How Katy Perry Failed And Charli XCX Won From Reading The Room

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One of the most widely-held misconceptions held by those who don’t sit in poorly lit rooms making decisions about album rollouts is that a team of experts plots out diabolical strategies, and a democratic consensus makes decisions on album rollouts, video concepts, and psyops that get artists to ascend to new heights of fame. Some assume a record label's incompetence fails it. Those same people often assume Illuminati-like geniuses plot out their fav’s career. In reality, anyone with a brain who has sat through these meetings knows that there is often a mix of competent and incompetent people smashing ideas into one another, and the artist often makes the final decision.

But more often than not, it’s the artist's instincts that make or break an era of their career. Never has there been a more striking contrast to illustrate this during a singular timeline than Charli xcx’s brat rollout vs. Katy Perry’s 143 rake-face of a rollout. Let’s examine how these two artists' lifestyles and instincts affected the vastly different outcomes of these album releases.

Who The Fuck Are You? The Flop?

Before we get started, I don’t really have time to suffer anyone who denies that Perry’s 143 is a bomb of epic proportions. Not one of the songs is in her 10 most popular on Spotify two weeks later. Meanwhile, four months later, Charli has nothing but her recent record in her Top 10 (I wrote this days before the release of the remix record). Charli is the rare case of an artist late in their career elevating themselves into another echelon of fame.

The two offer an interesting contrast in that both have released their seventh record (I know some people who contest this is Charli’s seventh record, but between Number 1 Angel/Pop2/XCX World, I have very little space for this technicality). It is not debatable that 143 failed to relaunch Katy into superstardom, and brat is the best-case scenario for an album release’s success. 

The Kernel of Truth

One of the things the Nusic community (a term Eli Enis coined for the masses debating music in a fact-free world of cluelessness on how music works) of people who type fan-fiction-level fantasies about the way the pop music sausage is made will blame the record company for sabotaging a career. But anyone who has been in these rooms that make decisions for artists that go sour knows that the situation is usually caused by a team that has been brow-beaten by years of out-of-touch ideas by an artist who is no longer tethered to any experience their fans would have due to living a lifestyle far away from the one their fans live. One of the many things Nusic Twitter gets wrong is that the artist is often the creative force and the veto vote, and when their instincts have become clouded by the clouds that cover the ground in the view from their ivory tower, they make very, very, very out-of-touch decisions. And this goes for the decisions both in the studio and in marketing. Eight years ago, when I wrote this in my last book, Processing Creativity, I wrote it celebrating Perry’s amazing album Teenage Dream and the creativity that went into it, but it reads much differently in 2024.

The kernel of truth is often that an anchor or a north star guides the artist through a portion of the creative process. However, as Ms. McKee states above, it needs to come from a truth in the artist's life. This is a problem when your truth begins to come from the perspective of an out-of-touch entrepreneur investing in soap companies with labels as long as novels. Charli’s reality has been notably documented as going out and partying with the people. Even the imagery of her Boiler Room set showed this, as she was surrounded by the cool kids who like her music. brat is widely praised as her reading from her diary as a party girl growing up struggling with the choice between whether to do another key bump or have a baby. This keeps you much closer to the room your audience is in, allowing you to read the room.

Pre-Empire / Post-Empire

Back in 2017, author Brett Easton Ellis penned a seminal article for The Daily Beast (which, full disclosure, publishes one of my podcasts on politics) that has aged flawlessly. In it, he described the era of celebrity where “the team” was the voice on social media posts as an “Empire” era, and after Charlie Sheen tears the concept of the facade to shreds, we enter a post-empire era where honesty and vulnerability reign as celebrities of the highest order now show a warts-and-all look at who they are to keep the audience captivated.

Take a look through Katy Perry’s posts. They all feel workshopped by “the team” till they are milquetoast. And sadly, the few that don’t feel like that reflect some of the worst instincts possible (as seen below :/). On the flip side, Charli tweeting within hours of VP Harris being handed the torch of the Democratic nomination for president that “Kamala is a brat” not only pierced the music world’s discussion on up to cable news, but it was also bold and authentic. The raw bravery and honesty to shoot from the hip screams the currency audiences crave in a post-empire world, which rewarded her with a raised level of notoriety rarely achieved from an off-the-cuff tweet.

