It’s “awe,” not “up.” Katy Perry dropped an explosive revelation on Sunday night’s (March 6) episode of American Idol: you’ve been singing the incorrect lyrics to her hit song “Firework” this whole time. Don’t be embarrassed, you’re not alone — her fellow Idol judge Luke Bryan is right there with you.
There’s no telling why the 37-year-old pop star sat on this bombshell revelation for over a decade, but perhaps she suspected that some day she’d need to bust it out to roast one of her Idol co-workers. It all started when Bryan launched into a pretty unflattering impersonation of Perry singing her 2010 -11 smash, a teasing dig that might have cut deeper had he gotten the lyrics right.
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“It’s not ‘up up up,’ and it’s not ‘ah ah ah,'” Perry lectured the “Play It Again” singer. “Well what is it then, because I’ve been dying to know all these years,” Bryan sarcastically replied.
“It’s ‘awe awe awe.’ ‘A-W-E,'” Katy said, spelling out the word to be perfectly clear. “It’s ‘awe awe awe’ everybody, get it right!”
With “Firework” topping the Hot 100 for four weeks in 2010 and spending 39 weeks on the chart, it’s hard to come to terms with how so many people could bungle the words to such a catchy, globally popular song. Nonetheless, Perry doubled down on her assertion that the lyric has, in fact, always been “awe.” In a recent Instagram post, she uploaded the Idol clip of her schooling Bryan along with a screenshot of a Kerouac.com article that highlighted the time she said at the 2012 Grammys nomination concert that “Firework” was inspired by Jack Kerouac’s iconic 1957 counterculture novel, On The Road.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,” the Beat legend wrote in one of the books’ most quotable passages. “The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
That’s right. ‘Awww.’ See Perry’s post below: