The Future Is Funky: A History of Afrofuturism in Music

KATY PERRY’S IN DEFENSE OF: FUTURE

Designer: Jenny Chen ( Business Administration and Design ) Katy Perry strolled into the 2010s with the world in her hands. One of the most prolific and popular artists of the 21st century, her inspiringly escapist, bubble-gum pop anthems dominated the charts. Perry’s career-defining album, 2010’s Teenage Dream, landed her five separate U.S. number one records, making her only the second artist in history to do so. Billboard aptly named the record “one of the defining LPs from a new golden age in mega-pop.” Her followup effort, Prism also burst onto the charts at number one, leading her to headline a world tour and an explosive, critically acclaimed performance at the Super Bowl XLIX halftime show.

Though stars tend to fall hard from grace, few have seen such a shift in public favor as Perry. As the decade wraps up, her light has faded almost completely from sight, struggling to break the top 50 of Billboard’s Hot 100, even with the lead singles of her recent effort, Smile. When did America decide that Katy Perry was no longer the pop superstar? And does Smile dignify a place for Perry in an industry and genre that banks on the near-constant reinvention of its brightest stars?

There was no one moment where the public turned away from Perry; rather, it was a series of small choices that led to a hard-toexplain, widespread distaste for the artist and persona she was attempting to embody. Much of the blame for Perry’s disappointing downfall is rightfully placed on Witness (2016), a record expounded by a disappointing array of tired pop tropes and a failed effort at redefining a waning star. In an attempt to popularize what Perry deemed as “purposeful pop,” she turned towards politically tinged music that tried to make a statement without taking any risky stances. This backfired. Big-name sponsors pulled endorsements while conservatives battered her for coming out in full support of Hillary Clinton, which included releasing an uninspired political anthem for the campaign. “Rise” was her first stand-alone release in years to underperform. Liberal circles were no more generous to this artist with a personal history of tone-deaf missteps, including appropriating braids in the “This Is How We Do” music video, donning a Geisha costume at the AMAs, and fetishizing queerness as a career stepping stone in “Kissed A Girl.” In exchange for music that was simultaneously far too real to be fun and far too uninspired to be catchy, Perry’s Barbie Girl persona perished at the heightened scrutiny and pressure that her newfound political aspirations, wellintentioned as they were, brought upon her own shortcomings as an artist and self-appointed activist.

There’s also an expectation for women in pop to have to constantly reinvent themselves to earn our attention. As fellow pop powerhouse Taylor Swift noted, “female artists have to reinvent themselves 20 times more than these men who do the same shit.” The Witness era epitomizes this pressure. With a new edgy haircut (albeit one that was unfairly lambasted across social media platforms) and a more adult, revenge-tinted aesthetic, Perry tried to keep it fresh, but failed to win the stingy public’s approval. She emerged defeated in a media-crafted, “catfight” feud with Swift, contributing to her decay in popularity. Despite her own real missteps, Perry’s career has been damaged by unfair expectations of women in the industry to stay young, interesting, loud in the right ways and quiet even more. After a failed reinvention that left Perry less prolific and popular than she had been in over a decade, it was uncertain if Perry’s most recent project, Smile, could be a triumphant comeback or another step down into the mausoleum of fallen stars. However, the reality was… more mixed. Coming at probably the wrong time to an audience not really interested in joyful, Hallmark lyrics, Smile’s collection of everyday, inspiration-porn anthems, soaked in nice but generally uncreative platitudes, represented a more mature, self-aware return to form for the original pop supernova. While the album exemplifies hit-or-miss, Perry proved she still has it by asking less of her audience. We don’t have to rise up in revolution or fight her battles for her, but rather sit and lose ourselves in positive messaging and conventionally enjoyable dance pop.

Picking through some of the more formulaic mush, multiple songs on Smile stand out in a way that no Perry effort has since 2013. “Daisies,” an endearingly simple, mid-tempo anthem, allows her voice to shine through on an ascendant yet tastefully mellow chorus. “Harleys in Hawaii” melts together breezy summer days with a sensual guitar riff and a vibey, laidback beat, representing a dreamy return to Perry’s escapist roots. In the pointedly dramatic “Not The End Of The World,” surprising cynicism and impressively high vocals are capped by a creative, bouncing interpolation of Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.” Above all, “Never Really Over,” the album opener, lead single, and clear peak of the record, illustrates a promising way forward for Perry’s artistry: thoughtfully and adeptly distilling complex feelings of love into a catchy, magnetic, warm, and laudable display of electropop fare. It was one of her best singles in a decade and charts a course for the future (and a possible return) of Perry’s artistry.

It’s hard to know if Perry will ever be able to grab the ears and hearts of America like she once did during her Teenage Dream reign. However, with an audience too quick to toss out worthy stars for the next hot thing and a web of entertainment industry journalists focused on curating clicks over meaningful discourse, it’s worth asking if we were too quick to send Perry’s career out to pasture. Smile proves that not only does Perry have more to say, more inspiration to spread, and more escapism to design, but that there is absolutely still a place for her big-production, maximalist anthems to rival current dance pop icons in the scene. If she keeps moving in this right direction, Katy Perry deserves a chance to move on from her flop era.

