The following is an excerpt of an article from the Aug. 19 issue of Rolling Stone. This issue is available Wednesday on newsstands, and Friday, Aug. 6 online via , Rolling Stone's premium subscription plan.
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.
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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 s--- bout my girl Miley. I love that ho."
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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 fiancé, 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.
To read Vanessa Grigoriadis' story in full and hear Perry open up about speaking in tongues, her love for Russell Brand and losing her virginity, you must be a subscriber to All Access.