Katy Perry's album cycle already off to rough start, thanks to Dr. Luke

In February of 2024, Katy Perry promised that “it’s going to be a very, very exciting year … for all popstar girlies!” She meant, of course, that she and an overwhelming amount of her peers were prepping to drop new music. Except her prophecy has taken on an unfortunate new meaning in the wake of the backlash surrounding the announcement of Perry’s first single, “Woman’s World.” The excitement has been less about the actual music, and more so about the resurfaced conflict between herself and fellow “popstar girlie” Kesha, and their mutual producer, the controversial Dr. Luke.

Let’s get this out of the way first: what we’ve heard of “Woman’s World” doesn’t sound great so far. In the snippet Perry posted to TikTok, she sings, “Sexy, confident/So intelligent/She is heaven sent/So soft, so strong.” The shallow empowerment of this kind of “girlboss anthem” that might’ve better suited Perry’s self-proclaimed “purposeful pop” era back when she was promoting Witness in 2017. These lyrics are not particularly promising, and an alleged leak of the rest of the song divided fans online. Some believed that the leaked snippet was generated by artificial intelligence. Others ran with a rumor that the track was rejected from the album of a lesser-tier pop star, Ava Max, based mostly on a long-ago Instagram post. Above all, many listeners were concerned about the Dr. Luke of it all.

Rolling Stone confirmed that Perry did indeed work with Dr. Luke on her upcoming album, as well as several other producers including Stargate, Max Martin, Sarah Hudson, Vaughn Oliver, Rocco Valdes, and Theron Thomas. Luke and Martin worked on many of Perry’s biggest hits— “I Kissed A Girl,” “Last Friday Night,” “California Gurls,” “Roar” and more—so it makes some business sense that she would return to them, especially after the relatively modest successes of 2017’s Witness and 2020’s Smile. As a Capitol Records source told Rolling Stone, “Katy knew exactly the album she wanted to make and put together the team to make it happen.”

Many fans took issue with Perry’s “team” including Dr. Luke. Beginning in 2014, Luke was embroiled in a legal battle with Kesha, who accused the producer of “sexually, physically, verbally and emotionally” abusing her during their professional relationship. Luke denied her allegations, claiming the lawsuit was an attempt by Kesha to get out of her contract with his label, Kemosabe Records, and counter-sued Kesha for defamation. The lawsuit went on for years, and in the meantime, Kesha was forced to continue to release music under Dr. Luke’s label (including the Grammy-nominated “Praying,” a song widely believed to be about Luke). They eventually settled out of court in 2023.

Katy Perry was brought into the conflict amid Luke’s defamation lawsuit, when private text messages between Kesha and Lady Gaga became public as part of his case. In the text exchange, the two singers discussed a rumor that Perry had been raped by Dr. Luke. The rumor “was discussed privately between the two friends and would never have become public, except that Dr. Luke decided to publish it to millions of people in his 2017 complaint against Kesha,” Kesha’s attorney said in a statement at the time. “This defamation claim, based on a private text message which was based on the statement of a third party, is also frivolous.”

For her part, Perry denied that Luke had ever sexually assaulted her. In a deposition (via People) the artist said that she “felt pressured” to support Kesha because “People were generally very angry at me for not saying anything” about the case. Understandably, she said she was “pissed off” at being brought into the middle of the legal battle, and was “annoyed at both Luke and Kesha” as a result. “And I want to stay out of it because I know them both and I empathize with both of them and obviously it’s a horrible situation for both of them. And the only two people that know what really went on are those two people,” she said. “But Luke was using me as a pawn because it’s a good play.”

Perry admitted in her deposition that she hadn’t publicly defended Dr. Luke because she feared “that I would be attacked, I would be the one woman that is against women and I’m not against women, but I believe in innocent until proven guilty and I believe in justice.” At the time, she didn’t work with him on her Witness album because “The association with working with Luke was a negative at the time and still is because of this incident,” she said (via The Blast).

Apparently, Perry must have judged that the association working with Luke is no longer “negative,” perhaps because of his recent work with other artists like Nicki Minaj and Doja Cat. (Doja Cat, who signed to Kemosabe Records before Kesha’s allegations came to light, has said she would no longer work with the producer.) That was definitely a misjudgment. “Woman’s World” isn’t even out yet, and it’s already kicked up a firestorm of criticism, particularly given the optics of an alleged abuser working on a female empowerment anthem. Perhaps Kesha put it best when, seemingly in response to the Perry-Luke team-up news, she posted on Twitter/X a simple, sarcastic: “lol”.