‘Firework’
By Katy Perry
“Come on, show ‘em what you’re worth,
Make ‘em go, ‘Ah, ah, ah,’
As you shoot across the sky…”
While half the world struggles to find clean water, and the news is dominated by wars, a pop star floats in microgravity sixty six miles above the earth and sings ‘What a Wonderful World’. The irony would be laughable if it weren’t so grotesque.
On the 14th April 2025, Katy Perry, and five other women, blasted into the edge of space for a fleeting moment of weightlessness at the apex of the 10 minute flight into ’space’, at a cost of millions of dollars. The all-female trip was promoted as a symbol of empowerment – as if shattering the glass ceiling now requires a rocket.
Perry returned brimming with ‘love’, transformed, apparently, by the curvature of the Earth and a fleeting glimpse of the stars – enough, she claimed, to ignite a deeper human truth. And, as if touched by divine revelation, she knelt and kissed the ground – a gesture so nauseatingly contrived that it reeked – not of awe or humility, but of a celebrity high on her own sanctimony, presenting her ten minute, glorified fairground ride as an inner awakening.
This is the new spiritual tourism of the ultra-rich: buy a seat on a rocket, call it transcendence, and descend back to Earth a better person, while the planet below burns, floods, starves, and fractures under the strain of the very excess that made such indulgences possible.
If perspective was truly the goal, Perry could have spent the time confronting life on Earth: in a Sudanese refugee camp, a Gaza hospital, or a Congolese cobalt mine, where children claw minerals from the ground so the rich can upload their moments of shameful indulgence even faster. But that kind of experience doesn’t sell merchandise or burnish the brand. It doesn’t fit neatly into a deluded narrative of personal growth, where the rich consume awe like they consume everything else: on demand, for a price, and without consequence.
These luxury-fuelled joyrides are sold as reminders of Earth’s fragility, but they are monuments to denial. Nothing says ‘I care about the planet’ like setting fire to tonnes of rocket fuel to have a remote view of it. Nothing screams ‘love’ like spending more on a ten minute trip to space than most people will earn in a lifetime.
Perhaps, instead of singing ‘What a Wonderful World’, it might have been more fitting if Perry had sung ‘Drive’ by the Cars…
“Who’s gonna tell you when it’s too late?
Who’s gonna tell you things aren’t so great?
You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong…”
The wealthy pollute vastly more than the rest of us, yet pay the least to fix the damage. They cast themselves as enlightened explorers, while remaining wilfully blind to the trail of suffering their obscene wealth leaves behind. It is not the Earth they love, it is the illusion of themselves as saviours, as seers, as something other than what they are: self-obsessed passengers on a burning ship, dancing in first class, and filming their hypocrisy for ‘likes’.
April 2025