Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century: No. 25 — Katy Perry
With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. We’ve already done our Honorable Mentions, and now at No. 25, we remember the century in Katy Perry — whose dizzying, era-defining early-’10s peak still burns bright in the minds of pop fans, even as it gets farther away.
For anyone who lived through her commercial peak, Katy Perry will always be one of the names most synonymous with pop music. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but perhaps the biggest is that few performers of the last 25 years have felt as committed to maxing out top 40 superstardom at its biggest, brightest and best: When Katy Perry ruled the mainstream at the turn of the 2010s, it felt like she was wringing every ounce of potential from her albums, singles, videos, live performances, TV appearances, fashion and branding choices and general public persona. It was pop as the most legendary icons of early MTV once envisioned it – and perhaps unsurprisingly, it matched their success in ways no other artist this century has managed.
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Few would have imagined that fate for Katy Perry when she initially emerged – first briefly in the early ‘00s as Katy Hudson, contemporary Christian artist, and then rebranded as snotty Warped Tour singer-songwriter Katy Perry later in the decade. “Ur So Gay,” the metrosexual-taunting title track to her first Perry-era EP release, suggested great promise for word-of-mouth cult success, but seemed too cheeky, too edgy and too problematic for top 40 success. At the time, the mainstream had been dominated for years by hip-hop, Auto-Tune and post-American Idol pop-rock seriousness; there didn’t seem to be too much of an opening for the kind of technicolor, attitude-driven turbo-pop Perry was bringing to the table.
But whatever opening was there, Katy Perry’s next song was forceful enough to guarantee that it pushed its way through. The bicurious “I Kissed a Girl” arrived sounding and feeling like an absolute juggernaut, a barnstorming electro-rock singalong with writing credits from pop royalty Max Martin and Cathy Dennis and cutting-edge production from Martin’s long-time collaborator Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald and Luke’s protege Benny Blanco. Rather than softening Perry’s edges, the song just made them sharper: “Girl” was louder, brasher and even more divisive than “Gay,” drawing criticism both from moral-outrage conservative groups offended at the song’s homosexual flirtations and from LGBTQ critics annoyed by the song’s perceived queerbaiting.
Ultimately, the noise around “Girl” just ended up pumping up the volume of the song itself, which blazed its way to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 2008. By then, parent album One of the Boys had been released, with the major-label debut set entering the Billboard 200’s top 10 and spawning another three hit singles. Two of those were Hot 100 top 10s: the bubbly relationship eye-roller “Hot n Cold,” which was arguably both her rudest and most unstoppable pop-rock blast yet, and the widescreen morning-after anthem “Waking Up in Vegas,” a less-bratty but still delectably post-hedonistic story song. In between them was the more straightforward ballad “Thinking of You,” her first single that sounded like it could’ve been done by one of her then-top 40 peers; the song tapped out at No. 29 on the Hot 100, suggesting audiences preferred Katy Perry at her Katy Perriest.
That notion would be confirmed by Perry’s sophomore set, a one-woman home-run derby that ultimately made the tremendous success of her One of the Boys era look like a couple of practice swings. Teenage Dream was first trumpeted in May 2010 with the arrival of the irresistible “California Gurls,” a Jay-Z-and-Alicia-Keys-responding, Beach Boys-and-Big-Star-quoting love letter to the Golden Coast, blessed by no less an esteemed West Side representative than Snoop Dogg. The song was every bit as big and bursting as Perry’s One of the Boys singles – and with enough PG-13 content to keep it from getting too bubblegum – but without any of the sneering or snarkiness that punctuated those hits, ensuring nothing stood in the way of its summer dominance. Meanwhile, the song’s candyland fantasia of a music video made iconic images out of a dramatically wigged Perry laying nude on a cloud and shooting whipped cream cans from her breasts, ensuring she was just as unavoidable on MTV and YouTube as she was on the airwaves.
That song shot to No. 1 on the Hot 100 in June, and by the time of Teenage Dream’s August release, its follow-up – the album’s title track, an immediately immortal young-love anthem as daydreamy as “Love Story” and as fist-pumping as “Livin’ on a Prayer” – was also on its way there. Teenage Dream itself debuted atop the Billboard 200, and went on to blanket pop culture for the entire next year and a half, with a jaw-dropping three more Hot 100 No. 1 hits to follow: the inspirational electro-pop floor-filler “Firework,” the beat-heavy out-of-this-world love song “E.T.” (with a guest verse from Ye, then Kanye West, on the single edit) and another winking how-wasted-were-we remembrance in “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.).”
With the fifth No. 1 off Teenage Dream, the album famously made chart history, as just the second set (after Michael Jackson’s 1987 blockbuster Bad) to ever spawn five Hot 100 No. 1 hits. The achievement capped one of the most successful album rollouts in pop music history, with each single essentially becoming its own mini-universe, given its own sound, look, aesthetic and narrative different from the other four. It also showed Perry and her team to be at the forefront of finding ways to build excitement and consumption for late-cycle singles in the digital age; adding Ye to the single release of “E.T.” and Missy Elliott to the remix of “Last Friday Night” helped get those songs to No. 1 on the Hot 100 years before adding after-the-fact A-listers became standard practice for big pop singles.
