Aren’t you lonely

Up there in utopia

Where nothing will ever be enough

Happily numb

 So comfortable, we’re living in a bubble, bubble

So comfortable, we cannot see the trouble, trouble

Katy Perry, Chained to the Rhythm

In February 2017 Katy Perry released Chained to the Rhythm, lead single from her album Witness. The song’s video takes place in an amusement park called Oblivia, whose aesthetic is influenced by the retro-futuristic aesthetics of the 1950s, a moment in which optimism—and naivete—reigned supreme in US society. As a metaphor of the United States, Oblivia turns out to be an outstanding critique of the pitfalls and disadvantages of the “American lifestyle.”

At first Perry, looks completely excited and awestruck with the park, and she walks along with a crowd of smiling people taking choreographed selfies and eating atomic mushroom-shaped cotton candy. She sings:

Are we crazy?

Living our lives through a lens

Trapped in our white picket fence

Like ornaments

Oblivia’s rides turn out to be keen diagnostic images of american-style capitalism and include attractions like The Great American Dream Drop (a drop tower ride that has couples within tiny houses fall from a certain height), a roller coaster called Love Me that whizzes past a tunnel of emojis, loves and likes, No Place like Home (a launching platform that propels visitors beyond the white picket fence that surrounds the park) and a 3D show called A Nuclear Family (which showcases the typical American family of the 1950s).

All is well in paradise until Perry approaches a rosebush and upon touching one of the stems—made of barbed wire—begins to see the park with new eyes. Unlike Milton’s Eden (6.4), in Oblivia roses do have thorns. In fact, the very image of the barbed wire-rose, refers to the enclosure implicit to any paradeisos/amusement park. The theme of being trapped is further developed on another ride (dubbed The Greatest Ride in the World) which has the longest line in the park. People advance happily numb to take a shot at the big attraction, a giant hamster wheel from which everyone eventually falls down. It’s difficult to think of a more fitting metaphor of the current US credit system.

The political content of Katy Perry’s video invites us to a pop revolution. Unfortunately these representations are yet another instance of the co-optation and emptying of symbols of rebellion and discontent that lead nowhere (5.12, 5.18). Although clever and aesthetically accomplished, Chained to the Rhythm is an ineffectual critique precisely because it is carried out within the boundaries imposed by the media (5.5). This type of cultural expression, says Mark Fisher, rather than challenging the establishment, feeds it by absorbing its forms of dissent. Perry’s video, “performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief.”¹ In the absence of these shared beliefs, both dissent and communication are impossible.

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1. Fisher, Capitalist realism, 12-13. ↩︎