RetroPop: Jolting “Wide Awake” With Katy Perry, Maya Angelou, and Sylvia Plath

hmmm. OK. I want to go with you here, I really do, but I just can't. Admittedly, I'm no Katy Perry expert; I've heard this song exactly two times- once when I clicked on the link here, and then again when I realized that the song was so disinteresting to me, that I had actually zoned out about mid-way through, and stopped listening to the lyrics at all. I do, however, know a thing or two about Sylvia Plath, and have a reasonable working knowledge of Angelou's work as well. This mash-up is problematic for me, not because of the "audacity" of linking these artists together, but in the flatness of the Katy Perry selection-there simply isn't much there to work with in the Katy Perry piece in terms of depth, complexity or nuancing. There's just not enough there to tease out or extrapolate much, if anything, about the narrative mindset or the authorial voice. Granted, there is significantly more information that we can glean from the imagery presented in the video (I'll deal with that later)- but without the backstory of Perry's very public failed relationship with Russell Brand, her lyrical images are so generic as to be almost meaningless. In the absence of her persona, both the poetry of Perry's lyrics and the imagery of her video are nothing more than a series of generic, trite, machinations that have been employed with greater impact by more adept artists, to much greater effect (the video for Tori Amos' "Hey Jupiter" comes most immediately to mind as a more effective application of the "inner child as savior" trope, just as a single, obvious example)... What Perry has done here, has been done before, and with much more emotional immediacy and raw depth. In short, I'm just not buying what Perry is selling. What makes both "Still I rise" and "Lady Lazarus" so much more compelling, is the ability of the authors to pull out the freakishness of their own singular experiences, until they become so exaggerated as to become transcendental- ironically, a parlor trick that Perry, with her campy persona and explosively orgasmic projection of constructed-femininity-as-commodity, has proven time and again to be particularly gifted at. Perry trades in exaggerated expressions. It's how she gets the butter on her bread. Perhaps the problem here, is that Perry is actually trying too hard to (simply) be honest. It's almost as though, outside of artifice, she just can't contact her own creativity, and the fruits of her honesty end up feeling inauthentic. We can actually see pieces of this idea in the video itself, in which Perry sits down in front of a make-up mirror (on a sound-stage set like, well, a sound-stage) in order to remove an obviously fake pink wig, at which point she contemplates herself; as a performer, Perry is simultaneously aware of us an audience, contemplating her, and her performance as the Artist contemplating Her Genuine Self.
I know, Meta, right!?! By the end of the video, we have seen Perry (presumably) confront and conquer her "false suitor" with the help of her inner child... the expected narrative would show a stronger, self-actualized Perry preparing to go out on stage as Herself, having risen above the need for gimmicks... but AHA what we get instead, is a shot of the supposedly "resolved" Perry, again at her makeup mirror, but this time she is in a new wig, one which is made to appear more life-like, but at closer inspection is as fake and contrived a construction as the earlier pink wig. In this wig, Perry's true self has simply gone deeper, it's truly incognito- even the disguise is wearing a disguise- in this case the "disguise" being employed is an attempt to appear "genuine." Even as Perry goes out onstage to "perform" as herself, we know this is a performance about performance. While this is an important and profound (albeit, possibly unintentional) commentary on celebrity and the self, it serves only to push the truth of Perry's experience deeper, removing it from the possibility of being a productive part of her art.
This is in stark contrast to both "Lady Lazarus" and "Still I Rise," which on some levels are about willfully constructing an alternate identity in order to protect the self and acknowledging, even embracing, that construction as a means for safe but explosively meaningful expression. The power of Plath's piece lies in the authenticity of her ineffable sorrow, and the palpability of her rage. Even if we don't know about Sylvia's oven, the poem can do nothing but be absolutely honest about the author's inability to resist the repetition of her own self-destructive behavior. It does not equivocate, unlike Perry's piece, it does not pretend to be moving on, even as it reaches for the razor blade. "Lady Lazarus" IS the razor blade, and the waiting wrist. Likewise, Angelou presents the reader with a kind of jubilant phoenix, eager to reclaim the self in the wake of its own disparagement. Both voices eagerly await a kind of cathartic destruction as an opportunity for self-reinvention- which is exactly what Perry seems to be backing away from or denying. Perry's narrative voice is no avenging phoenix, waiting to rise from its own ashes and exact vengeance; Perry's narrative voice just wants you to look at her pretty pictures, so it can burrow deep inside of its own security blanket, sucking its thumb and watching reruns of Alias for new costume ideas. There's just no real WORK going on here, there's no action, there's no crisis, there's no change. Perry's narrative voice might just as well be talking to us about a trip to the grocery store to buy kumquats and lollipops- which is totes fun to hear about, but not, you know, life changing.
This is not a teardown of Perry- please don't get the impression that I live in a cave, and spend my time gazing at my navel, contemplating feminist poetry (I mean, I DO, but, you know, I do other stuff, too....) I think Perry has a real talent for pushing on the barriers between the personal and the public, and even for pulling the grotesque out of her subconscious and into her own personal limelight for everyone to see and poke at. I think we've seen her tweeze at her own pain like Plath in "Lady Lazarus," and I think we've seen her re-assemble her broken girl parts into a more meaningful and self-actualized whole as Angelou does in "Still I Rise," and hell, the woman can write a catchy tune- I just don't think she's doing any of those things here.