It’s rare that a piece of art comes along that is so monumentally bad it unites almost everyone in their hatred for it, and it’s even rarer for this to come from one of the world’s most accomplished and beloved pop stars. But with her new, much-anticipated single Woman’s World, Katy Perry has done it.
To borrow some strange and stilted words from the song itself, “She’s a winner. Champion. Superhuman. Number one.”
Since dropping on Friday, this supposed feminist empowerment anthem and music video have been torn apart by critics, with Pitchfork calling it “abysmal” and The Guardian’s Laura Snapes saying “[it] made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it”.
The terrible reception has led Perry to respond directly, releasing a behind-the-scenes video on her social media in which she – dressed as a sexy Rosie the Riveter – explains why specific elements are “sarcastic” and “very on the nose”. But this has only fuelled the pushback with some of the most popular replies reading, “If you have to explain the joke, it’s not a good one” and simply “CRINGE”.
Is it really that bad?
Woman’s World has many things working against it. The song itself is plodding and predictable, with lyrics that sound ripped from a 2004 tampon commercial. The opening lines – “Sexy, confident / so intelligent / she is heaven sent” – were widely mocked on TikTok well before the song’s full release.
And the video is a garish and confusing spectacle that never seems quite sure of what it wants to say. Taking Perry’s explanation of the opening third of the clip, she is satirising the girlboss feminism of the 2010s. Dressed as feminist icon Rosie the Riveter, Perry recreates the famous Lunch atop a Skyscraper image with models in sexy tradie wear before hammily spruiking “whiskey for women”, sex toys, gua sha rollers and a can of her own non-alcoholic apéritif (released not in the 2010s, but just a few years ago).
She then gets smashed by a giant anvil – which she’s explained as “a reset for me and a reset for my idea of the feminine divine” – and awakens in a chaotic new world with giant bionic legs that have to be recharged by pressing a petrol pump into her exposed butt cheek.
