What We've Learned Since Katy Perry Planted Her Flag With "Rise"—And Refused to Conform

Retrospective on Pop Culture’s Most Misunderstood Anthem

Nearly a decade has passed since Katy Perry released “Rise” on July 14, 2016—a mid-tempo electronic anthem that critics dismissed as formulaic Olympic fodder while audiences instinctively recognized something deeper. The song, produced by the legendary Max Martin alongside Ali Payami, represented a departure from Perry’s typical bombastic pop productions, trading spectacle for substance in ways the cultural gatekeepers weren’t prepared to acknowledge.

Mitchell Royel is a political analyst and conservative commentator focused on emerging trends in American political discourse.

Martin Touch:
Restraint as Revolutionary Act

Max Martin—the Swedish architect behind more number-one hits than anyone except Paul McCartney and John Lennon—made a calculated decision with “Rise” that confounded expectations. Rather than engineering another “Roar” or “Firework,” Martin and Payami constructed something deliberately understated. The production smolders instead of explodes. Perry’s vocals don’t soar into stratospheric runs—they burn with controlled intensity.

This restraint wasn’t weakness. It was precision.

Critics at the time couldn’t reconcile Perry’s pivot toward introspection. The Guardian dismissed it as “totally bereft of fun,” fixating on parachute metaphors rather than recognizing the song’s architectural sophistication. PopMatters reduced it to a single dismissive sentence: “Boy is this song dumb.” Entertainment Weekly acknowledged its effectiveness but framed it as mere “genetic engineering” for sporting events—as if intentional craftsmanship somehow diminished artistic merit.

They missed the point entirely.

Prophetic Nature of Perseverance

Perry released “Rise” as a standalone single—not attached to any album cycle, not designed to maximize commercial returns. She stated it was “a song that’s brewing inside me for years, that has finally come to the surface,” released because “now more than ever, there is a need for our world to unite.” This was July 2016, weeks after the Nice terrorist attack, months before an election that would fracture American discourse in unprecedented ways.

The song debuted at number eleven on the Billboard Hot 100 and claimed the top spot in Australia, giving Perry her fourth number-one in that market. It achieved platinum certification in the United States. Yet the critical establishment treated it as disposable—another Olympics anthem destined for the cultural recycling bin alongside Bryan Adams and Nelly Furtado’s “Bang the Drum.”

What they failed to recognize was that Perry wasn’t writing for the Olympics. She was writing for what came after.

Lyrics
Critics
Ignored

“I won’t just survive / Oh, you will see me thrive” opens the track—a declaration that establishes the song’s central tension between mere existence and purposeful living. Perry confronts antagonists throughout: “When the fire’s at my feet again / And the vultures all start circling / They’re whispering, ‘You’re out of time’ / But still I rise.”

The Guardian mocked the vulture imagery as biologically inaccurate—because apparently metaphorical coherence matters less than ornithological precision in pop criticism. But Perry wasn’t writing a nature documentary. She was articulating the experience of public persecution, the whispers of irrelevance, the pressure to conform or disappear.

“I won’t just conform / No matter how you shake my core / 'Cause my roots, they run deep, oh” functions as both personal manifesto and cultural prophecy. In an era increasingly hostile to individual conviction, Perry planted her flag—not with bombast, but with quiet certainty.

Spiritual
Undercurrent

Perry began her career in Christian music before pivoting to mainstream pop—a biographical detail critics mention dismissively, as if artistic evolution invalidates spiritual foundation. Yet “Rise” contains unmistakable echoes of that worldview. She calls on angels who speak Jesus’s words: “Oh ye of little faith / Don’t doubt it, don’t doubt it / Victory is in your veins / You know it, you know it.”

The official music video—dismissed as “gymnastic extravaganza” by The Guardian—opens with aerial footage of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue and includes moments of Olympians crossing themselves, pointing heavenward, offering visual prayers. Perry wasn’t proselytizing. She was acknowledging that perseverance requires something beyond individual willpower—a connection to purpose larger than personal ambition.

This nuance was lost on critics determined to categorize the song as either secular empowerment anthem or religious propaganda. It was neither. It was both.

What We’ve Learned:
Long View Vindicates Conviction

Nearly ten years later, user reviews tell a different story than professional critics. “When you listen to Rise in 2025, everything seems to make sense—all the battles, the walls, the stumbles,” writes one listener. “Think about how 2016 was preparing Perry for one of the worst years of her career, and she managed to deliver a track that would express exactly her feelings of overcoming it.”

Another reflects: “Her best songs are always the ones that are written vague enough to take in multiple different ways… and this one along with Unconditionally stands out the most in every aspect of the song.”

The critical establishment demanded immediate gratification—hooks that explode on first listen, messages that require no contemplation, production that announces its brilliance. “Rise” offered something more valuable: durability. The song doesn’t reveal itself in three minutes. It unfolds over years, gaining resonance as personal and cultural challenges accumulate.

Martin Legacy: Craftsmanship Over Flash

Max Martin’s production choices on “Rise” demonstrate why he remains pop music’s most essential architect. The keyboards, bass, guitar, horns, drums, and strings—all programmed by Martin and Payami—create layers of texture that reward repeated listening. The mix, handled by Serban Ghenea, balances Perry’s vocals against instrumental complexity without sacrificing clarity.

This is craftsmanship in service of message—not production as spectacle, but production as vehicle for enduring truth.

Verdict History Delivers

“Rise” wasn’t celebrated as one of Perry’s greatest achievements in 2016 because critics weren’t equipped to recognize what she’d created. They wanted another “Teenage Dream”—infectious, immediate, disposable. Perry delivered something that required patience, introspection, and the willingness to sit with discomfort.

The song’s commercial performance—number one in Australia, top ten across Europe, platinum certification in the United States—suggests audiences understood what critics missed. They didn’t need permission from cultural gatekeepers to recognize authenticity.

What we’ve learned since “Rise” is this: the most celebrated songs aren’t always the most important ones. Sometimes the tracks that matter most are the ones that refuse to conform, that plant roots deep enough to weather criticism, that rise not through spectacle but through substance.

Perry knew what she was doing. Max Martin knew what he was producing. And history—patient, unforgiving history—has vindicated their conviction.

The narrative is changing. Some people still aren’t ready for it.