Katy Perry is burning it all down on her new single, aptly titled “Watch It Burn.” You might be wondering how she is doing that — maybe with some matches or a Molotov cocktail? Nope. She’s using her newly grown scorpion tail.
“Watch It Burn” is the follow-up to last fall’s “Bandaids.” In the video for the latter, she suffers a series of horrible Final Destination-like accidents. Somehow, she survives them all and is last seen smoking a cigarette outside a gas station. Although that’s definitely illegal, it was a hint for what was to come in this new single. “Gonna try to forgive and forget/ Light a cigarette/ And watch it burn,” she sings during the song’s chorus, embracing a new era of cigarette-obsessed pop.
Oddly enough, I have many thoughts on this new Perry era, specifically how the video ends in a kind of baptism. In the visual, she wreaks havoc on an innocent town with her sleek, pointed tail. At the end, she enters a church where her tail is vanquished and she is thrown into a bath of holy water on the altar. I can’t help but wonder what this might mean, whether it connects to her Christian rock beginnings, or if this is a literal spiritual rebirth or an artistic one.
Watch the Christian Breslauer-directed video below.
