“World Class Sinner/I’m a Freak,” the fictional would-be comeback single for The Idol’s grieving mononymous pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), plays dozens of times in the HBO show’s first two episodes. The song loops while Joss and her dancers rehearse the song’s choreography (which was inspired by the panting routine from Britney Spears’s 2001 hit “I’m a Slave for U”) in the backyard of her Bel-Air mansion. It gets previewed for record-label execs and other hangers-on, who nod their heads along in strained approval. It restarts—over and over again, from the top—as Jocelyn struggles through multiple takes of choreo while filming the music video.
The track opens on an alluring note, an organ swell building to Jocelyn’s breathy vocals: “Maybe it’s hard to see / When you’re lookin’ at me / But I do what I want / Don’t give a fuck at all.” There’s a coquettish beat drop, an overt chorus (“I’m just a freak, yeah / You know I want it bad”), and line after line of crass chestnuts such as “Every weekend I’m tryna find someone to bang” and “Get down on your knees and get ready to become my bitch.” The bridge, as is true of many mainstream pop songs, is comically bad: a pitched-up delivery of “I’m a motherfucking world-class sinner” accompanied by a dizzying backing refrain of “Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me.”
“World Class Sinner” was written for the show by The Idol co-creator Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye and Asa Taccone, who is a musician, producer, and frequent collaborator with his brother Jorma’s comedy-rap group The Lonely Island. It’s a schlocky send-up of the sort of freaky single a former teen pop star might release to grease up her old image. It’s also a bop that has racked up over 6 million plays on Spotify in the last couple of weeks. On TikTok, creators are confessing they’re listening to it unironically and/or naming it the song of the summer. On Twitter, New Yorker writer Naomi Fry got existential: “I wonder how things would look like if I didn’t have ‘I’m just a freak yeah’ stuck in my head.” Emblematic of its Lonely Island stock, its line “’Cause you’re dumb, but you’re cute, that’s a good enough ratio” is one of the funniest lyrics of the year so far. If “World Class Sinner” is meant to indict a music industry that cranks out pop hits like a factory assembly line, the problem is that we’re all already programmed to love those damn hits.
We have, in some sense, heard this song before. Whenever we get a new show or movie set in the music biz, there’s often an accompanying original song that we are meant to think is bad—shallow lyrics, unoriginal melodies, flaccid hooks, A&R’d to hell. In 2018, there was the post-folk oeuvre of Lady Gaga’s Ally Maine in A Star is Born, with ditzy tracks like “Hair Body Face” (which has 45.9 million plays on Spotify) and “Why Did You Do That?” (62 million plays). Miley Cyrus delivered a ridiculous earworm in a 2019 episode of Black Mirror called “On A Roll,” as performed by her A.I. kiddie-pop cyborg Ashley O, which has garnered a whopping 112.5 million Spotify plays.
Rife with treacly optimism, “On A Roll” has a nonsense chorus (“I’m stoked on ambition and verve / I’m gonna get what I deserve”) and an absurd refrain (“Hey, yeah, whoa-ho, I’m on a roll / Ridin’ so high, achieving my goals”). As series creator Charlie Brooker told GQ in 2019, it’s meant to be “insanely positive, full of empty affirmations.” But at the same time, he admitted, “for sort of a satirical take on a pop star, we were humming [the song] ourselves. Everybody throughout the production was singing along unknowingly.”
Like “World Class Sinner,” the faux hits on the Black Mirror and A Star is Born soundtracks were written by real-deal musicians, at least partially. Ashley O’s “On A Roll” is a bubblegum interpolation of the Nine Inch Nails song “Head Like a Hole.” The co-writers on Ally Maine’s “Why Did You Do That?”, a deliciously clubby track with twinkly xylophone sounds and a house beat, include Gaga and veteran songwriter Diane Warren. In 2018, Warren told the New York Times that it was not written to be a “bad” pop song: “[It’s] not the intention. I would never purposefully sit down to write a bad song, although I guess I’ve done some without trying that turned out that way. This was a fun song, and I love fun pop songs. Not everything has to be serious all the time.”
In the movie, Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine ribs his wife Ally about “Why Did You Do That?” after she performs it on Saturday Night Live, mocking the lyrics: “Why do you look so good in those jeans? / Why’d you come around me with an ass like that?” And yet, as Warren said in the Times, “[music] can be everything. It can be a serious song, it can be a pop song, it can be a song about an ass.”
TV can be everything, too—even a show like The Idol, which gestures at being a prestige drama, claims to be a comedy (or so Tesfaye and his co-creator Sam Levinson keep insisting), and is ultimately as “about an ass” as a show can get. On some level, the show’s characters seem to understand this. “Do you like the single?” Jocelyn asks her friend/assistant Leia (Rachel Sennott) in the first episode, unsure that this is the banger to clinch her redemption arc. “I know it, like, works commercially but I just feel like every time I listen to it I’m, like, fucking embarassed.”
“It’s, like, edgy but, like, in a cool way,” Leia reassures her. “Not every song has to be like– It’s fun, you know? Like, you wanna dance to it.”
Later on, Joss plays the track for her shifty new paramour Tedros (Tesfaye), who spins it into an excruciating, moan-filled remix she later plays for her team—“Jocelyn says she’s found her new sound”—that leaves them both aghast and unimpressed. Record exec Nikki (Jane Adams) cuts down Jocelyn, telling her to be grateful for the “giant fucking big-titted hits” the label has given her. In the third episode, Joss and Tedros embark on their own delusional Laurel Canyon sessions, promising the label they’ll come up with something better than “World Class Sinner.” (Tedros claims he’s gonna enlist Mike Dean to lay down some tracks.) We never hear the song in episode 3, but we see clips of Jocelyn’s back-up dancer Dyanne, played by Jennie from Blackpink, performing the video Joss abandoned after Nikki pursued her to take up the discarded song.
Why, we wonder, would they champion such a song? Well, duh—because it’s a hit! We’re all going to be hearing real-life nightclub needle drops of “World Class Sinner” all summer.