#but it's over now! and it's been marked so it's not like i'm plagiarising myself lol

[at-thezenith]

dissertation story !

given that this monstrosity was the reason i couldn't work on any original work basically all of last year, i figured that i might as well share part of my dissertation here! it's about a professor who has been given a research grant to write a story, but he is searching for something wholly original (i.e. actually never been done before, which as we all know is impossible). in the process he goes through literary history trying to find the last original idea, and goes...a little crazy. here's the first part! i'd love to know what people think of it :)

The well was utterly dry. Nowadays, the Professor could not stand walking by a bookshop, watching smiling drones try to sell empty books to empty heads. The displays were fly traps designed to lure in poor hapless insects starving for something that looked new.

Instead of walking amongst the drooling troglodytes, the Professor spent his time in his study. Often he would find himself lost for days in the ocean of words, leaving clothes to crisp under the iron, food to burn in the oven. Endless shelves encircled the room in a wooden ring. There was not a sum of money in the world that could part him from his beloved books. Of course, he hadn’t read them all; some were in languages even he couldn’t understand, but he was confident that no-one since the Alexandrian guardians possessed such amounts of knowledge. In his earlier teaching years the room had brought him comfort, when he would read a particularly bright student’s work and panic, eyes darting around for the information that they knew, that he had missed. But he would read the rest of their bungled papers and glance up, the millennia of knowledge smiling down on him.

His own works were not in the study. He never read the published versions, incinerating every copy sent to him. If he read them, he ran the risk of copying himself, and then where would he be?

Washed up, unoriginal. Boring.

The last novel was now ten years old. The Professor’s levity when entering his study had been replaced by a cold shiver, the windows flashing in the daylight like a taunt. The door had remained locked for the past week as he worked up the courage to smell the once-hypnotic scent of old books, run his fingers over the smooth wooden shelves. What madness had possessed him to try again?

The research grant had been too tempting to ignore. Its golden promise distracted him from the red-printed envelopes that piled up at his door. The words ‘FINAL NOTICE�� were stamped onto his retina, and only when he had cut the telephone cord in half did he stop hearing ringing at all hours of the day and night. He had thrown himself into his work, upending his study and brain for any new project, idea, thread of inspiration. He trawled through every myth, legend, epic, ballad, play, novel, poem, fairy-tale, parable, coming up blank every time. Everything he read copied something else, a formula stretched thinner than a hair. He read in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, Mandarin, Ancient Greek, Latin, even Esperanto when he got desperate. Nothing. Zilch. Zero.

For a week he wandered about his house in a fugue state, discussing his ideas with a bust of Homer as if it were a skull just to imagine another human voice. His work had once satisfied him enough, his soul a smithy, his passions the uncreated masterpieces. To let them be compared to others? Impossible.

And yet, think of the works he had already let loose in the world, directionless without their father. He had allowed opinions to taint him, let them crawl into his skull like maggots, feeding on his brain. Had they succeeded?

He thought of the novels he had written. Drama. Done to death! Crime fiction. One in a thousand million! You could swim in a sea of stoic, suited men frowning over a woman’s corpse.

When he first thought of an idea, its beginnings scratching the back of his mind, he was unsure if it was the first sign of madness or a genuine eureka. He looked back at Homer, along with his other busts of great writers. There was a reason there wasn’t a single modern author in their midst. Who now could audaciously claim that they were equal to the likes of Plato, Callimachus, even—he chuckled drily—Lucian of Samosata? Was he committing the same blasphemy?

But why then did the papers laud him so, endless letters spat through his door singing his praises. One review had called him the modern–day Bard, that didn’t come from nowhere. So maybe it wasn’t arrogant to write something original. He had received the grant money; the Committee thought he was more than capable.

The busts gleamed in the dim glow of his lamps, the only ones he allowed in his study. They were his only audience, sternly reminding him of what he had to live up to.

Well, there was no better time to start than now. Yesterday would have been better—he remembered the teetering piles of red envelopes—but today was just as good.

