Katy Perry got to enter herself into the grand pantheon of “Musical superstars who almost got really dumb obituaries because something went wrong while they were flying around an arena on a giant prop” last night, as footage has begun circulating of the recent astronaut suffering what looked to be a pretty shocking malfunction during a concert in San Francisco.
Specifically, Perry was flying through the crowd on the back of a giant metallic butterfly, performing her hit “Roar,” when the entire apparatus suddenly lurched hard to the side, dropping her several feet and sending her shaking. (From what we can make of the many angles of the moment circulating on the internet today, Perry did seem to be clipped in on a harness—but that part of the rig also seemed to get pulled abruptly when the whole setup suddenly jerks about five feet to the right, sending the whole butterfly swaying and shaking.) Credit where it’s due: Perry only loses about one line of the song, returning to the track’s chorus despite clearly still steadying herself on her suddenly unreliable ride. (She later posted a picture of her own terrified face from the moment to her Instagram Story, along with a “Goodnight San Fran” caption.)
As noted by Deadline, this isn’t the first “flying around the auditorium” mishap to pop up at a major concert in recent weeks; Beyoncé was floating over her fans atop a flying car in Houston last month when the whole thing canted dangerously to the side, forcing her to stop down a performance of “16 Carriages.” (She’s since replaced the flying car with a flying golden horse, which doesn’t seem like it’d necessarily solve the underlying problem, but…) And, as very old people on the internet, we still have semi-fond memories of when Kanye West (somehow less disturbed then than he is now) would float over his crowds on a big flying platform and then would have to fend off fans who tried to catch a ride by hanging off the edge. The point is, music stars really like floating above arenas like some kind of mythical musical god; what’re the demands of a bunch of poor winches, pulleys, and cables when compared to that?
