Part of a series I’m working on about women in pop culture: repping pop culture, being pop culture, changing pop culture, embarrassing pop culture. Future installments will cover movies, books, and more.
On X (formerly Twitter), user Peter Lloyd aka @Suffragent_ writes:
“Katy Perry’s new song is a feminist anthem called Woman’s World.
It was co-written by six people, four of whom are men.
It’s produced by three men, one of whom is Dr Luke, who was accused of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse by Kesha.
The video is also directed by a man.”
Historically, I have not been immune to the musical outputs of either Perry or Łukasz “Dr. Luke” Sebastian Gottwald — and I did vote for the two of them on “Dark Horse,” with its delightful Juicy J middle eight, in the 2014 Pazz & Jop. Kesha filed her lawsuit against Dr. Luke in October of 2014, and I was done with him pretty soon after the story broke wide. I have no use for Perry anymore either. She always seemed like someone who was gonna be stuck in a different era, whether it was the counterintuively conservative SoCal rockabilly/Bettie Page style of her early look or the nihilism of the Teenage Dream singles with their themes of running away, getting blackout drunk, the firework-go-boom as metaphor for self-actualization — all at the dawn of a bunch of new voices begging us to not fetishize the retrograde and emerging modalities urging us to work on ourselves so our personal trauma and baggage doesn’t have a knock-on effect in the larger world we influence with every choice we make.
“I Kissed a Girl” also feels of a different era, although in some ways it is contemporary. Sure, the faux-sapphic titillation gives “Britney smooching Madonna” and we’re in Chappell Roan times now. But titillation and OMG Shocking are very 2024, which we’ve totally seen with Saltburn and Challengers and even Roan herself with that particular line in “Casual” that helped spur her virality. The downside of the less-queer “titillating” media of 2024 is that the culture industry is still run by leering aging hetero men and they’re the ones who sign and develop and package women to be Hot Young Marketably Feminist Miss Thangs, so we get former Disney chick Olivia Rodrigo being hired to feed the gross horny record guys’ boring Quentin Tarantino masochism when she pouts in her little outfits like archetypal altgoth apex-predator Rose McGowan/Megan Fox and says mean shit to boys. I like “Vampire” but whatever, I see through it. Roan, although she came up collaborating creatively with the talented songwriter/producer Dan Nigro before Rodrigo’s huge success with him, is not from the male gaze, is not for the male gaze, and is not a fucking Disney princess. I am hopeful. Sabrina Carpenter and her “Espresso” are fun, and yet — let’s blow up that pipeline. Nickelodeon too.
It’s nice how Billie Eilish has made the industry adapt to her weirdness when it realized she wasn’t going to commit to changing herself for anyone. Musically, she’s not the most exciting artist out there, but her visual sensibility is hers. And Eilish’s high-profile inclusion in the 2023 Barbie movie was a major facet of what made it a special project. Barbie can be anybody, she can be all of us, so why can’t a queer baggy Barbie with green hair be partially responsible for the soundworld of another Barbie’s journey to self-discovery? And then represent the movie so well in its publicity/awards cycle?
Meanwhile, Brat summer continues. I’ve been a fan of Charli XCX for a while, both as a hyperpop/A. G. Cook girlie and a regular-pop girlie, so I’m glad she’s seeing some American success now. I enjoy Brat and find it a very 2024 album in a different sense than I talked about above. There’s the minimal lime green cover (recalling if not referencing the Colpa Press Los Angeles Rave Flyers 1991–1994 book) that knows it makes itself easily memeable for any situation and the most no-brainer grabby key art for a marketing whirlwind ever, and the public beefs that swirl around the 31-year-old’s life as well as her reflections on that drama, and the immature and defensive adulation of problematic famous friends. The most 2024 vibe on Brat is the sense of exhaustion: she doesn’t sound terribly excited about the bathroom coke or the club classics. I hear her yearning to be something, anything, besides the “365 party girl,” and hear it more yet in the ex machina of the “365” remix at the end, with its dirty digitalia finally subsuming her human vocals in a push to keep… bumping that.
But life does find a way. One of the most welcome surprises of 2024 was June’s all-woman Black Music Month at NPR’s Tiny Desk, in which Chaka Khan was radiant and her artistry shone through those old chestnuts as clearly as ever, and SWV spun their lush nineties harmonies into bold, sinuous, and celebratory full-band neo-soul jams. I want more! In the meantime, I’m catching up with the Tems and Tierra Whack sets.
