The Guardian Skull Drags Katy Perry’s Woman’s World

[BUtterfield 8 41,385]

 

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.

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. 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 areyou?” 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.

[Borisapillar 9,131]

itswhatshedeserves.gif

 

Katy always gave mean girl vibes. She came for Gaga and her comments about Britney over the years were downright cruel. Glad the world is finally seeing her for what she is.

[Borisapillar 9,131]

reheated Gaga is wild

[nATAH 48,889]

reheated Gaga

[palma 7,814]

2 minutes ago, Borisapillar said:

reheated Gaga is wild

no lies were told in that review though 

I would feel sorry for Katy but she dug her own grave with this 

[BUtterfield 8 41,385]

[Teletubby 148,980]

[Sorcerer 12,487]

16 minutes ago, BUtterfield 8 said:

It sounds less like a roar of triumph than the echoing cry of someone falling down a large ravine.

HELP 

this is why music journalism is essential

[Blahwhatever22 8,117]

[Juanjo 2,139]

Couldn’t agree more! Also, the gay kiss was so unnecessary! I was like, girl, you are trying waaaaay too hard! She was totally like, “Here, f*gs, I guess this is what you want, right?”  

[nATAH 48,889]

14 minutes ago, Teletubby said:

edit the word flop onto the anvil

[Edonis 28,950]

well? did they lie? 

[Red 97,983]

g0000rl someone did not drink their morning coffee 

[Bronco 11,017]

Damn a paper like the Guardian, which simps for every problematic white woman possible these days, is saying Katy is ****. She really is over

[SlaeUrAnus 15,958]

“Reheated Gaga”

NOOOOOO