Katy Perry’s new single is a depressingly retrograde racket, a faux-feminist pastiche paying tribute to the “feminine divine”. Titled “Woman’s World”, it would have been mortifying enough in its natural habitat of a Hillary-for-president fundraiser in 2016. But now, in 2024, it sounds little more than alarmingly antiquated.
With its Rosie the Riveter visuals and dreary lyrics about sisters, mothers and sexy confidence, the track also marks Perry’s return to music following two poorly received albums and several years manning the judge’s desk on American Idol, a show that rivals only Tony Blair and the mice in my kitchen cabinets in its refusal to go away.
The internet, meanwhile, has decided that Perry should face the kind of digital flogging previously reserved this year for the beleaguered Jennifer Lopez and Justin Timberlake. Perry’s ethics, creativity, styling and choice of collaborators have all been put on trial at the Pop Culture Hague in recent weeks, with viral tweets and memes declaring her not only out of step with the times, but a punchline very much deserving of mockery and criticism.
Some of it is fair – the “go girl!” caterwauling of “Woman’s World”, for instance, is lent an air of fraudulence by the presence, on its production credits, of Dr Luke, a man who has long denied allegations of rape by the pop star Kesha. Some of it feels harsh. But it all suggests that the road ahead for Perry will be far trickier than she may have imagined.
This is not, it should be said, new ground for her. Conversations about Perry’s relevance as a pop star and her oddly stagnant sound have swirled for years. It’s been more than a decade since a Katy Perry album release has gone smoothly, with 2013’s Prism – which featured hits including “Roar”, a track built for supermarket aisles and BBC Sport montages – the last gasp of the singer as an unflappable chart titan.
The wheels seemed to fly off soon after. Witness, in 2017, saw Perry tease a shift into “purposeful pop” – an ambiguous term that didn’t align with the radio-friendly but chronically basic boppery of the record itself (remember “Swish Swish”?). Smile, released three years later, was a minor improvement, but its lead single – the shimmering, romantic “Never Really Over” – was the only truly great thing there. Everything else felt like an artist stuck on creative autopilot.
Ever since Madonna ditched visible underwear and chunky jewellery for cone bras and public nudity, transformation has been key to pop stardom. Few of the genre’s biggest names have ever maintained a singular aesthetic longer than, at best, two album cycles. Perry, though, has long been defined by her immobility – the cartoonish, wink-wink, nudge-nudge of her music videos; the hotel-art empowerment of her lyrics. “When people think of me,” she told Apple’s Zane Lowe during an interview this week, “they think songs with a message, songs that are like captions on T-shirts, and I love that.”
Perry does seem to enjoy what she’s doing, and there is something fascinating about someone who steadfastly commits to the bit long after many have grown tired of it (just look at the anvil that crushes her, Looney Tunes-style, in the “Woman’s World” video). It does make her deeply uninteresting as a pop star, though. And when pop requires not just bangers on speed-dial but narrative, spectacle, glamour and a sense that you’re watching someone who is their own centre of gravity, Perry isn’t doing enough.
It was easy, at one point, to get a sense of Perry as an artist. After a brief, early Noughties dabble in Christian pop under her birth name Katy Hudson, she arrived properly in 2008 with the single “I Kissed a Girl”, a bawdy grab-bag of pop tropes that cemented her as a star with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Perry looked like Zooey Deschanel but had a creative identity all her own: brassy synths, a powerful voice and a chugging, pop-punk soundscape that felt like Avril meets Britney.
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One of the Boys – which also featured hits including “Hot N Cold” and “Waking Up in Vegas” – remains her best album to date and it was a massive hit, selling seven million copies. Teenage Dream, released in 2010, was even bigger, tying Michael Jackson’s Bad for the album to produce the most number-one singles on the US Billboard charts. It’s sort of the apex of Noughties pop: expensive, glossy and full of massive, soul-burrowing choruses. Everyone knows “Firework” and “California Gurls”. Everyone can probably visualise the album cover, with Perry luxuriating nude in a candy floss sky. But its success feels as if it slightly derailed the woman behind it all: Teenage Dream made so much money, and immediately catapulted Perry into the big leagues with era contemporaries Rihanna and Lady Gaga, that the mission seemed to be to replicate it. Rather than evolving as an artist, trying out new sounds or new collaborators, she stayed in a safe space, shackled to the idea of herself.
That Perry’s new album – 143 will be released on 20 September – marks a return to her work with Dr Luke, who was retired for both Witness and Smile, suggests that she still feels indebted to that moment in time. That Teenage Dream was her opus, and that merely replicating the circumstances of its birth will be enough to get her another hit. But Dr Luke’s involvement lends the 143 campaign an unhelpful and decidedly unpleasant energy, and it’ll be a topic that Perry will have to navigate anxiously, if she chooses to address it at all.
It’s a problem in itself. Pop in 2024 is all about truth, from Charli XCX baring her soul to the likes of Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande excavating their recent romantic splits. Perry, because of her collaborators, is returning to a hostile populace on the defensive, her motives unclear and her sound unchanged. Who is Katy Perry now? I’m not even sure she has the answer.
‘Woman’s World’ is out now