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The Pop Stars Who Flamed Out

Katy Perry’s 143 joins the cursed ranks of musical missteps this year.

Perry’s downplaying reservations about Luke in favor of reheated Ghost in the Shell and all-ages rave aesthetics feels par for the course in the year of the Beyoncé corpo-lingo email interview, the Ariana Grande divorce-album rollout that didn’t really cover divorce, and the Camila Cabello album that featured Playboi Carti after his domestic-violence charges and kept quiet about sampling The-Dream the same month he was accused of sex trafficking. 143 has gotten the memo that people perk up at the signifiers of ’90s and ’00s dance music — this year, Camila’s C,XOXO sampled Pitbull’s “Hotel Room Service,” Justin Timberlake and Cirkut put a French touch jam on Everything I Thought It Was, Ariana Grande dutifully spritzed house and disco singles into eternal sunshine, and Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism bet the farm on mid-tempo post-disco — but missed the lesson that Renaissance ’s “Cozy” communicated: songs about relaxation can smack. Perry’s labelmate Doechii is a ray of hope in a song otherwise leaning into the pop star’s stiff hip-hop affectations and a heaping slice of Crystal Waters’s “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless).” “Lifetimes” spends most of its three minutes buzzing back over a soaring chorus after a short verse, but nothing in the mix is jarring enough to set it apart from the thousand other spikier versions of this kind of thing.

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