On Monday, I experienced a haze of glitter and rainbows…
That is what it is like to attend a Katy Perry concert – It is all a daze… Of cats, dancing, and pizza.
Smack me now, but I thought of the Beatles at this show. WHAT?! She did not just use the Beatles and Katy Perry in the same sentence. But, before you send me hateful tweets, think about this… What is the purpose of having a concert, when everyone knows EVERY word of your songs? And when a big bulk of the audience is full of screaming ladies that drown out what you are trying to sing? When I listen to old live shows of the Beatles, I feel bad for them, the screaming drowns them out – well, mostly I think of myself, next to a screaming lady at a show – and I would probably take my beer bottle and smack them on the head with it – but anyways, you get the point. What is the point of a live show when that’s the experience?
Katy Perry faces the same challenge, although her tunes are not necessary worth asking the audience to be silent so you can bathe in the glory of the them – she still has to compete with being on the top of all radio charts. So how do you do that? You make it a spectacle! You float through the audience on balloons, you change costumes, flash neon lights, and you make the audience stop singing for two seconds to go “oooooo, ahhhhh – that was super cool. Did you see that?” (yes, dudes behind me. I have eyes, I saw it.).
So that is what she does, she puts on a bitchn’ performance that honestly is a super entertaining and amusing way to spend a Monday night. First let’s discuss two of my favorite things in the world: cats and pizza. Katy also loves cats and pizza, she has a cat named Kitty Purry and is constantly spotted posting photos online of herself eating pizza, wearing a pizza swimsuit, etc.
There was at least ten minutes of cats on the prism shaped screen at the back of the stage. The cats floated on pools and did generally bad ass cat things as “Gin and Juice” played. Then, giant cat playthings popped up all over stage (and I thought to myself, how do I steal those for my cat?) and dancers dressed like cats busted a move on them. Does that sound weird? It does as I think about it today, but it was awesome. It was like watching Cats: The Musicial, but with neon lights and way more of the sexy Rum Tum Tugger cats.
Katy had some kid come up on stage (who politely addressed her and said “sup” like a true 11 year old badass) and she gave him pizza. Then she professed her love of pizza for a solid five minutes – perhaps revealing too many personal details about digesting the pizza. In an audience where I would reckon there were thousands of teenage girls, it was refreshing to see someone talk about eating. And yes, we want kids to have healthy eating habits and they should not down pizza everyday, but we also want them to feel comfortable eating pizza without stressing about it. She can probably eat all the pizza she wants though since she spent five minutes jump roping. Jump roping for that long is difficult, but perhaps if I did it with the lights off and neon lights attached to my gym clothes, I might find it more fun.
The giant screen on the stage that backlit each performance reminded me of a Pink Floyd concert (Yeah, I did it again, I included a legendary band in the same paragraph, deal with it.) The screen constantly changed to tell a story with whatever song was going on. During “Teenage Dreams,” the entire screen was full of goofy bloopers from her concert performances and music videos – I think she was probably doing something cool on stage, but I was focused on the antics of the screen. It made her very relatable and real, (I mean the pizza solidifies that she rocks, but this helped). It was nice to see that she didn’t take the whole performance of being a celebrity that seriously. Quite charming.
The weirdest part was when the video screen made it look like she was trapped at one point – and she was in a straight jacket, climbing the walls to get out. It seemed like it was supposed to be a little sexy… Too each their own. Performance wise, the best song of the evening was “Grace of God,” I thought that she nailed the perfomance, and did it without all the glitz or help from the audience drowning her out – it showed she did have some singing chops in there. I actually don’t love that song on my copy of Prism, so it was nice to see the change in the song live.
Katy did make a good comment about selfies (before taking one with the audience). She said that everyone probably took so many selfies on the way over to the show that they didn’t talk to anyone who was dropping them off. Yes, certainly a difference between the crowd at this show and the crowd at the Justin Townes Earle concert I went to the night before where hardly a cell phone was spotted. I won’t lie, I took a ton of selfies with my friend – but I looked awesome and needed to have record of it in case I ever wanted to dye my hair blue and wear rainbow dresses in the future. Plus, sending them to the folks at Bearded Gentlemen was quite amusing!
Everybody is sick of the term “YOLO.” Katy flashed it in giant neon letters. And at first, I cringed and then I thought, ya know what? Those giant rave lights have a point… Dress up in a blue wig, wear a rainbow dress, and eat the pizza.
Now I just need to find myself a pair of the glitter blue pants she wore during “Firework.”