Katy Perry

For approximately eight months after it’s release in 2008, unless you actually lived in a cave, it was physically impossible to escape Katy Perry’s breakthrough single “I Kissed a Girl”. My membership at the local gym coincided with these eight months. I’m not suggesting that I quit the gym because “I Kissed a Girl” was never off the radio that they played - I’m telling you that I quit the gym because “I Kissed a Girl” was never off the radio that they played. Seriously, that song was so overplayed even deaf people have heard it; this, alongside it being terrible, made “I Kissed a Girl” a candidate for the most irritating pop song of the 21st Century. I actually feel sorry for Katy Perry having to still play it live, but then I remember that she gets what she deserves. Well, what she deserves, plus loads of money.
Now, three (long) years of Katy Perry chart dominance later, if her latest single, “The One That Got Away”, reaches the top of the charts, she will break Michael Jackson’s record of 5 No.1 singles from a single album. To put that into context, that is the actual Michael Jackson - greatest pop artist of all time. Luckily, “The One That Got Away” is a turgid song: a depressingly mediocre and generic ballad, which alongside the nauseatingly melodramatic “Fireworks”, only serves to highlight how bad at singing Katy Perry actually is.
I hated the inescapable singles from her debut album, but in hindsight, they were infectious pop songs injected with a dose of humour from an artist who refreshingly didn’t seem to take herself too seriously. However, songs like “The One That Got Away”, “Fireworks”, and “Teenage Dream” are all depressingly sober affairs, all sounding like they could have been recorded by any of the current pop starlets. This actually makes me wish Perry would record new music more like “I Kissed a Girl” - at least that had personality, even if it was the personality of an irritating arsehole who feigns homosexuality for attention.