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Introduction

Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, known professionally as Katy Perry rose to fame in2008 with the release of the single I Kissed a Girl and then successfully arousedpeople’s attention. With more singles released all over the world, Perry has becomeone of the most popular singers. Throughout her career, Perry has sold 100 millionrecords globally, and is one of the best-selling Musical artists of all time. Her thirdalbum Teenage Dream became the first by a female artist to produce fivenumber-one Billboard Hot 100 singles in the U.S, and the second overall afterMichael Jackson’s album Bad. Her fourth album, Prism, released in 2013 made herthe first artist with multiple videos to reach one billion views on Vevo with thevideos for its songs Roar and Dark Horse. Her songs Firework, E.T, Hot N Cold,Roar and Dark Horse have each been sold over 5 million digital copies, and thevideos of these songs will be analyzed in this paper in detail. In the meantime, Perrywon great popularity on social media and she surpassed Justin Bieber as the mostfollowed person on Twitter in November 2013.Considering the great popularity of Katy Perry and her controversialperformances in her music videos, many works have been done to analyze thesevideos.Foreign researches about Katy Perry’ s music video can be divided into twocategories: the criticism of sexuality and the racism. She has been criticized forpeddling sex to young girls and showing racist stereotypes in her music videos(Pennington 40). In Katy Perry’ s latest music video Dark Horse, RosemaryPennington argues that Katy Perry is reinforcing a hegemonic understanding of theOrientalist framings of East and West through the destruction of Orientalized men ofcolor, and then reproducing the old discourse which stereotypes the East as people tobe possessed and tamed by those in the west. Her single I Kissed a Girl also sparkeda controversy for the homosexual themes.
In a broader sense, many researches about music video have been done fromfour perspectives: the aesthetic analysis, the political economy communication, thepost-modern theories of meaning and representation and the audience analysis,which provide the author the insights to do researches on music videos. Politicaleconomy looks at how elites within media industries work actively to maintainpower, and cultivate markets and more diverse audiences. Simon Frith describesmusic videos as the “industrialization of music where songs are fetished, mademagical, and we can only reclaim them through possession, via cash transaction inthe marketplace” (50). That is, music videos are commercial sine they serve asboosting sales. John Fiske describes music videos as serving two contradictoryaspects now that they “offending realism, rock videos offend capitalism; in boostingrecord sales they maintain it” (10). In other words, music videos are kind of complexcommodities which on one hand are advertising in assisting gaining profits andsubject to ideological pressure, on the other hand they are to some degree contrary tothe dominant media patterns.In Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture,Andrew Goodwin not only provides a history of MTV, but also pays attention to thestructure, form and narrative style of the videos. The discussion covers a wide rangeof economic and commercial issues, detailed textual analysis and the pleasures fromwatching music videos. Similarly, Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader,edited b