I hope this open letter finds you well. My name is Chris Krovatin, and I am both a diehard metalhead and a fan of what you do. Among the many pop stars littering the charts in these strange times, you are one of the few I find genuinely interesting. That is why I am officially urging you to start an extreme metal band.
Let me begin by confronting the seemingly incongruous facts that I dig your creative output and that I pretty much only listen to death, thrash, and black metal. You see, Ms. Perry, one of the central tenants—arguably the central tenant—of metal is overkill. Hyperbole is at the heart of our music. We want the biggest riffs, the fastest drums, the least understandable lyrics, the goriest album covers, and the most extreme public imagery imaginable. We want to be so over the top that it’s ri-goddamn-diculous. As Motörhead so succinctly put it, “everything louder than everything else.”
This is a concept that you seem to understand. Your music is in many ways heavy—thick with bass, drenched in harmony. If layering tracks had physical density, your music would have the same approximate weight as a small sun. It’s not just that, either; it’s your stage show that proves how well versed you are in madness. A lot of pop stars seem chained to some level of either typical mainstream glamour in their stage shows (your Cyruses and Ushers, for example) or “meaningful, artistic” experiences (Lady Gaga and Lorde come to mind). You, on the other hand? You go all-out. Onstage, you have hugely-curved plastic surgery mummies, and giant cross-sections of Candyland, and outfits that make you look like you’ve just stepped out of a sequin-coated nightmare.
On top of that, you seem to genuinely have the pipes. You can wail with the best of them, ad metal was built on people with powerful, soaring vocals. Just because most metal bands are fronted by someone who sounds like their sneezing through a mouthful of intestines doesn’t mean that real metal vocals are dead (it would be cool if you could also do death growls, but, you know, nobody’s perfect). Yet, many female clean metal vocalists sound too classically-trained and operatic. The best ones are the ones with a full-diaphragmed yell, which you seem to have, at least according to “E.T.” (God, “E.T.” would be so killer as a booming blackened death metal track). So, it’s time to put that voice to use in the only truly worthwhile musical form out there: metal.
Obviously, many metal purists would see your metal band and cry, “Poser! What does teenage dream Katy Perry know about the Satanic might of pure metal?"
That's what we'd have to look forward to on ATRL. People suddenly becoming experts on "real metal".
I would not be here for the music but I would be here for the meltdowns when Katy's tenth #1 is a death core metal song.
