Hey ladies! I don’t know about you but waking up this morning, I felt different. Changed. Possessed of some kind of ineffable life force. A long-suppressed inclination towards total world domination suddenly blossomed. It was kind of scary, but I knew that I could do anything I wanted with this feeling, like buy stuff or reveal the hitherto untapped complexities that I’ve always kept stashed under a bushel (you’re telling me I could be sexy … and satirical?) or succeed in business or even become some kind of seltzer/shoe/apple cider vinegar mogul. I felt like the strong complex female main character in the strong complex female main character movie of my own life. What was this intoxicating sensation? As I watched Katy Perry’s new video while cleaning my teeth – hey, I prize dental wellness and looking good just 4 me, I thought, sassily waggling my index finger in the slightly smeared mirror – I realised what had happened. I’d just been empowered, baby!
Perry’s clubby missile of a new single, Woman’s World, had affirmed to me that yes, it is a woman’s world – and you’re lucky to be livin’ in it. In her woman’s world, women are nuanced, winners, smart, soft, pretty, prickly, fiery and shiny. As the video demonstrated, you could be a Rosie the Riveter type (but, like, hot) or a businesswoman or a big sexy bionic horse. Women can have it all! Thank god someone finally said it.
There was another strange sensation. That of being dragged back in time, possibly in some kind of cosmic wagon pulled by the scary bionic horse woman. Back to almost exactly a decade ago, to August 2014, when Beyoncé performed at the MTV Video Music awards in front of the word FEMINIST, emblazoned in big baby pink letters, and the whole world had to be passed its collective smelling salts at the pop-cultural notion that girls just wanted to have fundamental rights. Maybe a few years further back, even, to when the brash electro-pop of Lady Gaga stressed the importance of being exactly who you were. (Incidentally, Gaga’s biggest hit of 2014 was Do What U Want, with R Kelly, another winding reminder that we were ever so young.)
Woman’s World is Perry’s first solo single in three years: “the first contribution I have given since becoming a mother and since feeling really connected to my feminine divine,” the 39-year-old pop star said in a statement. Her last album, 2020’s Smile, was her first since her 2010 superstar breakout Teenage Dream not to hit No 1 in the UK or the US. She has made subsequent stints in Vegas. The sense, going into her seventh album era, is of a 2010s pop star now very much on the back foot – one compounded by pre-release visuals that seemed nakedly inspired by the warped futurism of next-gen stars Arca and Charli xcx. At least the imagery suggested some kind of attempt to embrace pop’s present; then the credits for her new album 143 were revealed, heavily featuring Perry’s old collaborator Dr Luke.
In 2014, Kesha sued Luke (real name Lukasz Gottwald) for sexual assault and battery, sexual harassment, gender violence and emotional abuse. Luke denied the claims and countersued for defamation, alleging that Kesha, her mother and management had fabricated the claims to escape the record contract she had signed with him. In 2016, a judge dismissed Kesha’s claims. Kesha had also accused Luke of raping Perry, which Perry and Luke denied, and in 2020 a judge ruled that those comments were defamatory. In 2023, Luke and Kesha settled his defamation claim.
No conviction has ever been brought against Luke, although he is perceived by many as a pariah within pop music, and any artist – such as Kim Petras – who works with him becomes subject to disparaging online commentary from pop fans and will be called upon to defend the choice. When the collaborators for 143 were announced, Kesha simply tweeted “lol” – widely assumed to be a reference to Luke’s involvement – and was later photographed in a T-shirt emblazoned with the same word. The actor Abigail Breslin also called out the news, and later said she received death threats for doing so. Much of the online commentary around Woman’s World underlines the disconnect between working with a producer who comes with such baggage to make a song about the strength of women.
Kesha at a gas station with a “LOL” shirt. pic.twitter.com/SIhDITLhlZ
— Kesha Discord (@KeshaDiscord) June 28, 2024
The video for Woman’s World suffers from a much more benign case of mixed messaging. It starts out as some sort of attempt at satire, with Perry dressed as Rosie the Riveter and gals in work gear recreating the famous Lunch Atop a Skyscraper photo. They pretend to flamboyantly wee in urinals, which are quickly swept away (with far less glamour than in George Michael’s canonical Outside video) to reveal the stripped-down gang chucking away wellness paraphernalia – including Perry winking as she hurls a can of her own seltzer brand – to dance in a circle waving sex toys at each other. Boobs are oiled and bedazzled in stars-and-stripes bikinis. Perry wields a bedazzled screwdriver. It is perhaps less the trenchant comment on how women are sold the tools of their own disempowerment that Perry presumably intended than a preview of the Makita power tools calendar 2025.
Muddled in with all this turbo cheesecakery are blatant grasps for gay standom. “She’s a sister and a mother,” Perry sings, winking at drag culture so hard you suspect she’d pop a hernia if her abs weren’t hard as armour. Later in the video, as bionic horse Katy strides through some sort of apocalyptic scene – having rebooted as a sexy equine cyborg after being crushed by an anvil – two men kiss in the windy maelstrom. This clumsy expansiveness stumbles in a later bit when Perry rides in a monster truck with a sparkly uterus hung from it, an inadvertently apt symbol of all the essentialist, pandering nonsense going on here.
Not to sound like one of those men (actually I’ll take Perry’s insistence that it’s my goddess-given right as a woman to be essentialist, OK!) but: this garbage has six writers. Granted, it is infernally catchy, but it is the Bic for Her of pop, the pink Yorkie for girls (get your lips around this!), a song that made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it.
As well as sounding like reheated Gaga, it also sounds brazenly like Chappell Roan’s Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl, a knowing, joyful, absurdist take on songs exactly like this that also pounds with scream-along euphoria. Roan – along with Sabrina Carpenter and Charli xcx – is modelling how to be a pop star in 2024: they’re inventive, self-aware, silly, deep, some of the qualities Perry had at the peak of her promise but seems to have lost for ever. Charli’s Girl, So Confusing (and the subsequent remix with Lorde) drew on the complexities of jostling for supremacy as a woman. Woman’s World is more girl so confused.
At the end of the video, Perry encounters a teenager doing a TikTok dance in front of a ring light shaped like the ♀ symbol, which Perry steals and brandishes as she flies off in a helicopter. “Who are you?” the girl asks, perhaps in some sort of self-aware nod to Perry’s absence from pop’s upper echelons in recent years. “I’m Katy Perry!” she yells in slow-mo. It sounds less like a roar of triumph than the echoing cry of someone falling down a large ravine.
