When in doubt, call in the kid. That’s the unfortunate stratagem Katy Perry resorts to at the end of her new album, “143,” in a groaner of a closer called “Wonder” that features a guest turn by the singer’s 4-year-old daughter, Daisy. Like a copy of a copy of her decade-and-a-half-old “Firework,” “Wonder” has Perry exhorting Daisy to stay innocent in a cynical world — to keep the fire lit in her heart, to keep the weight of reality off her wings, to resist letting “the envious ones say that you’re just a weed.
” (No, really.) By spotlighting her child’s untrained warble, Perry is attempting to demonstrate the human stakes of that undertaking while showing us that, as a record maker, she’s living by her own advice. She’s also, of course, daring us to scoff.
But scoff I must: On an album slick with flop sweat, poor little Daisy comes across not as a beneficiary of Perry’s motherly encouragement but as a victim of her creative desperation. Anyone could understand why Perry was feeling adrift going into “143,” which comes a few months after she wrapped her seven-season run as a judge on “American Idol.” At 39 — and with a pair of largely unsuccessful LPs behind her in 2020’s “Smile” and 2017’s “Witness” — Perry is already past the age when female pop stars encounter the brutal disinterest of a music business preoccupied with novelty and youth; indeed, she was battling the perception of obsolescence even before the emergen.