In 2017, there are myriad ways to approach an album rollout. There’s the Kanye way, consisting of a steady drip of promotional singles and a bonkers listening party at Madison Square Garden, after which, of course, you don’t actually release the album. Then there’s the Beyoncé approach, in which said album arrives as a complete surprise – usually with an accompanying film – causing tectonic plates to shift as scorned lovers the world over revolt. Adele and Frank Ocean, similarly, dropped long-awaited records after extended hiatuses with minimal promotion. Lady Gaga, who once commissioned a Jeff Koons sculpture for the release of Artpop, now opts for more measured rollouts, sporting cowgirl gear for Bud Light-sponsored gigs at speakeasies and pubs ahead of her folksy record Joanne.

What Katy Perry did this weekend was quite different. Perry, whose album Witness was released on Friday, installed 41 cameras in a Los Angeles apartment for a Big Brother-style live stream lasting from Thursday night to Monday afternoon.

“Do you see her, like, take a shit?” a friend asked me in anticipation. Well, I wasn’t entirely sure, though I assumed not. I had tuned in a bit on Friday – Perry was doing transcendental meditation – but didn’t commit until two days later, on Sunday morning, when I woke up, had coffee, went on YouTube, and became a Witness along with thousands of others.

Perry with her dog, Nugget. Photograph: YouTube

9am



Katy Perry is asleep when I pull up the stream, which is a bit awkward because James Corden has stopped by for a visit and is wandering around aimlessly. Earlier, there was cooking with Gordon Ramsay, yoga with Jesse Tyler Ferguson, astrophysics with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and therapy with Siri Sat Nam Singh, all in 24 hours.

Perry awakes in funky blue pajamas with stars on them that I wish I owned. She greets Corden and they make their way to the kitchen, where an impressive food artist called Dan Blake is making pancakes with Perry and her friends’ faces on them. She thanks him and takes a bite, and there’s one for her puppy, Nugget, too.

9.30am

Perry says she’ll show us how she can make herself look like a frog

The event is, well, not exactly Perry’s daily goings-on – and the fact that it’s presented as such can get annoying, particularly in moments when all the necessary pre-orchestration makes itself glaringly known (Perry’s assistant can be seen carrying around a face sheet, a sort of PR rubric of all the other celebrities who will be stopping by).

10am

Perry and Corden play Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts, a game in which they choose to answer personal, gossipy questions or instead eat something from an artfully prepared tray that contains cow tongue, scorpion, pickled pig’s feet, bird saliva, and a 100-year-old egg. Corden opts to take a bite of the cow tongue instead of saying who’s the most boring guest he’s ever had on his show. He also takes a shot of mayo when asked to choose between Justin Bieber and Harry Styles.



10.04am

KP is the more candid of the two, probably due to her totally understandable aversion to eating a pig’s innards. Corden asks her to list her famous lovers in bed from worst to best, with Diplo coming in last, followed by Orlando Bloom and then John Mayer. “They’re all amazing lovers,” Perry says, “and I would have sex with all of them when I get out of this place!”

Perry and guest James Corden playing Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts. Photograph: YouTube

10.30am

An hour in, I realize something: celebrities are as transcendently boring as we are. Perry says her goodbyes to Corden, and a 3D painter called Tracy Lee Stum stops by. In what looks like the house’s courtyard, she’s done a sort of panoramic piece in honor of Perry’s album, the word Witness written across it. It’s nice to see artists, whether of the pancake or graffiti sort, get access to a platform like Perry’s, and thus far they’ve seized the moment.

11am

KP goes up to her bedroom, where an iPad is waiting for her. She goes to a different, FaceTime-y live stream to answer fan questions. The best part, as is always the case with public streams, is reading the comments as they pour in, which range from messages of unconditional devotion to requests for money or advice or sex. It made me vicariously uncomfortable to watch Perry read and sidestep the weird ones, and then I found my patience tested as she nobly spent 10 minutes giving shout-outs to commenters, repeating the phrase “Hi (insert name)” hundreds of times and then merely “hello” in different languages.

Nugget. Photograph: YouTube

11.30am

Perry says she’ll show us how she can make herself look like a frog. I didn’t know what this meant, but I was nonetheless intrigued. Then, with the help of “a secret neck muscle”, Perry releases from under her chin what looks like a frog’s vocal sac. I attempted to do this multiple times to no avail, but a few commenters chime in that they possess this strange, secret neck muscle, too. “I figured out I had it when I was six,” Perry says, before going off to shower.

12pm

With KP temporarily absent, the house starts blasting her new album and we’re back to the kitchen camera, where some of Perry’s visitors are having their faces replicated in pancake form by our old friend Dan Blake. To pass time, the camera has assumed a cryptic, security footage-style view of the kitchen, where people I still don’t know are still chatting and still eating pancakes.

12.30pm

Perry commences a remarkably meticulous skincare routine that goes on long enough to get through at least five songs off her new album, which she sings and dances to while applying nasal strips and deodorant and face cream and a few other things I couldn’t identify. This, obviously, is not as grating as the fact that Mariah Carey supposedly gave birth and has sex to her own music, but watching entertainers dance to their own songs is not something I’ll ever warm to.



Perry and the YouTuber Patrick Starrr. Photograph: YouTube

1pm

It turns out she was readying herself for a makeup tutorial from the YouTuber wunderkind/makeup artist Patrick Starrr, who’s now usurped Dan Blake as the best thing about the stream. Starrr tells Perry a bit about his path to YouTube stardom, how he doubted anyone would want to see a “brown, plus-size Filipino do make-up”, and hilariously briefs her on some niche lingo, specifically the exact cadence in which one should say: “Girl, let me tell you.” Then comes an uncomfortable moment as Perry talks about her cosmetics line for CoverGirl and its new initiative: to eliminate the stigma around “PDA”, public displays of (cosmetic) application. Starrr doesn’t look impressed.

10.45pm

Perry hosts a dinner with several celebrity guests, including Margaret Cho, Caitlyn Jenner, and CNN’s Van Jones. Photograph: YouTube

I revisited the Witness stream on Sunday evening if only to see how much longer Perry could keep it up. When I log back on, I find Perry, Margaret Cho, Caitlyn Jenner, Van Jones, Derek Blasberg, Ana Navarro and a few others deep in dinner conversation about politics, race relations, and Twitter followers. The best part of this conversation is the politically conservative Caitlyn Jenner’s reaction, an unsavory mix of scorn and shock, to Margaret Cho saying she’s “sick of white people”.

Epilogue

It’s almost 2 in the morning in New York, I’ve got work in just a few hours, and things are getting a bit gratuitous on the Witness live stream, so I call it quits, emerging from the depths of internet tedium with an infinitesimally better understanding of Katy Perry and just how one disguises a 72-hour experiment in self-promotion as candid, plain-spoken fun.