Last week I did an Adele deep cuts playlist, and also did Drake and Nicki Minaj playlists recently, and I kind of wanted to continue in that vein of covering some of the biggest pop stars of the past 10-15 years that hadn't been in this series yet. 

1. Self Inflicted

2. Mannequin

3. One Of The Boys

4. If You Can Afford Me

5. Hackensack (live)

6. Brick By Brick (live)

7. Hummingbird Heartbeat

8. Circle The Drain

9. Not Like The Movies

10. Peacock

11. Dressin' Up

12. Walking On Air

13. This Moment

14. Love Me

15. Spiritual

16. Pendulum

17. Deja Vu

18. Witness

19. Act My Age

20. Tucked

21. Champagne Problems

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from One Of The Boys (2008)

Tracks 5 and 6 from the MTV Unplugged EP (2009)

Tracks 7, 8, 9 and 10 from Teenage Dream (2010)

Track 11 from Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection (2012)

Tracks 12, 13 and 14 from Prism (2013)

Track 15 from Prism (Deluxe) (2013)

Tracks 16, 17 and 18 from Witness (2017)

Track 19 from Witness (Deluxe) (2017)

Tracks 20 and 21 from Smile (2020)

Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson had an odd little path to historic pop stardom. As a teenager, she released a Christian rock album as Katy Hudson, but the label that released it soon went bankrupt, and the album never made it streaming services. Around the same time, Almost Famous turned actress Kate Hudson into a household name, so Katy Hudson became Katy Perry by the time she resurfaced as a secular singer. She kicked around the industry for a few years, recording with a lot of big name artists and producers (the first time I ever heard and saw her was in a P.O.D. video, which is bizarre in retrospect). 

The first Katy Perry song that got a major label push was an edgelord piece of garbage called "Ur So Gay," which only made a tiny fraction of the impact that the (slightly) less embarrassing "I Kissed A Girl" made a year later. But "Ur So Gay" appeared on her triple platinum debut One Of The Boys, which is a pretty ugly footnote on an otherwise pretty enjoyable pop/rock album, which includes the title track written by the great Butch Walker. A year after Katy Perry's first album, she recorded an "MTV Unplugged" special that included a pretty good new song, "Brick By Brick," and a cover of one of the most beloved Fountains Of Wayne deep cuts, "Hackensack." But Perry's run on the Warped Tour and her Unplugged EP turned out not to be much of a bellwether for her next project, which would put her in the pop stratosphere alongside singers like Lady Gaga and Britney Spears. 

Teenage Dream was such a massive phenomenon, five #1 singles plus another on the expanded re-release a couple years later, that it's weird to hear the other songs on the album that weren't hits, although there are some good ones. A lot of Katy Perry's music is right in the aesthetic sweet spot of a lot of other guitar-driven pop songs that Max Martin and/or Dr. Luke produced, but she's not half the singer that Kelly Clarkson or Pink is, and her persona and her lyrics can also be a lot more grating than theirs. So her massive success feels a little cynical to me, but I will say, she had some pretty good songs on those first couple albums, and they weren't all singles. 

By the way, speaking of the now disgraced Dr. Luke, it was actually surprisingly easy to make this playlist without any songs he co-wrote or co-produced. He mainly worked on the singles on Katy Perry's first three albums, and she never worked with him again after Kesha's rape accusation. And the few deep cuts he did for Perry were usually pretty mediocre songs like "International Smile" and "Legendary Lovers." So if that's a concern for you, I just wanted to point out you can listen to this playlist without hearing any of Dr. Luke's work. 

An album as big as Teenage Dream could theoretically launch a singer to permanent A-list status, or at least a decade at the top, but Katy Perry started squandering that momentum pretty quickly. "Walking On Air" was a promotional single before the release of Prism, and Katy Perry performed it on "Saturday Night Live," but it never got a proper radio push. And it probably should've, since the official follow-up to "Roar" was "Unconditionally," probably the biggest flop of her career considering that it missed the top 10 after so many #1s. "Spiritual" is notable as Perry's only song co-written by John Mayer during their 2-year relationship, although they sang a duet on one of his albums around the same time.

Witness was a total fiasco without even a couple big memorable hits like Prism, at least as a singles campaign, although I really like "Pendulum." But it didn't even go gold, two albums after a blockbuster that will probably be diamond soon. Her last album Smile was better, but by that point the damage had been done. And now she's been put out to pasture as a judge on "American Idol," just like Paula Abdul, the singer whose brief but impressive Hot 100 success Perry's career most resembles. 

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