What’s blonde, a little confusing and eccentric all over? Well, yes, one correct answer would be Courtney Love. But that’s not the diva on my mind. The zany prima donna I’m referring to would be Katy Perry, as she appears on her fourth studio album “Witness,” released in 2017. The singer’s aim to explore “purposeful pop” went horribly wrong with some admittedly strange tactics, but seven years after the record’s release, “Witness” remains her most forward-thinking effort, largely consisting of midtempo, electronic-leaning synth pop, and demonstrating an artistic search for connection to oneself and others.

Reinventions are standard for nearly all pop acts, especially for the genre’s leading ladies: Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Madonna, the list goes on. Time and time again, we’ve seen diva after diva adopt a new sound, wardrobe and attitude as a way to remain as artistically exciting as they can be. When done right, reinventions hold the power to keep our favorite artists in the constant cycle of public interest. When they fail — as sadly in the case of Perry — reinventions can completely change the way the public views and interacts with a performer. 

By 2017, pop hitmaker Perry was 33 years old and had spent nearly a decade prior churning out some of the most popular songs of the late aughts to mid-2010’s. (Anybody ever “Kissed A Girl” and liked it?) After finding great success in the field of radio-friendly, expertly produced pop bangers, she pivoted toward what she described as “purposeful pop” on the Grammys red carpet just before her fourth album cycle began.  

With “Witness,” Perry indicates that she’d grown tired of the booming arena-pop she’d made a career off of and was in search of something more resonant: minimalistic dance-pop infused with lukewarm personal and political awakenings. Maybe it was the fact that she’d entered her 30’s a few years prior. The album’s title track opens with a flutter of guitar strums and leads into a bouncing piano number in which Perry declares, “I’m just looking for a witness in all of this/Looking for a witness to get me through this.” Her search for meaningful connection is clearest and most explicit on the title track, which is sonically understated just enough to push itself closer into the adult contemporary sphere of popular music, but maintains a bit of Perry’s signature eccentricity with bubbling synths and a dramatic vocal arrangement during the bridge. 

Perry is hardly a stranger to more sentimentally focused pop cuts (“Firework,” “Love Me” and “This Moment”), but the themes of deeper meaning and self-empowerment are more central to the core of “Witness” than any of her other LPs. She explores breaking familial cycles (“Power”), challenging the status quo (“Chained to the Rhythm”) and karma (“Pendulum”) in a manner that I will admit is at times a bit hard to stomach (“Your words are like Chinese water torture”), but is an overall palatable, slinky force of synth pop. 

But while 15-year-old me was singing along to lines such as “Make me ripple ’til I’m wavy/Don’t be scared to dive in deep/And start a tsunami,” it seemed like just about everybody else was still hung up on Perry’s look. The cover of “Witness” displays the singer with a bleached-blonde pixie cut, her hands covering her eyes (à la “see no evil”) and an eyeball emerging from the hole of her red-lipped mouth. The blank studio backdrop for the photo with lightly airbrushed shadows around Perry’s bust looks objectively low-budget, and even the most loyal KatyCats (her fandom’s adopted name) such as myself can admit such a fact. 

Some have said that when young gay boys hit tweendom, they are divinely assigned a pop diva to protect and defend with their life, and who doubles as a guardian angel to guide their path toward self-discovery. My very first diva savior was Perry. My transformative bond with the singer was made while watching her 2012 documentary “Part of Me,” and prompted me to become wildly obsessed with her quirky approach to the radio-catered pop music. 

As a full-time Perry devotee, I welcomed this new version of my favorite diva and leapt into the new collection of 15 songs I’d waited four years since 2013’s “PRISM” for. But most were not as willing to look past the aesthetics of this new era and focus only on the music itself. Which, to some extent, makes sense. 

Especially in today’s media-obsessed culture, images and visual content can often be far more recognized than the deeper context and meaning of the work itself. Of course people remember Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” by the song itself, but chances are the image of his red and black leather jacket just flashed across your mind while reading this. Aesthetics and image are inherently a pop phenomenon themselves, and are intrinsically tied to the concept of reinvention. Though I’d argue that the music itself is what matters most, it makes sense that this new era of Perry’s career, one in which she looked vastly different from what most knew her as, caused some furrowed brows and got people hung up before they even listened to the music. 

Well, once everyone else caught up and did finally get to the music, the consensus was far from great. Pitchfork’s Jill Mapes described the album as a “confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness.” To Mapes’ credit, she’s not entirely wrong — lines such as “Marilyn Monroe in a monster truck,” sound diluted and confusing even to then-15-year-olds like myself. “‘Witness’ has great singles, forgettable singles, forgettable filler, and songs that go clunk,” Wren Graves wrote for Consequence.

