Why has our coverage of Katy Perry’s Rolling Stone cover been so exhaustive? I have no idea, and I apologize. I was excited when I read the first excerpts from Katy’s profile, where she discussed how her “freelance” minister parents used to speak in tongues. Then I felt so badly for her and her f-cked up childhood that I actually wrote a sympathetic piece about how she didn’t look all that Photoshopped on the Rolling Stone cover. Now Rolling Stone has released more excerpts from their cover story, plus additional photos of Katy. And that’s where we are now. I still say that she doesn’t look terribly ‘Shopped. Sure, it’s there, but she still looks like herself, and not some cat-like android. The rest of the photo shoot – well, I think wearing fishnets on the beach is pretty dumb, and her boobs look crazy fake in the Daisy Dukes photo. So, not so awesome. The other interview excerpts are pretty dumb too, so now I’m back to not liking her all that much:

The other day, Katy Perry was Googling herself again. “Any artist who says they don’t Google their name is a big fat liar,” she says. Perry is shrewd about her online image, with 3,062,173 followers on Twitter and a long-standing friendship with Perez Hilton, who has boosted her for many years. She was on her laptop, which she calls her office – she has no other, not even at her home, a 1920s triplex in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles that she cleans obsessively – when she noticed a bunch of online gossip sites were reporting that she had called Miley Cyrus’ new look “Britney Spears all over again” at the MuchMusic Awards in Toronto. “It’s worse. Look at those outfits. It’s bad.”

Now, Perry had said nothing of the sort – or, at least, nothing she meant for anyone to overhear. This required immediate action. She quickly tweeted a response: “I never said shit bout my girl Miley. I love that ho.”

Perry knew that what she was doing was weird. “It’s a little gross,” she says. “I’m sure no one knew or cared about that line about Miley. When you look at other celebrities’ Twitter feeds and see them posting about something they read about themselves on a Google Alert, it’s like, ‘Uh, maybe you should stop Googling yourself every day, the world does not spin around you.’ ”

But Perry mainlines attention the way her fiance, Russell Brand, once did with heroin (and now does with attention), so she found the entire interaction to be deeply satisfying. Not only did hundreds of gossip sites report on her tweet, but she had also managed to publicly call 17-year-old Miley Cyrus a “ho.” That was naughty. That was walking the line. That was exactly the kind of moment that Perry lives for.

[From Rolling Stone]

Enormous eyeroll. It’s this kind of thinking that will ensure that Katy takes The Douche Mantle from John Mayer. Doesn’t she remind you of Mayer now that I’ve said it? Mayer used to say bullsh-t like “Uh, maybe you should stop Googling yourself every day, the world does not spin around you” without irony. He used to be addicted to attention like it was crack cocaine. He used to think he was the smartest guy in the room, always, and that his words were so important, everyone needed to hear them. Hell, he’s probably still like that. And Katy’s taking it and running with it.