones, after she’d dyed her hair black and was struggling to make it in LA, looking kind of like Chrissie Hynde as she played her acoustic guitar in half-empty nightclubs where the patrons just wished she’d pipe down so they could talk. She’s just so determined. And she’s never appeared to be anything but sincere, even if at times that sincerity didn’t get her heard the way she wanted to be heard, which would only come later, when she learned how to pump up all kinds of volumes to way past 10. And so you tend to believe her when she says, “I get emotional onstage. I cry onstage sometimes. I cry when I’m singing the songs I’m singing, because they’re so”¦ ”˜Pearl’ is such an honest song for me. People think it’s about a third person, but it’s really about me” ”“ the song tells of being held back by a relationship and then finding release ”“ “and to put those emotions out there sometimes makes you really vulnerable.”

She stops talking and sits in silence. Apparently she’s full of raw feelings like that. It’d be so easy to make fun of them, of course, to just roll your eyes and snort, but the decent thing to do is just let her be.

By now, three years into it, Perry is known for many things. She’s known for having grown up in Santa Barbara, California, the middle child of God-fearing travelling evangelical ministers, who tried their damnedest to shelter her from the secular world by saying no to co-ed parties, no to pop-culture magazines, movies and TV shows, no to Lucky Charms cereal, if only because “lucky” sounds too much like “Lucifer.”

She’s known for going to Nashville at the age of 14, to make it as a Christian recording artist, getting a record contract but not succeeding, moving to Los Angeles, getting two more record contracts, not succeeding two more times, going out to bars and dancing, tossing up her skirt to reveal what’s underneath whenever the impulse struck her (“I am a wild one, that’s for sure. I don’t give a fuck”), being signed to Capitol, worrying that four strikes and she would definitely be out, standing under a shower being pelted with water while some probably-less-than-divine inspiration allowed the line “I kissed a girl and I liked it” to filter into her consciousness and be recognised for its potential as surefire hit-song material.

She’s known for her love of cats, especially her precious Kitty Purry, as well as for her love of cute. “I see everything in colour. When I see road construction and they have those little things on the road, I see them as candy canes. I try and find the cute in all things in life.”

More recently, she’s known for her marriage to lunatic Russell Brand. Publicly, that means being hounded by the paparazzi and having to go to places hidden in the back of laundry trucks. Privately, it means waking up to Brand taking her picture in full-on morning face and tweeting it to the world.

But what she’s mostly known for, at least on a par with her music, are her spectacular breasts, which she has used to equally spectacular advantage at every opportunity, tassels dangling from their bouncing barely covered tips, whipped cream erupting from them in great, weird, mommy-milky orgasmic spurts. They get all kinds of attention, not all of it good. There was the Sesame Street fiasco. More recently, it was the New York Post printing part of her mother’s proposal for an autobiography, quoting her mother as saying, “No mother wants to see the top of her daughter’s boobs,” like there would be something unusual in that. No matter. Her daughter will do with them as she pleases.

And yet Perry and her breasts have not always been on such happy terms. “I started praying for them when I was, like, 11,” she says, “and God answered that prayer above and beyond, by, like, 100 times, until I was like, ”˜Please, stop, God. I can’t see my feet anymore. Please stop!’ I was a lot more rectangular then. I didn’t understand my body. Someone in sixth grade called me ”˜over-the-shoulder boulder holder.’ I didn’t know I could use them. So, what I did was, I started taping them down. How long did I tape them down for? Probably until I was about 19. And, no, I don’t have any psychological pain because of it.” Why should she? Once unbound, she put them to good use, and such problems as breasts can solve, they solved, working a crazy kind of irresistible lucky-charms magic on all who came under their influence.