Katy Perry is in love with the ex-Prime Minister of Canada. The paparazzi have had them gazing at each other in Montreal, embracing semi-nude on the roof of a yacht on the California coast, and strolling hand-in-hand out of Paris cabaret club Crazy Horse. “[Justin Trudeau] is crazy about her and thinks she is the perfect woman,” a “source” told American gossip website Page Six last week. Videos have emerged of him at one of her recent shows, mouthing the lyrics to “Firework”; for Halloween, he dressed up as Left Shark, the notoriously ill-coordinated backup dancer from her 2015 Superbowl halftime show.
Internet users are enchanted but confused. “Were Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry hot and then cold, and are they now hot again?” asked Toronto Life magazine. Right-wingers on X are posting AI-generated images of Perry attending to Trudeau as he undergoes a prenatal scan. “It’s like Orlando Bloom was holding her back and Justin Trudeau set her free,” said an avowed fan.
This might be Katy Perry’s worst career move. She was one of the biggest culture-vultures of 2010s pop. Now she is doomed. Music video directors will always borrow from Teutonic S&M, Japanese anime, the French New Wave and Hollywood noir. But there is no G7 state with less cultural character than Canada. It has always been at a disadvantage by way of its linguistic and geographic proximity to America, whose mechanised film and music industries dwarf anything its neighbour’s sparser population can come up with. Drake and Carly Rae Jepsen are proud pop exports, but nothing distinguishes their music and visual language from anything coming out of Los Angeles.
The Canadian premiership suffers by association. A strong culture industry can turn momentary political scandals into pervading images that assume a place in the larger historical narrative. The Americans have John F Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, who are linked in popular conspiracy and also in death; the images are everywhere because they help us make sense of the cultural and political shift from the 1950s to the 1960s. Any quotation will say something serious about history, even if the statement is made inadvertently. Both Madonna and Taylor Swift have attempted to marry into the Kennedy family; Lana Del Rey once opened a music video by aping Monroe’s flirtatious White House performance of “Happy Birthday, Mr President.”
Canadian politics has its own glamour and scandal: Pierre Trudeau’s wife Margaret caused uproar after being photographed in Studio 54 in 1979, just as voters were kicking her husband out of office. If Trudeau were an American First Lady, this would be a universal cultural reference: wayward celebrities would ape it in magazine editorials and music videos. But no machine is running in the background to fictionalise Canada’s political history, or to link it to larger cultural shifts, from which the country remains persistently absent. In the larger scheme of things, Perry’s Trudeau association will mean nothing.
The association barely means anything now. Trudeau is handsome and charismatic, but he is politically watery. During his premiership, he worked on high-visibility progressive policies – the legalisation of marijuana, reconciliation schemes for Canadian indigenous groups – while largely ignoring huge rises in the cost of living. In his final years of power, he upset both the left and right by wavering on Israel and Palestine. He was finally shafted from office this January after his deputy resigned, citing the Prime Minister’s reluctance to counter Trump’s tariffs on Canadian imports.
This middle-of-the-road approach may please sections of the political establishment; the pretence of politics is that you’re working in the public interest, ready to rejig your approach and even step down if the nation calls for it. The same attitude will never work in pop music. If you want to dominate the airwaves you’ve got to be a Trumpian despot, happy to impose your life story and aesthetic vision on the unwilling masses. Public loathing is just another obstacle on your hero’s journey.
Over the past decade, Katy Perry has faced more than her fair share of loathing. It built up during the release of Swish Swish in 2017, when she had an unfashionable pixie cut and populated her video with stars from the now-defunct Vine. It peaked this year, when she took a very short and very expensive trip to space. Online critics accused her of being out of touch. This is true, and she knows it. Demi Lovato, Addison Rae and Zara Larsson have all received 90s-facing rebrands from canny stylists who understand cult appeal. Perry is fine with being fossilised in the kitschier world of the 2010s, where the corporate glass ceiling is still a prime concern, cupcake bras are an interesting innovation, and inflatable backup dancers run riot. Her much-ridiculed Woman’s World video is in on the joke. She proudly films a TikTok dance with a much younger co-star: we eventually realise her companion has no idea who she is. “I am Katy Perry!” she screams from the side of an airborne helicopter.
Pop goes where politics cannot. Perry knows you hate her. Her campy audacity is fine because she has had no material effect on anyone’s life; her online critics are merely obstacles in the sort of overarching career narrative other pop stars would kill for. She’s still filling arenas: her refusal to defect from the celebrity world is inspiring to fans who might face low-key versions of the same struggle. But as the representative of a political idea, a progressive party and a lesser dynasty, Trudeau’s retreat from office was wholly necessary. Their relationship will be a tug-of-war between political humility and pop-star hubris. Neither will win.
[Further reading: Jennifer Lawrence gives everything to Die My Love]
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