There is nobody better at committing to the bit than Katy Perry. When singing in Simlish, she puts her whole diamond into it. Her Vegas residency, launched in 2021 during the absolute nadir of her career, featured an extended setpiece in which she interacted with a giant toilet. Sometimes, the universe completes the bit for her: “The One That Got Away” was the only single from her gargantuan 2010 album Teenage Dream that didn’t reach No. 1 on the Hot 100. She is pop music’s Jenna Maroney, meeting every challenge with a vacant stare and nothing less than 150% commitment.
This is Perry’s greatest strength as well as her fatal flaw. When she half-asses something, you can really tell: Rhyming “trouble” with “bubble” would be a slam-dunk on a track about a sexy foam party, but Katy wasted it on a reggae song about the dangers of technology, or whatever. But when it comes to politics, Perry just seems bored, so much so that a comeback single titled “Woman’s World” seems like a foregone conclusion. And yet, when she describes women as “so intelligent,” she sings it in this halting, unintentionally patronizing rhythm that leaves you no choice but to assume she’s being sarcastic. Now that’s a good bit.
With its pulsating synths and steamroller chorus, “Woman’s World” is clearly modeled on Lady Gaga’s 2020 single “Stupid Love,” a brazen return to form that successfully launched Gaga into the second act of her career. There seems to have been a miscalculation, though: “Stupid Love” worked not because of its sound but because it took the core elements of Gaga’s music—slightly nonsensical lyrics, acid-trip concept, a general struggle with vowels—and turned them up to 11. It’s mystifying why Perry would have chosen to mount her comeback with a vaguely political song—you just get the sense that she just doesn’t really like or care about this stuff.
Even if “Woman’s World” didn’t sound like its author had to have feminism explained to her by the top half of the first page of Google, its message of empowerment would have rang false, simply because it was co-written and co-produced by Dr. Luke, the producer Kesha accused, in a since-dismissed lawsuit, of sexual assault and emotional abuse—allegations he denied. It’s sincerely twisted, if unsurprising—I generally believe you have to be at least be something of an amoral hypocrite to be a celebrity or pop star, and fair play to those willing to do it—but it also reveals “Woman’s World” to be even more of a monumental catastrophe: If Perry was willing to cop the built-in bad press of making a song about women’s lib with an alleged abuser, shouldn’t the song at least be a banger? Instead, it’s unfathomably tepid, irritating at best. In the immortal words of Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, uttered moments before she died: “Katy Perry, please stop.”