Katy Perry Being Blasted Into Space Is Emblematic Of This Chaos Era
April 15, 2025
Growing up, I thought the apocalypse would come all at once. Like, it would be a big asteroid that’d wipe us out like the dinosaurs, or the Earth would just simply… explode, in one of those neat, freak events that no one saw coming. What I didn’t realise – and I don’t think any of us did – was that the apocalypse would happen slowly. So slowly that we wouldn’t even know it was happening at all. That there would be many small events, one after the other, until all we knew was chaos. Which brings me neatly to: Katy Perry, creator of “Firework”, being blasted into space on a Monday afternoon from a Texas ranch while Kris Jenner watches on in a fedora.
Had this occurred 15 years ago, it would have been a major event. The first pop star in space? Isn’t that kind of a big deal? Instead, the notion of Perry being flung into the ether on a rocket ship belonging to billionaire Amazon owner Jeff Bezos just felt vaguely menacing. Like, why is this happening? To what end? As my friend Emma put it in a post: “Jeff Bezos sending Katy Perry into space ‘just because’ is a horseman of the apocalypse, btw. If Katy Perry wasn’t involved it would be odd, but not ominous. Somehow her presence makes the whole thing feel profoundly bad. Like I fear we have cursed the firmament and it will have untold disastrous consequences.”
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It’s difficult to pinpoint why this event feels not only unsettling, but actively sinister. Maybe it’s because the world is in crisis: political collapse, climate disaster, mass global violence. So sending an all-female crew into space while Perry sings Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World” while twirling a daisy feels very “why?” Just like when Perry released “Women’s World” last year, it feels a bit like the artist was frozen in time around the mid-2010s (when Taylor Swift kept bringing her “girl squad” on stage), with no memory of what happened on a cultural level between then and now. I suspect that nobody has the energy to explain to Perry why aligning with Amazon – famously Not Good when it comes to worker’s rights, fossil fuels and protecting independent businesses – isn’t the “you go, girl!” move that she thinks it is.
But I also just feel like the randomness of this whole Blue Origin event is emblematic of the chaos era that we’re living in more generally. I opened my phone to watch TikTok the other day, which I am addicted to thanks to Big Tech, and observed a plate of AI-generated grannies’ faces being eaten off a plate with a fork. When I turned on the TV, the boxer Mickey Rourke was squaring up to someone from Love Island while dressed as a pirate. Los Angeles – the entirety of Los Angeles – nearly burnt to the ground earlier this year. In fact, chaos is so normal right now that when I turned around to my wife and said “Katy Perry has been blasted into space,” she just said: “Oh?”
I don’t know when it all went wrong for us, to be honest, but I think it was long before the pandemic. I think it was long before even 2016, although that was a particularly cursed year. Maybe the Mayans were right when they predicted that the world would end in 2012. At the time, we thought they meant that the world would suddenly be engulfed in flames or something. But maybe what they actually meant was that life as we knew it would gradually cease to exist until, at some point 13 years later, Katy Perry – who wrote “Bon Appétit” (featuring Migos) – would be physically flung through the Kármán line and into outer space. Can someone stop the ride now, please? I want to get off.
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