Do you understand?
Photo: Katy Perry, via YouTube
On July 11, Katy Perry released the first single from her upcoming album, “Woman’s World.” 143her first album in four years, was accompanied by a music video, which is split into two parts: the first sees Perry dressed as a sexy Rosie the Riveter promoting vibrators and urinating in a urinal, and the second sees Katy Perry dressed as a bikini-clad, robotic-legged Katy Perry interacting with various pro-women imagery.
If this is a woman’s world, then Perry is clearly not the leading lady, because both the song and the video were huge flops: Vulture called the former “the most hackneyed iteration,” while The Cut said Perry was stuck in 2016. Many others across multiple sites were saying similar things.
Two days later, Perry responded to the criticism by tweeting a video explaining the basic premise of the music video, with her own caption: “Anything is possible! Even satire!”. Similarly, some viewers argued that much of the backlash was missing the point, and that Perry also thought the video was bad. What these defenders forget is that just because it’s satire doesn’t mean it’s boring. In fact, a lot of satire is boring. One example is Katy Perry’s video for “Woman’s World,” where America’s most comedic white female pop star turns everything on its head.
There is a paradox in making satire. Deeper, but more subtle satires are often misconstrued as celebrations by people who identify with the characters they are satirizing, while satires with a very clear intent often come across as obvious, if not overtly condescending, to the audience. And if Perry is a character in a “woman’s world,” she is obvious. The way she holds a bottle of “whisky for women” with a big grin on her face might as well read, “Satire whiskey symbolizing the commodification of feminism.” Dressed as Rosie the Riveter but surrounded by women pointing vibrators at her is less a commentary and more a collection of first-thought images. The urge to tweet “You can do anything! Even satire!” reflects a total underestimation of the intelligence of the viewer, and of the criticism of the music video itself.
While the satire in “Woman’s World” is clear in most ways, the video is very confusing. While the beginning is satirical, the song itself is not. In the lyrics, Perry is 100% serious in trying to sell the audience on a certain kind of empowerment of the era she’s supposedly mocking at the beginning of the video. But then the anvil falls on her, and by her own account, the video takes us into a whole different world of feminist ideas that reflect Perry’s philosophical evolution.
So why does the second half include Perry greeting a young black woman in a “Feminine Divine” T-shirt doing the dance moves from the first half of the video, stealing her moves and her equipment before flying off in a helicopter? It’s completely unclear what she’s trying to say. Is she saying that this used to happen, but doesn’t happen anymore in her version of modern feminism? Is she arguing that pop stars are ultimately too selfish to actually engage in allyship? Does that undermine her own explanation for the video as a whole? Mostly, it just feels like, “Oh, Katy wasn’t acknowledging that she knows racism exists” towards the end of the shoot. This just seems so ill-thought-out.
But in that case, we at least have some idea of what Perry is referring to. Two-thirds of the way through the video, the battery in Perry’s robotic leg is about to die, so she goes to a gas station and sticks a pump in her ass. My first thought was that this was a comment on how capitalism is intertwined with social issues, namely how the exploitation of women’s bodies is connected to the exploitation of natural resources. Or maybe it’s a comment on BBLs. But then I remembered that this was a part of the video that wasn’t supposed to be satire, so I thought maybe she was alluding to, and I can’t put this in a delicate way, putting gasoline in her ass. I mean, like a fart. I’m not against comedy with gasoline, but sometimes, like this one, it feels like the creators just ran out of ideas and needed to fill time and just said, “LOL, butts are funny.”
Perry’s “satire” defense counters the most common criticism of the “Woman’s World” video, namely that it’s stuck in the Hillary-era pop feminism that emerged around the time of Perry’s most famous empowerment anthem, 2013’s “Roar.” The “Woman’s World” video, she argues, is meant to mock the ignorance of a bygone era. But mocking the ignorance of a bygone era is not just a satire. Also Dated. SNL “This Is Not a Feminist Song” aired in the spring of 2016. “Gaslighting, Gatekeeping, Girlboss” has become a meme in 2021, but at the time Girlboss It’s already become a staple punchline on Twitter and in the world of alt-comedy, resulting in a feminist critique that’s almost as outdated as the feminism Perry is supposedly criticizing.
If no one laughs, you can’t call your work funny. The same goes for any attempt at sarcasm. Although viewers understood that Perry was using imagery ironically in the video (see point 1 in this article), they ultimately didn’t believe the satirical assertion she was making. That’s because viewers know who Katy Perry is and who she voted for in the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral election. They also know that the song was produced by Dr. Luke. So, as much as Perry claims to be mocking certain feminist tropes and ideas, viewers recognize that she is participating in those tropes and ideas through the video. Satire requires self-awareness, otherwise it becomes just hypocritical.
The great thing about Katy Perry is that she’s at her best when she goes all-in on a silly idea with total innocence. Her best music videos are: This is what humans normally find fun in front of a camera.and the whipped cream boob cannon. Perry has always been conscious of the comedy that permeates throughout her work, but it was fun to feel like it wasn’t actually there. total That’s hard to control. Unfortunately, “Woman’s World” seems like the exact opposite: a satirical, half-assed effort at a supposedly clever idea. Just because a comedy piece is satirical doesn’t make it better than other comedies; more often than not, it means it’s worse than other comedies. That said, the chorus is catchy.