You know America’s in a troubling spot when even Katy Perry is singing about the illusion of freedom.
That’s the subject of Chained to the Rhythm, the once-carefree pop star’s new single, which appeared online on Thursday night amid a series of Perry tweets and retweets about revolution, George Orwell’s 1984 and the need to “question everything.”
“Are we crazy?/Living our lives through a lens,” she sings, “Trapped in our white picket fence/Like ornaments.” The song goes on to point out how comfortable we are “living in a bubble” where we “dance to the distortion.”
Then Perry — whose Twitter bio now reads “Artist. Activist. Conscious.” — really drops the hammer: Turns out that distortion is leading each of us to stumble around “like a wasted zombie.”
Is this the first major pop song about fake news?
The initial sampling from Perry’s upcoming studio album (her follow-up to Prism from 2013), Chained to the Rhythm was co-produced by the singer’s old pal Max Martin and features a guest appearance by Skip Marley (a.k.a. Bob’s grandson), who announces in his verse that “time is ticking for the empire.”
Perry is scheduled to perform the song Sunday night at the Grammy Awards.
When she previewed her new song a day before, Perry unleashed a worldwide scavenger hunt among her millions of online followers.
In cryptic social media postings, the singer showed a video of a disco ball being dragged by a chain from her stiletto - recognisable from her foot tattoo (a grinning peppermint).
Perry - who has more than 95 million followers on Twitter - then posted a map showing disco balls in more than two dozen cities around the world with details on how to find them.
Finders of the disco balls - whose postings are eagerly retweeted by Perry - could plug in headphones to hear her new song Chained to the Rhythm.
Locations of the disco balls included outside the landmark Moulin Rouge cabaret in Paris, inside New York’s McCarren Park in the hipster haven of Williamsburg and at Shibuya 109, the Tokyo department store that is Japan’s epicentre of teenybopper culture.
The 32-year-old has been active on the political front and was one of the key celebrity backers of Hillary Clinton in her unsuccessful presidential race against Donald Trump.