• Jacob Kemp (Political Science)

When J-Pop Met Heavy Metal

Heavy metal, as a genre, has long been characterized by high-octane

instrumentation, apocalyptic aesthetics, and good ol’ Christian pearl clutching. The countercultural antithesis to the prim and polished juggernauts of Adult Contemporary radio, heavy metal lies within a particularly anarchic corner of alternative, tucked somewhere between the mainstream and the fringe. In a genre defined by jaw gnashing caricatures of hypermasculinity, one of heavy metal’s brightest stars over the past decade has undoubtedly been one of its least expected.

In 2010, Kobametal, a Japanese record producer, approached Sukuza Nakamoto of Sakura Gakuin, a Japanese idol girl group with a particularly disconcerting fixation on schoolchildren. Sukuza, who was given the name “Su-metal” as the lead vocalist of the group, was accompanied by Yui Mizuno (“Yui-metal”) and Moa Kikuchi (“Moa-metal”) to carve out a niche fusion of heavy metal instrumentation with J-idol culture in the creation of BABYMETAL. Their campy visual attire sees to the marriage of gothic Lolita aesthetics with the effervescent twinkle of Japanese idol worship. In live performances backed by militaristic strobe lights, distorted depictions of the Virgin Mary, and session musicians donned in skeleton robes, who are lovingly referred to as the Kami Band, the trio performed intricately choreographed dance routines while flashing heart signs at the audience. With Su-metal at center stage and Yui and Moa-metal at her sides for added flourish, BABYMETAL builds into the storied experiences of J-idol girl groups with heavy metal iconography, creating immersive performances that are only complemented by their high-budget gimmick.

Yet in all its kitschy glamor, BABYMETAL never approximates inauthenticity. Instead, it reaches into the aesthetic fusions of Shibuya-kei to meld the mainstream vitality of Japanese idols with the distinctly alternative subcultures of heavy metal that vehemently oppose this consumerism. In this, BABYMETAL is able to burrow into a niche, widely accepted as “kawaii metal,” which somehow commands the same intensity of its source material without sacrificing its integrity or relying on artifice. However gaudy the performance of BABYMETAL as an entity may be, it never feels uninspired or superimposed by corporate prospects. Having sold out some of the largest international festivals in the genre while performing alongside established legendary acts such as Metallica and Slayer, BABYMETAL was legitimately embraced by the industry, and their fanbase has been dedicated ever since. They became the first Asian act to top the Billboard Top Rock Albums Chart, as well as the first Japanese act to break into the Top 40 in nearly 50 years. “Gimme Chocolate!!” from Metal Resistance was a hyper-viral sensation globally which amassed hundreds of millions of streams and attracted the attention of mainstream audiences overseas. If success could be quantified by an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—which for all intents and purposes, it should not be— BABYMETAL’s bubblegum horror camp had made it to worldwide recognition within a few years of their debut.

But BABYMETAL is, in a way, larger than the sum of its members or its commercial success, gaining a sort of notoriety and influence that outpaces any of the individuals behind it. In this, it directly contradicts idol culture where fanbase allegiances and social followings can be split among the parts of the whole. Though Su-metal is their primary vocalist, as BABYMETAL sees it, their creation is founded in the divine inspiration of a Fox God who brought them together and uses them as a vessel. Refusing to categorize themselves into genres or conventional labels, the overarching destiny of BABYMETAL is to perform and spread their message of music to the masses across the globe, which allows BABYMETAL to become a singular unit, one of resistance against a status quo enshrined in the static. Through choreography and visual aesthetics, they are able to communicate to their audiences with a defined purpose. And it all may be a gimmick, but it is a resonant one that has branched well beyond the initial seed of Sakura Gakuin and gone on to capture the hearts and minds of millions.

And in this divine destiny, BABYMETAL’s roots have breached into Western pop stardom, rapidly taking hold of and becoming enmeshed into digitized movements in contemporary pop music. Where BABYMETAL’s records storied messages of anti-bullying and body image issues among young women, Western artists harnessed the angst of kawaii metal to express their frustrations against indoctrinated systems of gender, capitalism, and artificial humanity. “Play Destroy” by Poppy featuring Grimes highlights the juxtaposition between thrashing heavy metal guitar instrumentation and melodic confectionary pop that BABYMETAL is known for. Relying on this approximation of kawaii metal, Poppy and Grimes reiterate the distinction between the femininity that informs BABYMETAL and the inherent masculinity of the heavy metal genre, only to bulldoze through the conventions of artifice that uphold these boundaries. Poppy further expanded upon this project in her 2020 record, I Disagree, which fused elements of kawaii metal with the surging popularity of nu-metal to create a destabilized, nihilistic soundscape. It’s a far stretch from the Japanese schoolgirl idolatry from which BABYMETAL formed, which is only a testament to the breadth and influence that the girls had on the genre, as a whole.

Fusing the sickly saccharine of J-pop with the cathartic embrace of heavy metal, BABYMETAL forged a new path forward that refused to find a welcoming middle ground between its disparate influences. Kawaii metal teetered between the uncomfortable and the comfortable with precision, carving out stability from stagnant depictions of femininity and masculinity where the fluidity between the two had frozen over. And with audiences across the globe still ogling at their foundation on the polar ends of this spectrum, BABYMETAL had created a disquiet in the long-held conventions of the genre, and their impact upon this space has only echoed louder and stronger with time.

• Neeloy Bose (Bioengineering) Designer: Syd Tomasello (Graphic Design)