Katy Perry – Woman’s World
[Video]
[2.15]
Joshua Lu: The prevailing narrative around Katy Perry has transformed: not just about her being a bad artist making bad music, but also about her being a bad person on top of it all. It’s easy to justify every mark. “Woman’s World” is dated in concept (empty feminist dribble), sound (plodding synthpop that would fit into any of her past three albums), and execution (scatterbrained music video rationalized via “it’s just satire bro”). Choosing Dr. Luke as the song’s producer was not only morally questionable but also marketed as her executive decision. There are bad artists who are bad people making bad music and still hugely successful; Katy Perry’s inability to join those ranks is weirdly comforting, in almost a cosmic sort of way.
[3]
Andrew Karpan: Rarely do songs flop by sounding so purely evil: a collage of bad taste arranged in a way that scans as faintly ominous, weird and off-putting, the sound of a dystopian future nostalgically looking back to the past.
[2]
Alex Clifton: Katy Perry is trying so desperately to have it both ways, and it muddies the message she wants to send. If we are to take “Woman’s World” as earnest, the song might’ve fueled teen feminist awakenings back in 2011 but now comes across so dated. If we are to take it as satire, then it’s a disaster as there’s zero bite or personality on display. Say what you will about Taylor Swift and her complicated relationship with feminism (and I will), but at least “The Man” had her fingerprints all over it with a few snarky zingers. There’s nothing in “Woman’s World” that I can laugh at (and that’s not even considering the Dr. Luke of it all). I was rooting for Katy, I really was, but someone girlbossed too close to the sun.
[2]
Brad Shoup: A pale stick of factory-engineered cheese, where all the laughs thud and all the flexes result in pulled muscles. Perry used to be one of our very best pop panderers. Now what?
[1]
Alfred Soto: Bet some of y’all want to hear her Kate Bush cover.
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: She’s a winner, a champion; she’s a flower, she’s a thorn. She’s a bitch, she’s a lover, she’s a child, she’s a mother, she’s a sinner, she’s a saint. But shouldn’t she feel a little ashamed about failing to clear the low bar of discount Dua Lipa?
[2]
Nortey Dowuona: Katy’s flat, nasal soprano is produced by Kalani Thompson and Ryan OG. Both are experienced hands, but clearly they could only do so much with the take they got. The melody Katy sings in the first verse is so flat and thin that when she ramps into the chorus, she barely resolves the melody, the “it” a jarring cut before the chords resolve. Thompson and Ryan try to multitrack her voice to give it the power it doesn’t have — a trick he’s learned from working with Kim Petras and The Kid Laroi, both of whom have weak yet distinctive voices — but it doesn’t work. During the second verse, the multitracked echoes below just remind the listener of the lack of depth in the main vocal, pitch corrected so noticeably that it sounds even more inhuman. Since the first and second verse play the same barely moving melody, there’s very little else the producers can do. And while the hook is where their work shines, the abortive chorus and warmed-over chords prevent Katy from selling anything. If only Thompson and OG had a better vocal to work with, or a less rapist producer.
[0]
Leah Isobel: I honestly don’t feel anything when people work with Luke anymore. Maybe that makes me a bad survivor, or a bad feminist; I’m sure that if I said that on Twitter a bunch of transphobes would immediately jump down my throat and call me a rapist. But it’s the truth. If there was a true window for accountability — and I’m not convinced there was — it closed when “Say So” hit number 1 and the industry was like, cool, let’s toss a bunch of other young women into a room with this guy. Or maybe it closed earlier, when Kesha performed “Praying” at the Grammys and seemed to collapse into herself after the song ended, to which James Corden responded with a blank, ineffectual “Wow” before moving the show along. Maybe it closed even earlier, when Bonnie McKee compared him to the devil and said that “Dr. Luke’s deals are famously bad, everyone knows that,” but still credited him with launching her career; or maybe it closed when, that same year, “New Rules” became Dua Lipa’s breakout hit, earning Luke’s publishing arm money via the songwriter Emily Warren. Maybe it was earlier than that, when Max Martin took Luke under his wing and made some of the most beloved pop hits of the form now known as “recession pop.” But honestly, it was probably earlier: when capitalism took the place of feudalism, when some British guys sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and established a society built on the exploitation of people and nature, when the music industry was built off of vaudeville and the systems of domination it valorized. When artists choose to work with Luke, they are thinking like record executives; they are often rewarded. (Quoth the prophet: “As long as everybody getting paid, right?/ Everything gonna be okay, right?”) Kim Petras is the first openly transgender woman to have a #1 single, and she only got there because she signed a contract with Luke. Nicki Minaj earned her first solo #1 with “Super Freaky Girl,” a Luke production. Joy Oladokun performed at the fucking White House. That’s not to excuse Katy’s decision, but to say that these kinds of decisions are often papered over as “compromises” instead of sacrifices. This single’s anodyne synths and bland, dated uplift smack of sacrifice. Any interesting perspective is filtered out of the song and redirected toward the video, with its blunt satire and strange pops of body horror. (If I had a nickel for every time a Katy Perry video’s visual metaphors made me wince, I’d have two nickels, etc.) The oddity of the whole package suggests a certain helplessness in the face of doom. If it is truly a woman’s world, it’s in the sense of Andrea Long Chu’s edgelordy Females: “The self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.“
[3]
Aaron Bergstrom: If the erstwhile Katy Hudson never actually broke with her fundamentalist evangelical upbringing and has in fact been working as a deep cover operative trying to discredit godless feminism and destroy it from the inside, how would that look any different from what she’s doing now?
