What should we make of Katy Perry and her Christian upbringing?
Katy Perry is the latest pop-star to become fodder for the gossip columns. Last month her husband Russell Brand announced that he was filing for divorce after just 14 months of marriage, on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. But there’s more to Perry than a short-lived marriage to the comedian that Britain loves to hate.
The artist formerly known as…
Perry shot to fame in 2008 with the controversial and infuriatingly catchy track ‘I Kissed a Girl’: ‘I kissed a girl just to try it […] / It felt so wrong, it felt so right’. The song was deliberately provocative, but was even more so for those who recognised the singer as Katy Hudson, an artist who had previously released an album of Christian gospel music.
Perry’s parents are charismatic evangelical ministers based at Life Christian Church in San Diego. It was their encouragement, along with an experience of church music, which gave Perry the conviction that God has called her to a career in the music industry. She released her first album when she was just 15 and it is full of earnest teenage prayers: ‘I’ll give you my heart, say I love you […] Jesus’; ‘Lord, help me see the reality / That all I'll ever need is you’. The sincere exploration of adolescent spirituality, couched in rhyming refrains, was founded on a seemingly unshakeable faith in a personal God:
In the midst of all my sin and temptations, he'll prevail
When I fall and he will pick me up, for time and time again my faith won't fail.
Do it all again
The album was not a commercial success and Perry began to find her home life limiting and claustrophobic. Her curiosity led her to pursue the secular culture which her parents had kept from her and to consider alternatives to her inherited belief system, changing her name along the way.
In 2007 she released ‘Ur So Gay’, which was featured on her 2008 album One of the Boys. It casually ridicules the new metro-sexual identity and was branded ‘catchphrase-homophobic’. Her interest in the supposed fluidity of human sexuality gave way to more attention-grabbing songs and it was ‘I Kissed a Girl’ that gave her the big break that she had been hoping for. Her father famously said: ‘When my daughter came out and sang that song, “I kissed a girl”, and I liked it, I said, “My ministry is over”’.
Her next album, Teenage Dreams (2010), secured her position as culture’s favourite good-girl-gone-bad. It is due for re-release in May thanks to the popularity of the title song, which makes reference to her flirty-and-dirty image:
I’m a get your heart racing
In my skin-tight jeans
Be your teenage dream tonight.
Glamorising a lifestyle of partying, drinking and casual liaisons, her songs are all-too-literal descriptions of the morning after the night before. In particular, ‘Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F)’ is a chance for her to revel in the guilt of her exploits, bemoaning the cyber-space reaction while laughing away the real-world consequences:
Always say we’re gonna stop
This Friday night
Do it all again.
Crazy stuff
Despite her playful persona, there are hints in Perry’s lyrics that she is still thinking about faith. In an interview with Vanity Fair, she described her current belief system as an open-minded approach that drifts towards a vague sense of the spiritual: ‘At this point, I’m just kind of a drifter. I’m open to possibility […] Every time I look up [into the sky], I know that I’m nothing and there’s something way beyond me’.1
Perry claims that she’s not moved beyond her Christian upbringing altogether, but she has certainly lost a notion of the exclusive nature of the Bible’s truth claims: ‘God is very much still a part of my life. But the way the details are told in the Bible — that’s very fuzzy for me. […] I still believe that Jesus is the son of God. But I also believe in extraterrestrials, and that there are people sent from God to be messengers, and all sorts of crazy stuff’.2
Her new approach may be more ‘accepting’, but her songs continue to reveal a deep-seated longing for the kind of certainty found in her first album. The glamorous mess of the rock and roll lifestyle may make for a successful aesthetic, but it doesn’t answer life’s big questions. And Perry is definitely still asking them in her recent albums:
Party favours on the floor […]
So many fair-weather friends […]
Have you ever been so lost
Known the way and still so lost?
My mother says I should come back home but
Can't find the way 'cause the way is gone
So if I pray, am I just sending words into outer space?3
Rachel Thorpe works as an events planner and freelance writer in Cambridge. More of her articles are available at http://www.rachelthorpe.com
Footnotes
1. Interview with Vanity Fair, May 2011
2. Interview with Rolling Stone, August 2010
3. ‘Lost’, from One of the Boys