He wrote by hand; typewriters were slow, beastly things, and computers were not permitted in the study. Once, a colleague had tried to bring his laptop in, and it took three weeks before the Professor could enter the room again. Visitors were promptly banned. He would only write on sheafs of specially-ordered paper. This did make up a good chunk of his expenses, but he disregarded it. Mathematics did not belong in his hallowed hall.

Writing on this paper was a privilege bestowed upon one pen. Black, sleek, engraved silver tip. It had serviced the men in his family for well-nigh a century. These men had left grooves in the sides, dulling the black to soft charcoal grey. No-one had ever set the pen to a manuscript, using it for business deeds, contracts, and the like.

All of that was gone. The accounts had been picked clean: by his dead mother, by his distant siblings, and by him, financing his novels when publishers refused to accept his work. No matter: his work sold well enough to keep himself afloat, and he still had the pen: the weight of three generations in his hand, his grandfather’s initials scratched delicately into the side.

The Professor sat at his desk, pulling some paper towards him. It was mid-morning, sunlight streaming through the windows.

He put pen to paper, and started to write.

At first, the pen flowed elegantly across the paper, happily spilling its inky entrails as the Professor scribbled, stopped, crumpled, scribbled again, tore, scribbled, and eventually sat back, frowning at the midnight-blue words. There was something so…empty in the swirling letters. Saying nothing, taking up valuable space. The beginning words were not hooks but lazy hollers. What was wrong? In the past, he would scribble down prose like it would vanish from his head if he wasn’t careful. Now the words were wisps of smoke, and he was armed with just a net.

He grunted, picking up his pen. Net or not, he would get this down.

The papers began to fly over his shoulder as he scribbled and scratched out words, smudging the ink across the paper. His desk resembled a snowdrift, the flakes crinkling as he wrote. He tried aiming for his bin, but most papers were tossed without direction. One flew with such force that it hit a lampshade, spinning around and sending crazy shadows across the walls. The Professor barely paid attention, scrawling out his latest opening line.

In a hole in the ground there lived…

“Fucking Tolkien!”

He crushed the page in his fist. Around his feet were repetitions, reinventions, lesser copies of famous first lines.

Call me Samuel.

It was a queer, humid spring, when they killed—

There is a fact universally known that a single man—

Distinguished and rotund, Biff Murray came down from the landing—

It was love at first sight.

He couldn’t stand it. He was half-tempted to call up his publishers, to manually examine every single letter for piracy.

And how would he know if he had copied? He had not even read every book in his library. And all the works lost to time, what about those? He supposed only the long-dead authors would know those first lines, but it was the principle of it.

He sighed, looking around the room. The shelves regarded him pityingly but expectantly. They leaned towards him, eager. If they had mouths they would be speaking to him. Perhaps the best time to start reading all his books was now.

Reading them meant he could find something no-one else had written. Something no-one had even considered. He would work his way back through time, starting from the last great novel released, find the last original idea. None of this modern nonsense. Its rude and useless language might corrupt his thoughts.

[lunapaper]

The year was 2010. Emo was just starting to die out (long live the scene). I was studying to become a secondary school teacher, and Katy Perry was shooting whipped cream out of her boobs...

Second albums, more often than not, fail to live up to the hype. And yet, Teenage Dream has somehow endured.

While Perry’s 2008 debut, One of the Boys, launched her into the mainstream, it really hasn’t aged all that well. On tracks like ‘Self Inflicted’ and ‘Fingerprints,’ she tries way too hard to emulate Paramore’s bold pop punk. On others, she attempts to rebel against her gospel roots by turning the bawdiness up to 10.

It can also come off pretty juvenile at times. The singer was almost 25 when she sang on the title track: ‘So over the summer, something changed/I started reading Seventeen and shaving my legs/And I studied Lolita religiously/And I walked right in to school and caught you staring at me.’

But let’s be honest: Even though it’s been declared ~problematic~, you still jam out to ‘I Kissed A Girl’ when you hear it, don’t you? I hadn’t listened to ‘Ur So Gay’ before this, either, but its slinky, jazz-infused vibe absolutely slaps.