[1]
Jackie Powell: Katy Perry is doing a lot. She’s doing too much. She’s straddling trying to be relevant, putting out an earworm, honoring her on-brand silliness that worked over 10 years ago, all while attempting to embody the current moment where rights in America are being taken away. “Woman’s World” has been discussed alongside “Chained to the Rhythm,” which Perry put out after Donald Trump was inaugurated, but while “Chained to the Rhythm” wasn’t great, it at least had some sort of message and substance. “Woman’s World” doesn’t answer why this is a woman’s world that we’re living in. It is just a list of adjectives. There’s an argument to be made that Perry is still functioning in a pre-November 8, 2016 world where Hillary Rodham Clinton was trying to make history but was too polished, calculated and apologetic to do so. But the name of the game in 2024 is being unapologetic, a little silly, and authentic. That’s why Kamala is Brat and not living in whatever suffocating universe Perry is in — I can tell you she’s not living on Chromatica, amid all of the comparisons to Lady Gaga’s “Stupid Love”. There’s one mashup on YouTube where Perry’s “Woman’s World” vocal is smashed on top of the Gaga “Stupid Love” instrumental, and the chord progressions and family of synths are indeed similar. But as usual with a Lady Gaga song, “Stupid Love” had more dissonant sounds that gave the track some intrigue and punch. I’m a firm believer in the concept that being an artist involves a certain amount of thievery. But instead of stealing like an artist—there’s a book written about that—Perry is stealing like a manufacturer or corporate bigwig without a soul, just like the incredibly flawed person who produced the track.
[3]
Katherine St. Asaph: It feels reductive.
[5]
Hannah Jocelyn: There’s no incentive besides the moral one to side with the abused, and who needs morals, especially when the abuser and their enablers are this powerful? That’s why Dr. Luke came back, and why he never left, depending on who you ask. Katy sounds good here (we’re not in straining “Daisies” territory anymore), and the beat is serviceably in-your-face and refreshingly loud. If this wasn’t Luke, I wouldn’t really care about it. In any other context, I’d even like the chorus line “we ain’t going away”; post-Roe it reads as hope that societal progress won’t be entirely reversed to the ’50s and/or before. But if we are, in fact, “going away,” that’s partly because of power-hungry, entitled men much like Lukasz Gottwald. It’s a predator’s world, always has been and maybe always will be; he’s lucky to be living in it, and Katy Perry’s happy to enable it. Neat harmonies on the word “celebrate,” though.
[3]
Ian Mathers: We live in the stupidest fucking dystopia, don’t we?
[4]
Will Adams: A failure of a lead pop single by almost every conceivable metric (sonically: uninspired; lyrically: dated; visually: contradictory; contextually: yikes), “Woman’s World” deserved its intense backlash from the moment its ill-fated snippet dropped. But the dust has settled, and my impression of the song now is mostly boredom and mild fascination. It is beyond me why Perry, whose career-long brand has been cartoonish kitsch — sharks, furniture, toilets, oh my! — thinks she’s at all equipped to deliver message music. And this was after Witness.
[3]
Isabel Cole: Sometimes I feel bad for hating so thoroughly on Katy Perry, America’s living embodiment of what the Madonna/whore complex does to a mf, for having not one real thought in her big empty brain, but then she’ll do something like reuniting with Luke in a pathetic attempt to rewind the clock back to when the two of them were still relevant. The lyrics are giving something between “Olympics-themed sportswear ad” and “studio exec who has never had a conversation with a woman his own age discussing his vision for a female superhero project.” There are pop stars in the world who can take dumb lines and make them sound like they mean something, but possibly nobody is less suited to that task than Katy Perry, whose musical identity, insofar as she has ever had one, has mostly rested on taking dumb lines and making them sound even dumber. It’s not just that her voice is grating, or that she’s never once in her career displayed any kind of musical intuition or finesse or really any quality one might associate with an ostensible professional singer beyond “loud”; it’s that she sings like she’s doing a bit. On something gleefully stupid like “California Gurls,” that served her well, or at least decently: it’s camp! On a song pretending at genuine sentiment — well, arguably it’s also camp, in Sontag’s formulation of “failed seriousness,” but it’s mostly just annoying. Luke, too, apparently has had not one single idea in the decade and a half since Teenage Dream, or else maybe he thought that putting out a track that would slot neatly onto the back half of that album would subliminally fool us into thinking it was 2010 again. But it’s not, and rather than nostalgia the utter banality of the sound invites incredulity: was it really worth it, for this?
[0]
Taylor Alatorre: “If we ended all collaboration with Dr. Luke tomorrow – and I will, if he deserves it, if the allegations against him are proven in a court of law – would that end sexism? (Crowd: No!) Would that end toxic masculinity? (Crowd: No!) Would that end record industry gatekeeping against mold-breaking female artists? (Crowd: No!) Would that protect other artists from those predators and abusers whose careers have continued unscathed? (Crowd: No!) Would that make the public any more receptive toward a stubbornly dated electropop stomper that misidentifies ‘girl power’ as a key ingredient of Teenage Dream‘s success, but whose uncompromising Moroder pulse and surprisingly diva-esque vocal turn are almost enough to override its intrinsic cheugy-ness? (Crowd: confused murmurs, smattering of applause)”
[4]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I can’t write anything more clever or devastating than what the internet has already written. Katy Perry has been so completely and rightfully been savaged—for her aesthetic, singing, taste, and existence—that I almost feel sympathetic toward her. Just not quite.
[0]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Defies even post-post-ironic enjoyment — no thinkpiece, no stannish counterfactual interpretation, no attempt to toss this into a running playlist or daily mix will survive exposure to this complete void. It’s hard to even discern what she was trying to do here.
[1]
Will Rivitz: Was she satirizing chart success too?
[2]
Kayla Beardslee: I want to weigh in with my score, but everyone has already roasted this song so thoroughly, I don’t have anything left to say. Just like Katy Perry!
[0]
Reader average: [0.5] (4 votes)