Katy Perry has strongly condemned the White House for featuring her hit song "Fireworks" in a promotional military video highlighting U.S. airstrikes in Iran.
The controversy began on July 23 when the White House's official TikTok account uploaded a clip showing military operations. The video used Perry's 2010 track as background music, aligning the lyrics "boom boom boom" with footage of military strikes, alongside the caption "Iran has been warned."
On July 25, the pop star took to X to express her outrage, stating she was "deeply appalled and angry." Perry made it clear that she did not give permission for her work to be used, writing, "did not approve this, I was not asked, and I absolutely do not condone it."
"I wrote this song to be an anthem of hope, healing, and inner strength for people going through their darkest personal moments. To see a message of self-worth and upliftment weaponized to soundtrack destruction and violence is a complete violation of everything my song stands for," Perry wrote. "My music is for bringing people together, not celebrating warfare."
In response to Perry's criticism, Kaelan Dorr, Deputy Assistant to President Trump, shared a clip from Perry's 2012 music video for "Part of Me," which portrays her undergoing U.S. military boot camp. Dorr captioned the clip with, "This you?"
Meanwhile, the U.S. military's strikes on Iran on July 23 marked the "13th consecutive night of strikes aimed to hold Iran accountable and diminish threats from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to commercial shipping," according to a statement on X by U.S. Central Command.
President Donald Trump has consistently defended his administration's military actions against Iran, despite domestic political opposition. While the House of Representatives voted 214-208 to end the war, the Senate backed the president in a 49-47 vote.
"We want to get it over with, and we want to do it right, but we have to … do what we came to do," Trump remarked at an Environmental Protection Agency event in Washington, D.C. "We can't let them have what they want, which is nuclear weapons."
Perry is not the first high-profile artist to object to the White House's unauthorized use of music on social media. Ariana Grande previously criticized a June 9 TikTok video that showed federal agents arresting and handcuffing individuals to the soundtrack of her 2024 song "Bye."
"Please do not ever use my music in relation to this barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense," Grande commented. The audio and her comment were subsequently deleted. Responding to the situation on June 12, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson countered, "We’ll say this one last time: what’s actually barbaric, inhumane, and heinous are the criminal illegal aliens who have injured and murdered innocent American citizens."
Other pop stars, including Kesha, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sabrina Carpenter, have also criticized the White House for using their music without consent. Additionally, Nancy Sinatra reacted on X on April 19 after Trump shared a video on Truth Social the previous day featuring her late father Frank Sinatra singing "My Way," calling the post "a sacrilege."