Like Teenage Dream is also a product of its time, presenting pop at its most sugary, hook-laden and bombastic. It managed to spawn 5 No.1 singles, the second album in history to do so after Michael Jackson’s Bad, as well as a documentary, Part of Me. There’s even a deluxe edition, cleverly titled The Complete Confection. It was Perry at her peak.

You know the title track, of course. Evoking images of cherry red lipstick, tight denim and driving down an empty highway in summer, Perry desperately clings to the memory of young love, breathlessly pleading ‘don’t ever look back, don’t ever look back.’

‘The One That Got Away,’ meanwhile, is its bittersweet sequel, Perry's lovesick nostalgia now tinged with regret. Yet, the only thing I really remember about the song is the video starring Cassian Andor himself, Diego Luna, as Perry’s past love, the beautifully dishevelled and tortured artist of my dreams (Dear God, that penetrating stare...) He’s also the only reason why anyone bothered to watch Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, if it wasn’t already obvious.

First single ‘California Gurls,’ on the other hand, is pure pop exuberance at its most campy and carefree, indicative of a more innocent time when it wasn’t driven by algorithms or social media. ‘Firework’ is still a go-to empowerment anthem for just about every kind of montage imaginable. ‘ET’ (featuring a pre-’presidential’ Kanye) is heavily-synthesised cyber pop that doesn’t get nearly enough love.

But Teenage Dream, in retrospect, has quite a few misses. ‘Peacock’ is just one big, long, glitchy dick joke. ‘Not Like The Movies’ is big ballad schmaltz. The brassy soft rock of ‘Hummingbird Heartbeat,’ meanwhile, opens with a hell of a line: ‘You make me feel like I'm losing my virginity/The first time, every time when you're touching me.’ And I’m pretty sure ‘What Am I Living For?’ is partly plagiarised from Justin Timberlake’s ‘My Love.’ Even Pitchfork awarded Teenage Dream a rather tame 6.8 in their recent retrospective review.

By the time Perry released Prism in 2013 – her ‘darker, moodier’ record - she had shifted further into ‘inspirational anthems.’ There was the inescapable mega-hit ‘Roar,’ the saccharine power ballad ‘Unconditionally’ and the Eastern-tinged ‘Legendary Lovers,’ complete with wellness and spiritual motifs.

But it wasn’t without its bangers: ‘Dark Horse’ (featuring Juicy J) jumped onto the trap pop bandwagon just in time with its subterranean bass and eerie, otherworldly synths. Even the slick, 90s-indebted ‘This Is How We Do’ has a certain charm.

Prism also marked the point where Perry’s invincibility began to wear off. Where the masses once lapped up her candy-coated antics, they were now calling her out for wearing braids in the video for ‘This Is How We Do’ and dressing up as a geisha during a performance at the American Music Awards.

And they would only get louder during her era of ‘purposeful pop.’ Released in the aftermath of the 2016 US election, Witness was meant to cement Perry as ‘Artist. Activist. Conscious’ - as her Twitter bio read at the time. She had joined Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. On Instagram, she was quoting the likes of Socrates and Plato. She was Woke now, and she was telling anyone who’d listen.

Yet you’d be hard pressed to find much trace of this ‘purposeful pop’ on Witness, bar the first single, ‘Chained to the Rhythm.’ Written with Sia and Max Martin, the singer implores listeners to ‘put your rose-coloured glasses on and party on’ amid whirling, colourful synths.

The rest of the record, however, is made up of either soppy, overly sentimental ballads (‘Save As Draft,’ ‘Pendulum,’ ‘Into Me You See’), awkward lyrical turns and CHVRCHES/Purity Ring knock-offs (‘Hey Hey Hey,’ ‘Roulette,’ ‘Deja Vu’).

Funnily enough, Purity Ring’s Corin Roddick produced some of Witness’ better tracks: ‘Mind Maze’ and the soaring ballad ‘Miss You More, along with ‘Bigger Than Me.’

