Welcome to Oblivia! Katy Perry debuted the music video for “Chained to the Rhythm,” her new single with Skip Marley, on Tuesday, February 21.
In the four-minute video, the 32-year-old singer dons a Judy Jetson-esque white dress and rocks cotton candy pink hair as she heads to a futuristic, escapist theme park named Oblivia.
Throughout the video, which was directed by Matthew Cullen and filmed at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California, Perry and the other attendees dance their way through the seemingly perfect amusement park, oblivious to the world around them. Like Perry’s performance at the 2017 Grammy Awards, the video is a commentary on the current political climate in the United States.
“So comfortable, we’re living in a bubble, bubble,” the pop star sings, as she pricks her finger on a rose thorn. “So comfortable, we cannot see the trouble, trouble.”
Later in the dystopian visual, Perry and her friends drink flaming glasses of blue “inferno H2O” and watch a fellow parkgoer run on a human-size hamster wheel. Toward the end, Marley, 20, who is the grandson of the late reggae singer Bob Marley, pops out of the 3-D movie screen and raps, “Time is ticking for the empire / The truth they feed is feeble / As so many times before / They greed over the people.”
“Chained to the Rhythm” is the first single from the “Teenage Dream” singer’s forthcoming fifth studio album, her first since 2013’s Prism. The song premiered on February 9, along with a quirky lyric video.
“I’m so proud of [the song],” Perry told Ryan Seacrest on E! Live From the Red Carpet at the Grammys. “I think it’s a new era of me. I call it an era of purposeful thought. All of my songs have always had layers to them. … I used to be kind of the queen of innuendos, and I woke up and educated myself more, and I think I’m maybe more the queen of subtext, and I think it’s a song that starts conversations … and I think we need to listen to each other.”
Watch “Chained to the Rhythm” above!
