As Katy Perry continues to dole out singles in piecemeal form without necessarily offering the imminent promise of an album, her latest effort seems to prove that her output has been been quickly devolving since the undeniably infectious “Never Really Over” (in large part thanks to production from Zedd and Dreamlab). For, after that, came the literally “blah blah blah blah”-filled “Small Talk” and its unfortunate accompanying video that made one want to cleanse oneself by watching Best in Show afterward.
Making things worse for her “comeback” after 2017’s poorly received Witness album, Perry has now brought us “Harleys in Hawaii.” If the title wasn’t enough to give you some indication of Perry’s fondness for literalism, we have the “Manson”-directed video to hit you over the head with it. Manson, for those who don’t know, is “a directors collective, a creative think tank, a race to nowhere.” Kind of like the entire “Harleys in Hawaii” “narrative,” which features opening scenes of Perry riding down the highways of Oahu in what appears to be her best attempt at re-creating her own version of Lana Del Rey’s epic “Ride” video, a seedy ode to biker/Daddy culture with autobiographical elements of Del Rey’s own ruffian pre-fame existence (for most girls of privilege like to rough it out there in the real world before returning to their ivory tower, just look at The Simple Life). And, after all, Perry did once ickily tweet, “Lana Del Rey all day,” so it’s not out of the question that more than just Orlando Bloom was the inspiration for this concept.
For, as Perry unfortunately stated of the genesis of this song, “We rented a Harley because we were just there for a few days… You know, to be on the back of a motorcycle in Hawaii and just let the air flowing on your face. It’s so beautiful. It was awesome! But I can remember specifically where I was, the street corner I was at in Oahu and turning that corner and whispering to Orlando, going, ‘I’m going to write a song called ‘Harleys In Hawaii.’” So one supposes we have another British man besides Joe Alwyn to blame for the bathetic display of pop songs of late from former sworn enemies Perry and Taylor Swift. Unabashed in her cheesiness (just as Swift is with tracks like “Lover” from her recently released record of the same name), Perry thusly sings without the slightest tinge of irony (and in occasional concert with co-writer Charlie Puth), “You and I-I/Riding Harleys in Hawaii-ai/I’m on the back, I’m holding tight/ Want you to take me for a ride, ride/When I hula-ula, hula/So good you’ll take me to the jeweler, jeweler, jeweler/There’s pink and purple in the sky-y, ay/We’re riding Harleys in Hawaii-ai-a.”
As if it wasn’t bad enough that Hawaii constantly serves as the stomping grounds for white people to fulfill their cliche, middle-of-the-road paradisiacal fantasies, Katy Perry had to go and sing a naive little white bitch ditty like this. Why doesn’t she just get Aloha remade and cast herself in Emma Stone’s “one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Hawaiian” role of Allison Ng? Allison Ng. Huh? It might be less offensive than this song and video. Which seems to feature far more stereotypes of what it means to exist in Hawaii than scenes of riding Harleys. Like Perry sipping from an over the top cocktail with a flower in it at a tiki bar before segueing into karaokeing on the stage (incidentally, Del Rey did the same in Honolulu when she joined fans onstage to sing “Cherry” in 2018 during a stop there for her L.A. to the Moon Tour). This song, in fact, already sounds like a karaoke version of itself, so, in a way, it works out in Perry’s favor to take it to the intimate stage of this tiki bar to perform for the audience of one that is her Orlando Bloom prototype.
Later, as she sits on the beach in a straw hat a.k.a. an embarrassing display of what tourists in Hawaii think is appropriate to don in order to feel “in the spirit of the island” (sort of like how people wear berets in Paris), interspersed scenes of her pulling a saccharine Danny Zuko/Sandy Olsson moment by kissing him on the sand are meant to show the “romance” of it all. Of a place as majestically beautiful as Hawaii. If that’s the case, then one wonders how she ends up back in her hotel room wearing a bucket hat and eating Cheetos before hula hooping with some other comfortable with humiliation friends. Because, yes, hula hoops are the cherry on top of all the other requisite stereotypes that have abounded in this video (including Perry wearing a puka shell necklace while swimming with a Hawaiian hibiscus in her hair).
Del Rey may have recently crooned on Norman Fucking Rockwell’s “The Greatest,” “Hawaii just missed a fireball” (speaking of the state’s false alarm announcement of a nuclear missile attack when an employee incorrectly assumed a drill was a real world event), but the truth is, it hasn’t. Because they’re stuck with “Harleys in Hawaii.”