Final track ‘Act My Age,’ meanwhile, feels like a pre-emptive strike against the criticism Witness would inevitably receive (‘They say that I might lose my Midas touch/They also say I may become irrelevant/But who the fuck are they anyway?’).

Then there’s the godawful ‘Bon Appetit’ (featuring Migos) with its food-related double entendres. It was ‘Yummy’ before ‘Yummy’ existed. Seriously, I just wanna see Orlando Bloom say he likes this song with a straight face...

But I will still defend ‘Swish Swish’ to the death. Do the lyrics suck? Yeah, but Perry’s never been the strongest lyricist. But its pulsing 90s house beat does a lot of the heavy lifting, along with Nicki Minaj’s spitfire verse.

The promotional rollout for Witness, meanwhile, proved just as messy. Among the most infamous was a 72-hour livestream, where voyeurs got to witness Perry sleep, meditate, do yoga and welcome a random assortment of guests, including Gordon Ramsey and activist DeRay McKesson. Then there was the meme-laden video for ‘Swish Swish. She literally served herself up on a platter in the clip for ‘Bon Appetit.’ She tried reigniting her feud with Taylor Swift on James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke. Needless to say, it reeked of desperation.

Looking back, though, you can’t help but feel a little bad for Perry, trying so hard to please only for it to blow up spectacularly in her face. So devastated, it sent her to the Hoffman Institute, which offers an abridged version of therapy. As she later told the Guardian:

‘I think the universe was like, ‘OK, all right, let’s have some humble pie here […] My negative thoughts were not great. They didn’t want to plan for a future. I also felt like I could control it by saying, ‘I’ll have the last word if I hurt myself or do something stupid and I’ll show you’ — but really, who was I showing?’

But although Witness lacked the perkiness of Teenage Dream or the cartoonish charm of One of the Boys, it shines best on its darker moments.

‘Dance With The Devil’ has the kind of smoky allure that wouldn’t look too out of place on a BANKS album, while ‘Power’ is a revelation. Produced by Jack Garrett, what could’ve been yet another dull empowerment ballad is turned into a gritty, groaning slab of vaporwave pop, with sultry sax riffs that sample, of all things, Smokey Robinson’s ‘Being With You.’ It’s electric as fuck. You believe it when Perry sings: ‘’Cause I'm a goddess and you know it/Some respect, you better show it/I'm done with you siphoning my power.’

If the singer had just done away with the whole ‘purposeful pop’ concept and stuck with Garrett, Roddick and Terror Jr’s Felix Snow as her core producing group, Witness probably wouldn’t have been half the failure it was. It could’ve had a chance to grow on people, the kind of slow burn Perry could’ve gotten away with at this point in her career. The cyberpop dystopian feel also could’ve gone hand in hand with her newfound wokeness, echoing people’s fear and anger in the aftermath of Trump’s win. But alas, we’ll never know...

While the rollout for Witness over the top, Smile’s was lacklustre and wildly inconsistent.

First single ‘Never Really Over’ came out a whole 15 months before the release of Smile to little fanfare, along with a hippie-inspired video to match. ‘Harleys in Hawaii’ later followed, which also stuck with the flower power aesthetic. Other singles - ‘Daisies’ and the title track – seemingly came and went without a trace.

So how did Katy Perry get to this point? And is there any chance of coming back?

It’s hard to say. A lot of artists go through a rough patch or two:   Miley's twerking antics divided audiences when she released 2013’s Bangerz. Taylor Swift’s reputation divided audiences. Only in recent years has Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP been vindicated. Such is the nature of music and pop culture in general. It’s fickle, just one vicious cycle after another; an endless quest for trend-bait that'll never end.

Right now, disco pop is going through a renaissance, while hyperpop reigns supreme. Dua Lip and Charli XCX are basically untouchable at the moment. TikTok has taken over from Top 40 radio when it comes to breaking hits, while the gap between album releases has also grown shorter and shorter. Even the nature of fandom has changed, shifting from old-school elitism to the bloodsport that is ‘stanning,’ along with an unhealthy amount of ‘endless simping’ (to quote a close friend of mine).

