No one with any cultural sense would fault you for failing to see the there there in Katy Perry. Her voice is sturdy, but hardly distinctive, her lyrics are vague and
, her style (sonic and sartorial, alike) changes frequently and with the times. Her persona is ephemeral, like a really fun woman you once danced next to at a wedding.
That’s if you read the surface. Do a little digging and you’ll find an oddly vast amount of quotes attributed to Perry involving pee (usually hers, and generally dealing with how she manages it). Most pop stars are way less forthcoming about their urine and what they do with it, which means most pop stars are nowhere nearly as interesting as Katy Perry.
Perhaps a bucket would have sufficed. In 2012, The Sun quoted Perry on her pre-concert habits: “You walk on stage feeling like Mary Poppins but really you’ve just had your skin zipped, peed in a bucket and been dry-heaving over the trash can.” If she were actually Mary Poppins, she could just open her umbrella and pee in there.
But why pee anywhere when you could just pee yourself? In 2008, ahead of the MTV Europe Music Awards, Perry supposedly said, “I was so excited when I heard that I was nominated for two awards, but when I was asked to host the show I wet myself, Fergie-style!” Katy Perry and Fergie: Islands in the streams, that is what they are.
And then there is this highly dubious, completely unsubstantiated, and in all likelihood fake quote attributed to Perry in this blog post about celebrity bladder control issues: “Most people don’t know this, but I actually wore diapers pretty regularly during high school. Looking back I can’t say that I enjoyed wearing diapers in high school, but I think that the whole experience made me a stronger and more understanding person.” I don’t think Katy Perry actually said this, but it’s funny to think about and I’m proud of her all the same.
When paparazzi pictures of Perry and then-boyfriend Orlando Bloom on vacation leaked, The Mirror posted a bunch of them (this wasn’t the batch in which Bloom’s nice penis was exposed to the world from various angles). One of them contained the caption: “Singer Katy Perry and actor boyfriend Orlando Bloom pictured enjoying the second day of their holiday in Pittulongu Beach, Sardinia. Katy Perry pees on the beach without moving her swimsuit and then she covers her pee with sand.” I found no such photo evidence of Katy Perry peeing on the beach without moving her swimsuit and then covering it with sand like some shameful monkey (the picture this caption is attached to is just of Bloom’s butt) , but given all that we know about Perry I’m not gonna say for certain that it didn’t happen.
Speaking of monkeys, Katy Perry reportedly got peed on by one (and she liked it?). She also once awoke to being peed on her by her dog:
One of the lyrics to Katy Perry’s 2008 single “Hot n Cold” does not go, “Yeah you pee a mess,” but it might as well, I guess.
Also Katy Perry’s earliest memory involves the smell of diapers. If Freud read that after learning about Perry’s pee… thing, he’d be like, “I know, right?”