And Perry’s ubiquity at the time went far beyond the Billboard record books: For about two years at the beginning of the decade, she was absolutely unavoidable throughout pop culture. She appeared in Proactiv commercials and on Sesame Street, she walked red carpets with star comedian Russell Brand (her then-husband) and sat next to fellow pop megastar Rihanna at award shows, she hosted SNL, she kissed a Smurf and she liked it. She traversed the globe on her kaleidoscopic California Dreams tour, racking up nearly $60 million in box office for just her second headlining trek, according to Billboard Boxscore. She racked up additional honors across the pop culture spectrum, from video of the year (for “Firework”) at the MTV Video Music Awards to most beautiful woman in the world on the Maxim Hot 100. And oh yeah, she also released a Complete Confection deluxe edition of Teenage Dream that spawned another No. 1 in the defiant shout-along “Part of Me” and nearly another still in the No. 2-peaking post-breakup ballad “Wide Awake.”
More than that, Katy Perry also helped define the sound and look of a particularly fertile and oft-romanticized period in pop music history. The early 2010s represented something of a golden age for pop enthusiasts, one defined by epochal stars like Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and even a resurgent Britney Spears, as well as massive radio hitmakers like Kesha, Pitbull, Flo Rida, LMFAO and the Black Eyed Peas. EDM, Young Money, Glee, Adele – it was all happening at once. And the most omnipresent, most dead-center star of the era was almost certainly Katy Perry. It was her turbo-charged pop and kitchen-sink visual aesthetic that set the tone for the era of massive pop songs and even bigger personalities, and her collaborators (Martin, Luke and Blanco, as well as “Firework” producers Stargate) who would create the default sonic palate for the top 40 of the time.
While Perry became more central to pop music in the early 2010s than anyone would have guessed possible of her years earlier, her time at top 40’s core would also be briefer than many would have predicted once she arrived. She spent one more album as a no-doubt superstar: 2013’s Prism, which topped the Billboard 200 and spawned a pair of massive, Hot 100-besting smashes in the motivational anthem “Roar” and the trappy, Juicy J-featuring seduction jam “Dark Horse.” (Both songs would make the setlist when she took a career-peak victory lap in February 2015, as she headlined halftime at Super Bowl XLIX, in what was at the time the most watched halftime show in Super Bowl history.) Despite being a big win overall, the album didn’t quite have the legs of Teenage Dream, and later singles “Birthday” and “This Is How We Do” would end up missing the top 10 altogether.
Subsequent albums fared no better. Witness became her third straight No. 1 LP upon its 2017 release, but its release was marred by an uncharacteristically messy and confusing rollout – as Perry tried to pivot to a more conscientious, “purposeful” approach to pop – and it only spawned a single top 40 hit, with the No. 4-peaking, Skip Marley-featuring lead single “Chained to the Rhythm.” That song, which was released in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win (after Perry had been one of pop’s most vocal and visible Hillary Clinton supporters), was indicative of the difficulty she had fitting into the back half of the 2010s – a pop scene more defined by light, swaying trop-pop and muddy, downtempo SoundCloud rap than the kind of frothy pop-rock missiles she’d made her name on. When 2020’s Smile became the first Katy Perry album not to produce a top 10 hit, it suggested that her time at popular music’s forefront had perhaps come to an end.
However, even as her presence in the pop mainstream became less overwhelming, Perry hardly ever vanished. She joined American Idol as a judge in 2018, helping the show remain a ratings draw for seven seasons. She began the highly successful Las Vegas residency Play in 2021, cementing herself as one of pop’s pre-eminent legacy performers. She also scored a number of hit collaborations, taking hook duties on superproducer Calvin Harris’ “Feels,” teaming up with reggaetón star Daddy Yankee on the bilingual banger “Con Calma” and enlisting EDM hitmaker Zedd to co-produce the Smile lead single “Never Really Over.” None of them quite reached the four-quadrant smash status that Perry routinely managed in the Obama years, but all were fairly well received – with “Over” in particular remaining something of a fan favorite and should’ve-been-bigger pet cause among diehard KatyKats.
`In 2024, Perry has parted ways with Idol and wrapped her Vegas residency, as she prepares for a big career comeback with September’s 143 album. That’s gotten off to a somewhat rocky start with lead single “Woman’s World,” which only reached No. 63 on the Hot 100 and drew mostly negative reviews – with many critiques from fans and critics focusing on the jarring nature of the women’s empowerment anthem being co-produced by Dr. Luke, who was sued by Kesha in 2014 over allegations that he had been abusive in their professional and personal relationship. (Dr. Luke denied the allegations and countersued for defamation; the long legal battle ended in 2023 with the two parties settling the countersuit out of court.)
But even if Katy Perry’s songs are no longer omnipresent in today’s pop, her fingerprints still are. You can feel her in the eye-popping costumes and theatrically vivid world-building of Chappell Roan and the sticky sweet and slightly naughty hooks of Sabrina Carpenter. And even the backlash to “Women’s World” is indicative of Perry’s enduring level of stardom – the song dominated headlines for a week, as folks couldn’t resist weighing in on it one way or the other – and the fact that so many fans are still rooting for her. At her apex, Katy Perry was as proud and formidable a pop purveyor as we’ve seen this century, and she will forever be associated with the highest highs of that fondly remembered era: a teenage dream that countless millennial and Gen Z pop fans will never totally wake up from.
Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here and check back on Thursday when our No. 24 artist is revealed!
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