Is The Idol’s ‘World Class Sinner’ the Song of the Summer?

“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.