Yeah, I want to like Katy Perry and I feel like that “Woman’s World” song is pretty catchy, but I don’t really get why she was working with Dr. Luke on it, when artists like Kesha and Kelly Clarkson have been so outspoken about their extremely negative experience working with him. The lyrics are pretty meh as well, but I’ve always felt that way about her songs - she goes for melodies and hooks and impressive vocals, but the lyrics are an afterthought.
I’m also curious why an artist like Kim Petras chooses to work with Dr Luke consistently. It seems kind of baffling but maybe he still holds a lot of power in the music industry with record labels? It makes me wonder how much power Katy Perry and Kim Petras actually have over who produces their music. If their experience working with him is anything like what Kesha and Kelly Clarkson have described, it’s hard for me to believe that Katy Perry and Kim Petras would enjoy working with him, but maybe they have a different kind of relationship with him somehow.
There's obviously no way for us to know for sure without being inside the industry ourselves, but it's largely speculated that for a handful of artists - Kim Petras, Doja Cat, formerly Kesha - the connection to Dr. Luke is purely out of contractual obligation to work with him and his label. (FWIW, I've also heard that Kim Petras isn't actually under any obligation to work with him, so I'm not sure what the truth is in her case.) What I
do know that Katy specifically is not under any kind of contract with Luke like that and does not have to work with him if she doesn't want to, which can only mean her choice to link him up with him for "Woman's World" was a mutual decision and makes said decision all the more baffling and egregious.
We partially know this because Katy previously dropped Luke from her roster of producers around the time she was making
Witness in 2017, which was notably when the allegations against Luke were getting impossible to avoid and also at the time when Katy was trying to reinvent her image to be more socially conscious and feminist-minded. She seemed to have the foresight then to realize that trying to have messages in her music to uplift women while simultaneously hiring an abuser to bring that message to life was not a good look, but recent events seem to suggest she was more worried about the potential backlash she would get from associating with him publicly than anything.
Not for nothing - and this is pure conspiracy - but Dr. Luke is known to use aliases nowadays, and some have suggested there's some names credited on
Witness that are actually Dr. Luke using a fake name. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but him secretly being in the background the whole time makes more sense to me than Katy suddenly welcoming him back with open arms after making a point not to work with him. Again, though, that's pure conjecture, and I think the real issue isn't just that Katy is working with Dr. Luke, but that she hired him to work on a song ("satire" or not) with feminist messaging in it that was clearly meant to be a big, grand comeback statement. It immediately exposes what she's doing as, at best, misguided social commentary by someone who probably shouldn't be trying to make social commentary, and at worst, a hollow and cynical play for brownie points.
I honestly think that if this single has been your typical fun summery Katy Perry party jam, the association with Dr. Luke wouldn't have been at the forefront of every article and review written about it. There still would have been controversy and backlash, sure, but I think she might have had a chance to recover in the public eye. Now, though, unless the rest of the album is twelve "Teenage Dream"s stacked back to back to back, I think that ship has sailed.
Even if the music is good, I'm skeptical that it will do much to reverse her fortunes. Like I detailed in my post the other day, people just don't seem to be looking for new music from Katy Perry. I think her time in the spotlight has faded, but she's not okay with that, so maybe it was desperation that brought her and Luke back together? I really don't have the answers, but I think that unfortunately in the music industry, a track record of hits speaks louder to some than a track record of assaults, and without speaking on Katy Perry's judgment of character too much, it looks to me like she was mostly concerned with getting eyes back on her work no matter what. Though now that she's seen what kind of publicity that mindset gets her, I wonder if she'll reconsider.
