We should be allowed to criticise the culture we don’t like

This week, Katy Perry issued a response to criticism of her most recent tour, Lifetimes, which kicked off in Mexico on April 23 and will travel to a number of US arenas starting next week, before moving on to Australia, Europe and China, finishing up in Abu Dhabi this winter. Early performances of the show have been criticised and/or ruthlessly mocked online for their staging and choreography, on top of Perry’s “low energy” performances. And, in case you missed it, the pop star’s reputation was already suffering before she took to the stage, thanks to an ill-fated 11-minute ride on board one of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rockets – an “indulgent and morally hollow” exercise that doubled as a promotional activity for the tour. So what does she have to say about the backlash?

“Please know I am ok,” begins her statement, which was commented underneath a fan group’s Instagram post and has since been picked up by several major news outlets.”I have done a lot work around knowing who I am, what is real and what is important to me. My therapist said something years ago that has been a game changer, ‘no one can make you believe something about yourself that you don’t already believe about yourself’ and if I ever do have any feelings about it then it’s an opportunity to investigate the feeling underneath it.”

“When the ‘online’ world tries to make me a human piñata, I take it with grace and send them love,” she continues. “Cause I know so many people are hurting in so many ways and the internet is very much so a dumping ground for unhinged and unhealed.”

It’s not entirely clear whether Perry is referring to people’s actions or the people themselves when she says “unhinged and unhealed” here – either way, it doesn’t sound too much like the language of grace and love. But it’s the framing of herself as the internet’s “human piñata” that really sticks out. Have some commentators revelled in the pop star’s downfall or pushed things a little too far? Maybe. But it’s not accurate to dismiss all of her critics as mere haters and bullies, either. It’s definitely not accurate to call them “evil”, as in one fan’s X post with almost 10,000 likes.

The thing is, there are many valid criticisms of Katy Perry’s latest tour (even setting the space travel stuff aside) from the half-hearted dancing, to the “we have Star Wars at home” stage design, to the seemingly AI-generated background imagery. These aren’t criticisms of Perry herself, but of the art that she’s chosen to share – and has the resources to share via stadium-sized venues across the globe. And if someone thinks a work of art is bad, they should be able to say so, or satirise it, without fear of being labelled unhinged, evil, or a bully.

The word “haters” crops up a lot in pop culture, especially among the stan communities that fuel much of the back and forth about what you should – or shouldn’t – be able to say about their favourite artists. Don’t like brat? You’re just a Charli xcx hater. Sick of Benson Boone doing flips off a piano over and over again? Hater! Think Harry Styles is a bad actor? Good luck! Millions of fans are ready to track you down and call you out, while his mum shames you on Instagram, writing: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” When Eurovision defied calls to ban Israel from the competition in 2024, even the Israeli president Isaac Herzog called critics “haters” in an attempt to downplay their very legitimate concerns, while British entry Olly Alexander belittled accusations of complicity as “very extreme”.

These anti-critic sentiments, mostly shared among fans, have been endorsed by some of the stars themselves, too. See: Charli wearing a Praying t-shirt in 2022 that reads, “They don’t build statues of critics”, also worn by Katy Perry during the fallout from her last album cycle (given their respective relationships with their fans and critics, one shirt definitely feels more tongue-in-cheek than the other). To some extent, this embrace makes sense. Largely thanks to social media and the barriers it’s broken down, pop stars’ real lives are getting increasingly tangled up with their art. It’s understandable that you’d feel fragile if every bad review was indistinguishable from a personal attack.

There’s a big problem with conflating meaningful critiques with cruel or aimless “hate”, though. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” is all good as a tip for the school playground, but art has always thrived in dialogue with criticism, even if it might come across a bit mean – that’s how audiences figure out what’s good and what’s not, and how artists themselves improve their craft.

For example, if you were alive and online in the late 2010s, clips of Katy Perry’s recent dancing might have reignited some memories about a similar video from 2018, where Dua Lipa – appearing at that year’s Brit Awards – performed a stilted dance move later christened the Pencil Sharpener. Like Perry, Dua Lipa watched the video turn into a meme and a viral tagline (“I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing!”) and had to abandon Twitter entirely in the aftermath. 

“Those things were hurtful. It was humiliating,” she reminisced to the Guardian last year. “The thing that made me the happiest – performing and writing songs – was also making me really upset because people were picking everything apart that I’d been working on, and I had to learn all that in front of everyone. In the public eye, I was figuring out who I was as an artist, as a performer.” Over the next few years, she says, she learned to grow a thicker skin, but she also trained hard to become a much better dancer, as many TikTok compilations will attest. And in 2021, she partly credited this monumental effort to her critics themselves. “Getting bullied online... made me wanna dance my arse off and just really get better,” she told fans in an Instagram story. “So thank you so much, for all things good and bad, for helping me grow.”

To give Katy Perry credit where it’s due, she also appears to have taken some of the recent backlash on board, switching out the AI tour visuals for live shots of the crowd. This was hardly the biggest issue identified by the “unhinged and unhealed” online, but its reversal has been received as a step in the right direction.

This is not to say that all criticism is constructive, of course (especially when it’s levelled at female celebrities by misogynists on the internet, as is often the case), but for almost any creative person, it is part of a vital evolutionary process, which pop artists ignore at their own peril. After all, if online “hating” is one way for critics to make their voices heard, there’s another, much more impactful way to express themselves IRL. Or rather, by not turning up IRL in the first place. At Katy Perry’s Lifetimes tour, for example, the negative commentary has been backed up by rows of unsold seats. Beyoncé has similarly been filmed floating past empty seats during a set piece on her Cowboy Carter tour, for which thousands of discounted tickets are still reportedly available (throughout the Cowboy Carter rollout, many have criticised the musician’s “greedy” pricing and “tone deaf” embrace of Americana during Trump’s second term... but that’s a whole other debate).

If artists keep refusing to engage with their critics – either to take feedback on board, or defiantly double down, as in the case of someone like Lana Del Rey – then they shouldn’t be surprised to see their audiences diminishing in this way, or to find that the pop landscape has left them behind. Similarly, if audiences keep calling each other out for “hating on” their favourite artists at the exclusion of any critical debate, they can’t turn around and act shocked when culture feels painfully mid either.