Katy Perry is not having the best of times right now. The 39-year-old recently released the first single from her new album and received a lot of criticism for it. “Woman’s World” is intended as a feminist anthem, but reproduces sexist clichés in the music video. The song was produced by Dr. Luke, among others – a man who has been accused of sexual abuse.
“What kind of regressive, warmed-over hell is this?” was the Guardian’s headline about “Woman’s World”. A writer for the Austrian radio station FM4 wrote of “the most desperate comeback of the year”. Since then, Perry has released two more singles, which did not generate a comparable shitstorm, but did not completely convince critics either.
On Friday (20 September) the American will release the accompanying album, called “143”. Can this save her career?
Link to glossy pop
Musically, Perry is, as usual, focused on glossy electro-pop. While “Woman’s World” is based on a simple, pulsating beat and retro synthesizer, “Lifetimes” is reminiscent of somewhat random Ibiza house.
The most interesting is the third single, “I’m His, He’s Mine,” which Perry recorded with the American rapper Doechii. The song works mainly because of the rap parts – and because the two rely on a sample of the incredibly catchy 90s house hit “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” by Crystal Waters.
Backward-looking gender images
For her new album, Katy Perry has worked again with Dr. Luke, who was responsible for hit singles such as Perry’s “Teenage Dream”. This is the music producer who has been in a legal dispute with the musician Kesha (“Tik Tok”) for years. She accused him of manipulating and sexually abusing her for years. Dr. Luke denied this, the two sued each other and settled their legal dispute out of court in 2023.
“I understand that it sparked a lot of discussion, and he was one of many people I collaborated with,” Perry said on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “The truth is, I wrote those songs out of my experience of my whole life going through this metamorphosis. And he was one of the people who helped me make it all possible.”
The past few years have been marked by female pop stars empowering themselves. Musicians like Kesha, but also Taylor Swift, Adele, Billie Eilish, Charli xcx and Chappell Roan are actively standing up for their rights – and refusing to be swallowed up in the role of the sexy pop star.
Perry’s excuses and a music video in which only conventionally beautiful, almost naked women dance to her statement that women “can be anything” seem strangely backwards.
“A little sarcastic”: Katy Perry reacted to criticism
In the video for “Woman’s World,” the musician can be seen in pin-up outfits while, for example, holding up a diamond-studded cordless screwdriver, driving a monster truck, or filling her bare butt with gasoline.
This is satire, Perry replied after criticism was voiced. “We’re just having fun, being a little sarcastic,” she said in a video she posted on Instagram. “It’s very slapstick and very exaggerated. In this setting, we pretend that we’re not concerned with the male gaze – but of course we’re catering to the male gaze.”
The early success of Katy Perry
Not only her music, but especially her public presentation seems like a recycling of what made Katy Perry one of the pop icons in the early 1910s. She had incredible success back then. Five singles from her 2010 album “Teenage Dream” landed at number one on the Billboard charts.
It was a time when Perry, Rihanna and Lady Gaga topped the charts with electro-pop hits like “Firework”, “Only Girl (In The World)” and “Poker Face”.
It was also the time when a song about a woman kissing another woman still seemed somewhat subversive (and at the same time could serve male fantasies – as seen in Perry’s video for “I Kissed a Girl”).
Perry is clearly trying to connect to this era. But while this seems socially out of date, she and her team lack the compelling musical ideas that characterized her earlier hits.
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