The Girlz & The Gayz

One of the under-discussed realities of breaking a record in many of the corners of music is that the Internet’s cattiest, loudest jury can sway public discourse with the brush of a few nasty Threads, Skeets, or Tweets. If they convict you of the crime of cringe, your sentence is the death of your album. Katy undeniably received that sentence. I, of course, speak of what has become known as The Girls & The Gayz, the most online people who render judgment and will attack anyone who disagrees. Most in Perry’s shoes would fear this body and see appealing to them as the key to their comeback success, but when you aren’t in the rooms you want to appeal to, you can’t read them.

One of the subjects The Girlz & The Gayz have passionately taken up is the #freekesha movement, and they would most like to collect the scalp of Dr. Luke to atone for his wrongs to Kesha, so much so that TG&TG came for a cultural queen of their scene, Kim Petras, for refusing to abandon Luke as her longtime producer. When Petras released Slutpop, the audience was infuriated that she hadn’t abandoned him, and with each subsequent release, the chorus grows louder, and this discourse bestows shade on all who defend her. While Petras’s record Slutpop has proven to be her most enduring and beloved record (especially by TG&TG), and gay bars in my neighborhood will have Petras-themed dance nights, the discourse damns her and wildly shames her whenever she releases another record, and few would contend it hasn’t discouraged her growth in fans. Frankly, anyone half paying attention can see that if Petras could just find someone else to deliver songs as good as her current output with Luke, the embrace of her output would be explosive.

This brings us back to Katy, who did not see the warning of this and suffered countless humiliations. When trying to stage a comeback and appeal to TG&TG, to work with their public enemy number one and not expect them to do the lightest detective work to uncover this producer credit when these people are engaging in magical overthinking all day long was foolish at best, and she paid quite the price for it. Every day, the discourse seemed to be a competition for who could dunk on her most creatively.

When you have been an out-of-touch elitist for years, the kernel of truth becomes… well cringe… It’s tone-deaf to what the people who make or break your aspirations find appealing. You aren’t winning the favor of The Girlz & The Gayz when you are celebrating the richest man on Earth who is constantly saying trans people are something we should correct in our society, cozying up to white supremacists and supporting a candidate for president who has plans to trample their rights. Also, who could forget her illegally sharing a photo of her voting for the pro-cop candidate in LA during the peak of BLM? One might say she was trying to piss off the very people who’d determine her success.

Charli lives in a world much closer to her audience. She is there with TG&TG doing the podcasts they host, standing next to them in pictures out clubbing. It’s way easier to read the room when surrounded by the people who influence how it is interpreted.

Artistic Instincts

It is easy to argue that few album covers have generated more of a conversation than brat, and in a world where conversations are what ascend artists and particularly the discussions around the contradictions (more on that in a future newsletter), brat achieved the ultimate level of discourse. But as I have argued throughout this, this came from Charli’s own instincts. Here’s a portion of her interview with Zane Lowe that occurred right before her co-headliner at MSG in late October.

On the other hand, when Katy is releasing flop after flop, she thinks imitating this moment from Charli is a good instinct. In a world where 8% of Gen Z fans consider themselves professional fans (critics are not far away) and 62% creators, you are not endearing yourself to the loudest voice in the discourse with this sentiment. When Charli herself did this, she was in an era in her career that was not meeting expectations, so it showed questionable judgment to imitate.

I’m Your Favorite Reference

Contrary to delusional belief, artists are more often than not the ones shaping the outcomes of their releases in terms of both artistic choices in music and marketing. To lay blame elsewhere is pure cope embraced by those who have often never even walked within a block of where these decisions are made. Artists have their hands on the brush painting their output, whether it is marketing or vocal inflections, and they should be responsible for their decisions. The public only wants to see their most authentic work in a post-empire world.