Perry, meanwhile, has failed to keep up, choosing to play it safe in order to avoid further scrutiny. But in doing so, she strips away the humour, the mischief and other idiosyncrasies that fans fell in love with in the first place.

But what choice did she have? As Junkee’s Sam Murphy notes in his own piece about Perry’s rise and fall:

‘At that point, you have two choices as a popstar — hunt for relevancy or make what comes naturally to you. Perry chose the former and came unstuck. She inserted vague wokeness into her songs as cancel culture infiltrated pop, tacked on rap features as hip-hop became the dominant commercial genre, and worked with producers who may have been able to find her credibility.’

(Full disclosure: I started writing my piece on Perry back in December 2020, so the timing of Murphy’s piece and mine is purely coincidental).

Even if you don’t believe in cancel culture, no one actually wants to be cancelled. It’s just not good for PR, especially for someone with an image as glossy and as carefully put-together as Perry’s. Even now, she continues to atone for Witness, telling the LA Times: ‘Having more awareness and consciousness, I no longer can just be a blissful, ignorant idealist who sings about love and relationships […] Even my travels have afforded me a new perspective on cultures, class systems and the inequality around the world, not just in the United States,’ though she carefully avoids the subject of politics on Smile.

But redemption is possible. Swift – Perry's one-time nemesis - was a total pariah back in 2016, mocked for her Girl Squad, for diddling the Hiddles while on the rebound from Calvin Harris and criticised for remaining coy on her political leanings. Now she’s earning indie cred with two of 2020’s biggest albums, folklore and evermore, and has thrown her support behind a number of social causes.

The devil works hard, but Swift’s PR team work harder. I might not be her biggest fan, but Taylor works Kris Jenner levels of mastery when it comes to rebuilding public sentiment. Thanks to her newfound indie cred, you’ve almost forgotten about the pastel atrocity ‘Me!,’ her 2019 duet with that insufferable drama kid cliché, Brendon Urie. Shifting her songs away from petty grievances to more original storytelling was also a smart move.

But while Swift has managed to move on, Perry seems to have fallen into the same adult contemporary trap as Gwen Stefani, Kelly Clarkson, Christina Aguilera and Pink, one that ensnares many female artists over 30 (Though many have also managed to escape – Gaga, Taylor, Beyonce, Rihanna, Kesha, Robyn...)

As ‘woke’ as the industry and fans at large might think themselves to be, they’re still pretty ageist. There's still an expectation to ‘mature’ your sound as you age, to become more ‘serious.’ No more fun, no more experimenting, boomer. But when you do end up filing away the edges, you’re called dull, generic and past your prime. Perry said as much on the aforementioned ‘Act My Age. You just. can't. win.

And yet, many female artists over 30 have created some of their best work yet in just the past year or so: Hayley Williams made the dramatic shift from pop rock to low-key, Radiohead-inspired tunes on her solo debut, Petals For Armor. Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters was hailed by critics as her most bold, urgent and visceral. Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? was a cut of understated disco pop elegance. Carly Rae Jepsen, meanwhile, released an equally stellar companion to 2019’s Dedicated.

At this point in her career, Perry could afford to follow a similar path to that of the Canadian singer. Once the meme value of ‘Call Me Maybe’ wore off, along with her mainstream appeal, Jepsen finally had a chance to discover real creative freedom, pushing her sound to greater heights and earning critical acclaim, all without having to compromise her love for catchy hooks and bold synth pop arrangements.

A couple of years ago, a Reddit user made a post about participating in a focus group held by Perry’s label to discuss why she’s ‘no longer one of the[ir] most notable female pop artists,’ and ‘what can [they] do with her image or marketing to make you care about her again?’

It’s depressing to think that an artist as accomplished as her needs a focus group to help solve her identity crisis. There really is no easy answer. Hopefully, Perry will be able to return more vibrant and assured than ever, on her own terms...

-Bianca B.