Taki's Mag

Katy Perry

A good woman is hard to find, especially if you’re a rigger. That’s my job, though—I climb high steel in arenas and rig tons upon tons of concert equipment. The more vacuous the music, the more dazzling the doodads. Over the last few months, Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and Lady Gaga came through town with over a hundred tons of gear to hang combined.

I generally steer clear of the performances, but not always. So there I was, my eyes peeled open like Alex from A Clockwork Orange, stifling the urge to puke while suppressing an erection as gaggles of plastic booty shook across the stage.

The girls in the crowd get younger and younger every year, and I have to wonder what effect these cyborg-sexy entertainers have on their little Silly Putty brains. Is teen pop just skillfully marketed boogie-woogie or cynical instruction on how to be a whore?

Katy Perry made musical history last month as the first woman—and only the second artist since Michael Jackson—to have five #1 singles from the same album on Billboard’s Hot 100. Nothing embodies our culture’s progress like a race-morphing alleged pedophile passing the artistic torch to a hot brunette in a Brownie Scout uniform.

Onstage, Katy Perry maintains this cartoonish, wide-eyed gaze that says, “Oh my, I’ve never done this before!”, but I’m dubious. Her innocent persona didn’t impress record execs in 2001 when she debuted in Nashville’s Christian pop scene as Katy Hudson, so she quickly changed course and moved to LA. As with so many of us, strict Christian morality was stifling for Katy’s pubescent libido—her parents were evangelical ministers who wouldn’t even let their daughter say “deviled eggs.” Perry told Cosmopolitan that she broke away from her religion when she decided that sex could not wait until marriage. “I was like, I don’t know if I can hold that promise because this guy at camp is really cute.” The cult of entertainment doesn’t demand those limitations.

Today, Katy Perry is married to former sex addict Russell Brand and dances around a Candyland gameboard dressed like Bettie Page shooting whipped cream out of her tits. Millions of little girls love her, filling arenas to max capacity. Some of them even got up onstage the other night to sing along:

Last Friday night
We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a ménage à trois

Ke$ha takes the art of cherry pop to whole new levels. This glitter-smeared 24-year-old star began cutting through the nation’s birth canal when she appeared in Katy Perry’s video for “I Kissed a Girl” and sang backup on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton singles. Her most recent album, Animal, has sold over two million copies—which is astounding in the age of piracy.

Ke$ha’s stage presence is somewhere between Punky Brewster and Tron. The show’s theme was all about fun, fun, fun: drinking, dancing, and doing the nasty. Her audience was relatively small for a platinum-selling star but totally enthralled—mostly teenaged rave twinkies, flamboyant gays, and quite a few little girls with their parents in tow.

What were those parents thinking the other night when Ke$ha brought a goofy guy out of the audience, wrapped him up in cellophane, and sat on his lap during “Grow a Pair”? How did they explain the dude who moments later came out dressed in a wobbly penis costume and bounced his fleshy balls on the hapless fan’s face? Would the children in the audience impress their classmates the next morning with stories about last night’s show? Certainly, the lucky little kids who danced next to Mr. Cock-and-Balls during the grand finale are now the envy of their peers. I guess giant dildos are the new teddy bear.

Then there’s Lady Gaga. This androgynous android used Oprah’s ovaries as speed bags this year when she rocketed to #1 on Forbes’s Celebrity 100 and #11 Most Powerful Woman with $110 million in earnings, 43 million Facebook fans, and 13 million Twitter followers. She is a fame monster.

Despite her voracious hetero propensities, Gaga’s live performance is gayer than an Athenian bath house. She may look like a tranny with a very convincing ass, but she’s an opportunistic LGBT wannabe—a “wezbo,” if you will—crusading to make the world safe for gayness: condemning hate crimes, supporting gays in the military, and laying down catchy dance tunes so queer, they would have turned Freddie Mercury straight. Gaga’s synthpop is as infectious as her vagina must surely be. As I type this, her voice continues to loop somewhere in my hippocampus: “Pa-pa-pa-poker face, pa-pa-poker face….” I’m willing to try trepanation to make it stop!

Like any good harem, these ladies all have one man in common: Jesus Christ. But the Risen Lord is like the ultimate hard-to-get alpha who overplays his hand. Katy Perry left Christ to marry at a Hindu altar. Ke$ha just keeps him around her neck for good luck, along with a piece of her mother’s placenta for psychic powers.

Lady Gaga remains obsessed with Jesus. In her video for “Alejandro,” Gaga wears a rubber nun’s habit and swallows a rosary, then simulates a gangbang with an upside-down cross emblazoned on her crotch. In “Judas,” she plays Mary Magdalene, who pleasures her Latino biker Jesus before his glorification. “I feel like honestly that God sent me those lyrics and that melody…there’s no way for something that pure to be wrong,” she told NME.

During her show, Lady Gaga writhed on the ego ramp, shrieking up at Jesus, asking him if he would forgive everything. Then she moaned something that really struck me: “Tonight, my religion is you [the audience]!” It seemed like the feeling was mutual.

This shtick doesn’t shock me. I did everything in my power to burn through my innocence as a youngster. What surprises me today is how deviance has become so mainstream. Drunk sluts and fag hags were once the mysterious denizens of society’s underbelly. Since the 60s’ sexual revolution, they have become the canonized heroines of the modern world, from Janis Joplin to Madonna. Hedonistic art is a barometer of underlying social decay.

It is impossible to say how deep an international celebrity’s influence goes. The kids obviously try to dress like their superstars, they try to sing and dance like them, and despite national statistics that show teen promiscuity diminishing slightly since the early 90s, plenty of them try to get freaky like they think their idols do. Jesus may forgive them, but Facebook never forgets.

I get paid whether the show is an evangelical revival or a live sex act, so I shouldn’t care either way. Millions of imprudent parents allow their daughters to flirt with whoredom—let them. “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”

Innocence is precious. That’s why marketing agencies sell it to concert promoters at such a phenomenal price. Knowing that most potential life mates gauge a woman’s long-term value by her relative chastity, I’ll do my best to make sure that my nieces—or perhaps one day, my daughters—remain outsiders to fads that glamorize becoming a dartboard for sperm. What more can I do? Organize a moral boycott against jerking off to Katy Perry?