Just over a week after Katy Perry touched down on Earth following the Blue Origin space flight, the international pop star was set to kick off her next tour, The Lifetimes Tour.
Sadly for Katy, the tour has been the latest in a string of bad PR moves, causing her to receive significant criticism and backlash from her audience.
After beginning the tour in Mexico City on April 23, fans were quick to slam the 40-year-old musician for the use of images of people, which appear to be AI-created, low-effort choreography and low-budget sets.
All in all, it felt like yet another rough cop for the “I Kissed A Girl” singer but, it was kind of strange. After all, if we try to ignore the recent fumbles of the last few years, it’s fair to admit that Katy has made a career from her larger-than-life stage presence and productions.
So, how come she didn’t deliver this time around?
Well, a TikToker named Catherine has a pretty clever hypothesis about why The Lifetimes Tour seems so amateurish compared to the usual performance she puts on — it was originally meant to feature references to her Blue Origin space flight.
“Katy Perry was gonna come out in her blue astronaut suit. I bet that’s what happened,” Catherine theorised.
“She was gonna have the daisy. That’s why she was wearing the right jumpsuit. And she was gonna come out dancing like that, and they probably had a whole rocket thing. Then, at the last minute, they’re like, we’ve gotta cut this. We gotta change it.”
Catherine reckons that due to the immense backlash, memes and jokes being made about Perry’s space antics, the tour organisers decided to nix any space references from the show. However, due to the high budget nature of some of the on-stage doodads, they had to keep it in.
So, in an effort to make it all work, they switched the theme of aliens to robots which is why the show feels so disjointed and unpracticed.
“It is unpracticed. Not because she didn’t practice for the tour but because she scrapped all the astronaut parts of the tour,” Catherine concludes.
You can check out her video below.
Personally, I think Catherine is onto a winner here. Along with the reasons above, it wouldn’t be the first time Katy intended to intertwine her tour with the space flight.
During the 11-minute flight into space alongside media personality Gayle King, NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics research student Amanda Nguyễn, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and journalist (as well as Jeff Bezos’ fiancee) Lauren Sánchez, Katy held up a butterfly-shaped piece of cardboard which had the setlist of the upcoming tour written on it.
Sadly for the “Firework” singer, the livestream was so fkn terrible that you couldn’t read a thing BUT the intention was there.
If this whole thing had gone down in a more favourable way for Katy, I can imagine the space-flight themed tour would have popped the fuck off. Unfortunately, it was just too hard for the masses to look away from the cost, carbon emissions and wild way the flight was marketed as a feminist movement to enjoy a space-themed spectacle.
