Why Katy Perry's "Part of Me" is terrible (the video, at any rate)

It’s not something that really needs to be explained, there are bigger beasts in this world to hunt, but here I am anyway. Part of Me, for those of you who hate Katy Perry, is a song about a woman whose boyfriend cheats on her so she confronts him in his office and decides to join the marines. Before she does that she defiles her body by cutting off her hair and strapping her breasts, apparently as a reaction to being cheated on. Why is she strapping her breasts anyway? This isn’t Boys Don’t cry, she’s joining the Marines based on a poster entitled “The Woman’s Marines”, that’s a pretty big indicator that strapping your breasts is totally redundant. I can handle her strive for independence and a need to seize power and find a confidence in herself… by becoming just like every other soldier around her. Hey, if she’d introduced a knee into her cheating ex’s balls at the beginning it would have been a short song, I get that. But here it is. It’s the constant flashbacks. She’s doing press-ups, pushing herself to be the best that she can be, and she trivialises it by reminding us that her sole motivation is she got cheated on. She can’t act for herself, it’s all about a giant “screw you” to the ex, who probably banged the hell out of that office clerk he was not-so-inconspicuously having relations with… by a huge glass window… presumably in a town his girlfriend lives in. Even at the end, as she goes to mow down some people, she’s still got that “and look at me now” look. Yeah, you showed him. Well done, doesn’t seem petty at all. “Hey, just going to join the Marines. Why? Oh, my mom just told me my room was a mess, I’m livid. I don’t need clothes, just a pair of scissors to mangle my hair and a picture of the family to burn when I’m almost finished training. Cya, Dad.”