It’s a Woman’s World, and Katy Perry’s Back to Singing In It

It really is a woman’s world — specifically a woman named Katy Perry’s world, in the new video for “Woman’s World.” And in that woman’s world, women — including Trisha Paytas in a quick cameo — can wear bikini tops and do construction work, not to mention drink whiskey, use urinals, drive monster trucks, and walk straight through glass. Gloria Steinem wishes! Perry dropped her much-anticipated comeback single and visual today, leading off her first album in four years, 143. It comes after a rollout that was lengthy in more than one way, with Perry first announcing the song on June 17 and later revealing the lyrics on a 500-foot dress at Paris Fashion Week. It also comes with a fair bit of controversy, after fans discovered that alleged abuser Dr. Luke co-produced the track. (Perry last worked with Luke on 2013’s Prism, before Kesha accused him of sexual assault, but never disavowed him — in 2018, her lawyers said Kesha was making “outrageous lies” about Luke.) Uh, are we lucky to be living in this woman’s world?

Regardless, we’ll be getting more of it when Perry releases 143 on September 20. It’s her sixth album, following her 2020 release Smile, and it’s also her first release since she left the American Idol judges’ table to “go out and find that pulse to my own beat.” Sounds like she found it on 143, which a press release describes as “an album with a lot of heart – and a lot of BPM.”


https://www.vulture.com/article/katy...album-143.html

____________________________________________

Katy Perry Reportedly Chose to Reunite with Dr. Luke

Katy Perry isn’t letting Dr. Luke be the one that got away. Rolling Stone reports that she is reuniting with the producer — who collaborated with Max Martin on past hits including “Last Friday Night,” “California Gurls,” “I Kissed a Girl,” and yes, “The One That Got Away” — for her next project, which has been nicknamed KP6 by fans. “Katy knew exactly the album she wanted to make and put together the team to make it happen,” a Capitol Records source told Rolling Stone. “And that includes previous collaborators including Luke, Stargate, Max Martin, and Sarah Hudson, and some new heavy hitters such as Vaughn Oliver, Rocco Valdes, and Theron Thomas.” (Coincidentally, Oliver and Valdes produce for another K.P., Kim Petras.)

Perry, who left American Idol to focus on new music, instructed her Instagram followers to “get ready to pop off” with her first album rollout in more than four years, starting with the July 11 release of lead single “Woman’s World.” Earlier this week, she teased the track by dropping of herself with metallic legs and to some Selling Sunset-esque lyrics: “Sexy, confident, so intelligent / She is heaven sent / So soft, so strong.” Hours after Perry posted the snippet, Kesha tweeted, “lol,” which some fans interpreted as a shady hint that Luke was involved. In 2014, Kesha accused Luke of drugging and sexually assaulting her at a party in 2005. He denied the allegations and countersued for defamation in a case that has since been settled. (During the course of the legal battle, Perry denied that Luke sexually assaulted her, a rumor Kesha and Lady Gaga claimed to have heard from an industry exec.) The full album credits aren’t out yet, but something tells us that KP6 won’t include a Kesha collab.

https://www.vulture.com/article/katy...kp6-album.html

Though worthy of discussion, the thread could probably begin and end just with the title, if you know what I'm sayin'.

Can you still listen to the music or get distracted by the massive jugs?

I wonder if she can have a huge career now and not the gigantic mega star she was in the early 2010's where she could compete with the other pop superstars like Taylor Swift but we all know who won that war in the end.

Ill still mute all her stuff, but im glad shes still hot at this point of her career where she has to show skin. And shes been showing a lot.

As a person who is a minor fan of a couple of her hits, I can say this song fails miserably. Not catchy or interesting. She is great to look at though, and has obviously been working out hard in the gym and on her diet.

The funniest part of the video was instead of hanging bull's testicles from the truck you have a hanging uterus that looks like a bull (almost like the Chicago Bulls logo). I never have noticed that before.

Wonder if that could catch on for women?

All I can say is that Legolis is one one lucky Elf.

he's lucky he didn't see how you spelled his name!

I'm sure that last part was supposed to be ironic but my reaction is the same as the girl at the end of the video, who are you and what the heck is going on (obviously I know who Katy Perry is)?

The Guardian didn't love the song.

Katy Perry: Woman’s World review – what regressive, warmed-over hell is this?

(Capitol)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.



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 ) 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.

Ouch.

Finally, a feminist statement I can jerk off to!

This should be on the sticker on the shrink wrap of the vinyl.

I wonder if it took a 45 person committee to write the song and another 37 to produce it?

I'm here for the T&A... and that's all I got out of the video.

Absolutely horrible song. Not that any of her past music was good, but this is a new level of crap.

I didn't know she was still around. Haven't heard about her in years it feels like.

Saw her in concert five or six years ago. She puts on a good pop show.

And a good poop show!

Never though she'd pull a G. G. Allin.

Oof, horrible song and dumb as dirt video, but she provided some great eye candy at least (the only thing that made me sit through the whole video ).

Never been a huge fan of her's but this song is low grade dog food.... at best. Nice eye candy thou... I agree.

I know the woman that played her stunt double in the video.

She joined American Idol and took some time off though she put out the "Smile" album in 2020.

Katy look hot in her white bikini but the boots were horrible.

good lord that's awful. who knew women's empowerment was about -- checks notes -- shaking boobs.

That's where the power generators are!

"Hey babe, let me squeeze your empowerments" doesn't work at clubs either, FYI.

And right on cue: Katy Perry 'Woman's World' backlash: Singer defends 'satire' video (usatoday.com)