Katy Perry's Egypt History Lesson In 'Dark Horse'

Let’s just have a history lesson about ancient Egypt with Katy Perry! Her new video for the song ‘Dark Horse’ features Juicy J and Katy as a sort of Technicolor Cleopatra, surrounded by more bling that the whole Kardashian clique can even dream of and body guards which look like leftovers of Avatars or the Smurfs. I know, it’s a Perry video, you don’t have to make sense of anything, but why Egypt? Why the pharaohs? Did she watch too many Elizabeth Taylor’s oldies lately or did she always have a secret love for the Indiana Jones trilogy? But director Mathew Cullen actually gave a very serious reason to the Time:

‘[Perry] said that there’s actually a place in Egypt called Memphis, and she thought it was so interesting that Juicy J is from Memphis, Tenn. She basically came to me and said, ‘I want to do something Egyptian and I want to combine it with Memphis hip-hop.’ That’s music to my ears — when an artist has a couple concepts that they want to mash up to create something fresh.’

The Memphis connection,… I am so impressed. And these people think they have come up with some new idea! Cullen insists that ‘they researched the period online to better respect the symbolism while having fun’. I see, and that’s why the whole thing looks like a Cheeto commercial on acid? (She seems to eat some red Cheeto at one point).  But this guy is hilarious (or totally stupid) and he continues, ‘We’re only here because we build on the stories of every human being since the beginning of mankind. The most important thing is that when you create something, and this is actually something Katy and I worked to do — you bring a new spin to it.’

And even though the Time pretends that David P. Silverman, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania and Curator of Penn Museum’s Egyptian Section, finds the video ‘very wonderful’, gives a long list of very accurate details found in the video to demonstrate that Katy Perry and Mathew Cullen could have a PhD on Egyptology and that he could totally use the video in his class, this star wars version of ancient Egypt is completely laughable. Who is that professor, is he smoking something? It’s totally ridiculous how they want to be taken seriously for a video whereas it is just entertainment.