Alongside the dedicated (and albeit smaller) pool of KatyCats, I will continue to boast about the record’s underrepresented merit. What’s not to love about the slinky, bass-heavy sexual liberation of “Tsunami,” or the irresistible synth jump of “Bon Appétit?” The infectious groove of “Déjà Vu” masks some at-times corny lyrics, and makes for an undeniable head-nodder. Perry teaming up with Nicki Minaj for a goofy Euro-inspired dance cut results in a ridiculously cheeky spin on the classic diss track. The album’s lead single “Chained to the Rhythm” churns out a satirical electro-disco anthem criticizing political ignorance. The quasi-psychedelic guitar and eagle cry chorus of “Power” punctuates the midpoint of the record while the crooning sentimentality of “Into Me You See” rounds things out with a clear-eyed metaphorical high-note. Yes, these songs are not quite the instant earworms of her pop past, and sure, some of the songs that aim to be poignant sound contrived, but they are quality efforts nonetheless. 

But hindsight is, as they say, 20/20. Now, at the mature and sophisticated age of 21 years old, I can recognize that while all of these tracks are perhaps preserved with a sweet sense of nostalgia from my early high school days, not everyone can be expected to enjoy pop numbers with far weaker earworms when they’re used to getting insatiable stadium-worthy hits.

“Witness” was, by all accounts, a reinvention gone wrong. Faced with the intense backlash against her new look and new “purposeful” attitude, Perry poured her heart out in a 45-minute therapy session broadcast for the world to see. The session was part of the non-stop livestream, “Witness World Wide,” during which fans could watch the singer eat, sleep, shower and cry live for four days straight. “People talk about my hair, right? And they don’t like it, or they wish that it was longer,” she said. “I so badly want to be Katheryn Hudson that I don’t even want to look like Katy Perry anymore sometimes.” (Katheryn Hudson is Perry’s real name.) The scrutiny caused by her reinvention seemed to have caught up with her. 

Sure, just about every female pop star has been faced with a commercial or critical flop as a result of some artistic experimentation (take Lady Gaga’s style for “ARTPOP” for example, which had the singer vomiting on stage as “performance art”), but just about everything wrong with Perry’s reinvention seemed to come back to this damn haircut. This, my friends, is what I’d like to call the curse of the pop pixie cut. 

Just three years prior to Perry’s own chop and bleach, Disney alum Miley Cyrus debuted her own blonde pixie swoop alongside a no-fucks-given attitude to isolate herself from her Hannah Montana image. Despite all of the intense criticism she got for going rogue, Cyrus managed to get a number one hit (“Wrecking Ball”) out of her rebrand album “Bangerz.” In 2021, Demi Lovato’s comeback after nearly overdosing on heroin was accompanied with a pixie cut of her own. Unfortunately for Lovato, “Dancing With The Devil… The Art of Starting Over” did not spur any major hits and similarly to Perry, the pixie cut became somewhat of an object for online ridicule. Even the Queen of pop has had backlash coincide with a pixie cut. After many declared her career “over” with the release of her 1992 album “Erotica,” Madge hit the road for her “The Girlie Show Tour” and sported a short, blonde pixie cut. Rihanna seems to be an exception, with her massive hit “Diamonds” coming on the heels of her own chopped and cropped hairstyle.

So, is it really this godforsaken hairstyle that seems to prompt such a stir among the public? Tumult seems to follow wherever the pixie goes. Maybe it has something to do with the public not liking when women appear more androgynous and sport a “male haircut.” Maybe the public just doesn’t like when they can’t control how their favorite singers look. Or maybe it really just has to do with the music not being what people are used to. 

In Perry’s case, hasn’t her lyricism always been a bit quirky? Just about anyone should be able to recognize how outlandish lyrics such as “Boy, you’re an alien/Your touch so foreign/It’s supernatural/Extraterrestrial,” are. Let’s not forget “We went streaking in the park, skinny-dipping in the dark/Then had a ménage à trois last Friday night.” But if it has not been clear thus far, corny lyrics and contrived purposefulness never got in the way of my obsession with Perry and “Witness.” 

My adoration for my divine pop leader reached its summit in late 2017, when I won the chance to meet Perry backstage at her St. Paul tourstop in support of the record. Dressed in a bedazzled chef’s coat (and skipping opening night of the school musical that I was supposed to be stage-managing), I chatted with my pixie-haired idol for just under five minutes, during which I concealed my nerves with the exchange of quips, strong eye contact and a hug that seemed to last forever. None of the outside voices criticizing the lyrical and emotional intelligence of the record mattered in that moment. And nor did any of the comments about the hairstyle that Perry and I seemed to loosely share. 

In the years after “Witness,” Perry would open up and admit that the poor reception to her fourth record led her to a place of “brokenness.” The world seems to be happy to leave the singer where they feel she’s best: in the memory bank of the early 2010’s. Some will never give “Witness” a fair chance and others will look at you quizzically when you mention it and say, “I thought she stopped making music.” (True story, I can confirm.) Among Perry’s KatyCats, the album will continue to be a cult classic. And maybe that makes it even better. Afterall, not everyone has the taste for the “world’s best cherry pie.”

Photo: Capitol Records.