Everyone knows what Katy Perry looks like by now, right?
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[4.22]
Anthony Easton: Does this mean that after Russell Brand, Katy Perry has found Jesus again? Is the Hollywood positive thinking/sunshine optimism replaced with the Lord?
[4]
Brad Shoup: Dr. Luke puts her on the Reading Rainbow, and the book is… the Bible? I guess palling around with Russell Brand’s penis is enough to send anyone back to the Savior’s embrace. This is the acceptance flipside to the denial/anger of “Part of Me,” and it’s more winning for it. The peculiar way Perry rolls syllables around her jaw is played for strength by both the arrangement (clipped phrases everywhere) and the material (the way she sings “cloud nine” ends up with a precise amount of rue). When she lets loose on the bridge, it’s that much more moving; the melody arrives exactly where I expected, which is sometimes a way of saying it does exactly what I wanted it to.
[7]
Alfred Soto: From Dawn Richard balking at being treated automatic we descend the long slide to happiness, endlessly, where Katy Perry awaits, on her knees on the concrete, prepared to unzip those pants as low as you want. Best of all, she’ll sing in your ear if you refuse. The wistful roboticized refrain “I’m wide awake” shows she’s programmed to show regret too.
[2]
Will Adams: As (allegedly) a post-divorce response to Russell Brand, this works better than “Part of Me,” which spent too much time polishing its barbs instead of firing them effectively. Here, Katy is less yelpy, more introspective, and Dr. Luke dials himself back ever so slightly to give her more space. Unfortunately, it’s kinda bereft of a chorus (doesn’t it sound like it’s supposed to lead into something much more explosive?), which if anything is Katy’s greatest asset. There’s something genuinely uplifting about the twice-repeated “falling from cloud nine” sounding wistful the first time then confident the second, and yet you wonder how neither Katy nor Max nor Bonnie were able to set it to anything catchier.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: I refuse to dignify Katy Perry’s “heartbreak” narrative as anything more than the furtive unfastening of two mismatched celebrities, at least one of whom is probably still bemused about the whole thing, in order to artificially extend the Teenage Dream era. It’s far more enticing, after all, to have Katy find her true self in trendy YA-fantasy tropes and darkish makeup and self-congratulatory documentaries that let her wear film-canister bustiers than for her team to admit they’re just dredging up rejected songs to stall after being turned down for another No. 1 hit or further Dr. Luke collaborations. What’s interesting about “Wide Awake” is that it’s like it was dredged up from her old career, the one with The Matrix. Lukasz, Bonnie McKee and colleagues turn the acoustic track into something passably like “E.T.,” but Katy attacks her verses like her awakening’s made her Sophie B. Hawkins. You see why they turned it down the first time; “falling from cloud nine” isn’t nearly as clever as it’s written to be, and it certainly doesn’t hold a chorus together. But movie tickets don’t sell themselves, you know. Let the cloying credits roll.
[4]
Jer Fairall: The pitter-pattering techno, a distant offspring of Madonna’s “I’ll Remember,” signifies something like good taste as it might be best understood by one of her generation’s least tasteful pop stars, and right there is my conundrum: Katy’s unbearably obnoxious to me when she’s just a girl wanting to have fun, yet when she decides get serious for a minute the results are, usually, merely boring. I’m basically rewarding this (relatively speaking) for being indistinct, and I don’t at all like the sound of that, but when staring down at months of inevitable airplay, I might tend to get a little desperate.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: I think what I resent most is that the phrase “wide awake” is already starting to be colonized by her gulping yelp: I’m going to be singing this song in my head every time I read those two words in conjunction for the next several years. That’s a dirty trick.
[3]
Pete Baran: Katy Perry will not belong to any Wide Awake Club until she has played Mallett’s Mallet. At least a giant pink and yellow hammer would accessorise nicely. This is a pretty bland pop ballad which is made ridiculous by its subtext of being about the things she did not know about the notorious womaniser, ex-drug addict Russell Brand, when she could have read the first part of his autobiography.
[3]
Andy Hutchins: If it was actually 1997, this would be an even bigger hit. As is, this subverts the move toward squalling EDM by throwing more delicate things underneath a vocal that doesn’t impress, in typical Perry fashion, and it’s a nice thing to hear on the radio every so often. It will be less nice when it is the fourth song in every rotation by the end of July.
[5]