She’s a-non-y-mous.

Seriously, Katy? What’s the point of throwing your hat back in the ring, in the year of BRAT, ‘Espresso’, and Chappell, if you’re not even going to try?

It’s pretty obvious that Perry is making a last-ditch play for pop superstardom – tryhard, but conceptually fine – with her upcoming record 143, falling dutifully into line with the club-pop girls in search of an audience that just might love her un-con-di-tiooooon-alllll-yyyyy.

Trouble is, ‘WOMAN’S WORLD’ is phoned the absolute fuck in. The pop artists of the moment, the ones who are painstakingly breaking the back of the Taylor industrial complex, owe much of their recent success to either undeniable songcraft, or sparkling popstar savvy, or both. Katy Perry demonstrates an affinity for precisely none of these qualities on ‘WOMAN’S WORLD’. This isn’t a skill issue on Perry’s part – see ‘Teenage Dream’, see ‘Dark Horse’ – but she clearly has zero interest right now in actually building something from the stems up that might someday be authentically adored.

There is a beat and then there are words. There’s a problem with both. First, the words:

“Sexy, confident / So intelligent / She is heaven-sent / So soft, so strong”

“She's a winner, champion / Superhuman, number one / She's a sister, she's a mother”

Who does Katy Perry mean by ‘she’? Does she mean Katy Perry? Perry is, indeed, a sister and a mother, although I don’t think she’s referring to those terms so literally as she is in the way that a Gen Z Mitski fan might. Perhaps she simply means any woman. In that case, what in the patronising, platitudinal, faux-feminist anthem do we have on our hands? This is Hillary Clinton-pop. Perry’s ‘she’ is maddeningly anonymous, a one-dimensional blank canvas upon which to project the artificial light of a woman’s world that men conspicuously seem to profit off of.

“Open your eyes, just look around and you'll discover, you know / It's a woman's world and you're lucky to be livin' in it”

Is it? Katy Perry took four years off to watch Roe v Wade be overturned, the Taliban return to power, and Andrew Tate emerge as a Gen Alpha deity and that is the best she could come up with? Opening your eyes and looking around in 2024 really just serves to remind you that patriarchy is unfortunately alive and well. For the most part, men remain free to make women feel systemically unsafe and face minimal accountability for it.

And here is where we turn to the beat, produced by none other than Dr Lukasz Gottwald (not a doctor). Dr Luke is a longtime collaborator of Perry’s, having been involved in no less than seven of Perry’s eight Billboard number one hits. Around this time, he also worked closely with Kesha, signing her to his Kemosabe label in 2012 and contributing to each of her four number one singles. Kesha later sued Dr Luke for sexual assault and battery, gender violence and emotional abuse, sparking a volley of legal proceedings that ended in a settlement in 2023. The veracity of the allegations aside, it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that Dr Luke is probably a pretty heinous guy. Pop music distanced itself from Dr Luke over this period, with a couple of notable exceptions: Doja Cat, who worked with him pretty closely until Scarlet; and Kim Petras, who has stuck by his side with Hillary Clinton-like devotion. Even Perry kept him at arm’s length – until now.

There is something deeply, revoltingly cynical about reaching out to a man who has quite possibly committed sexual violence in a desperate attempt to make one last number one hit, only for the ‘hit’ in question to preach women’s empowerment in the shallowest possible fashion. You can tell that Perry simply doesn’t care about this song; it is a business decision, a totem of shoddy marketing. Everything about ‘WOMAN’S WORLD’ is noxious and soulless. It is the musical equivalent of a glossy plastic toy made with toxic chemicals. And, yes, the track is gnawingly catchy – sadly, Dr Luke is one of the most efficient producers in pop music history – but that’s mostly because it sounds like an Italo-fied version of Sister Sledge’s ‘We Are Family’. There is nothing novel here. On every level, to its very core, ‘WOMAN’S WORLD’ is regressive.

36

Sam Gollings

21 July 2024