Don't be a little b1tch with your chit-chat

[koganbot]

I take my critical stand in favor of... Ke$ha? Yeccch!

Great convo over on the Singles Jukebox, in full thrall even as I type this, about "Blah Blah Blah" which I reviewed at the last minute expecting to give it a 6 or so and discovered to my surprise that I was at a 9.*

This was my Jukebox review:

Tunefully pretty clatter that's clatter nonetheless, fusillades of frosting from all sides, chocolate kisses battling with sugar squirts, totally blah-blah-blah appropriate. Wiseacres 3OH!3 show up sounding proper and somnolent in comparison and are instantly obliterated by Ke$ha's cotton-candy eruption.
[9]

And this was my comment, in response to Alex O. saying "She dares to be stupid and vapid and revels in it, and makes it sound attractive":

She may simply be stupid and vapid – I haven't done the research. She's probably just falling into clichés of the wild life as her path of least resistance, though I'd like to project desperation onto her in order to imagine depth. I hated her from the get-go and may still hate her. So I went into this thinking "catchy enough for a 6″ and came out with a 9; what happened is that I hooked into the high-pitched pretty chaos and the pulse that's quite a hot throb underneath and that pulls everything together, and as sound this began making "You Belong With Me" and "I Kissed A Girl" and "3″ and "I'm On A Boat" and "Loba" and "Tik Tok" and "Heels" and "Untouchable" and "Outta My Head" and "Wobble" and "Cry For You" and "Disturbia" seem too pale and bare and languid in comparison. As sound, that is.

In other words, this rocks. The nearest equivalent I can think of is Tommy James & The Shondells' "Mony Mony," and this has a throb that beats that.

Which doesn't necessarily make "Blah Blah Blah" better than all those – though maybe it does, my viscera often holding sway against everything else; but I'm not a one-issue voter. But if I were still thinking of going anywhere as a musician, I'd try to figure out what Ke$ha and her producers did here and ask myself, "How can I harness that?"

Ke$ha

Watch on YouTube

Tommy James & The Shondells

Watch on YouTube

EDIT: Oh yes, and I spent half an hour last night doing a quick skim of John Leland's singles columns in Spin in the late '80s, unsuccessfully looking for what my memory told me was his recalling how he once said to his mom that he liked rock 'n' roll because it was noise, and by noise he meant Tommy James, not the Stooges. Maybe my memory is wrong here, and it was someone else, or my imagination.</failed fact check>

*UPDATE: Of that great Jukebox convo, while the reviews are still up, 50 of the 51 comments no longer show at the site, but Edward O. fortunately had them on file and I've now posted them here on Dreamwidth/LJ!

Comments

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Those are all my least favorites! Well, no -- like I said, I have enjoyed "TiK ToK," and "Take It Off" is an all right enough set piece, though it doesn't really go anywhere with what it's setting up. (Dark hole in the wall, glitter on the floor, girl feels a kinship with and an attraction to freaks, but not enough to stop objectifying them.) But "Your Love is My Drug" and "Blah Blah Blah" are shrill and stompy, like Katy Perry songs, but without the distinctiveness of Katy Perry's lyrics -- they're not Ke$ha songs, they're just songs. Anyone could have sung them. (By the way, since when have Pink and Avril ever tried to force anyone to have fun?) Both "Kiss N Tell" and "Dinosaur" feel like less skillful versions of tracks off Lily Allen's first album. ("Dinosaur," in particular -- it swipes some of the sonic tricks from Lily's "Knock 'Em Out.") And as for "Party at a Rich Dude's House" -- okay, look, I've been to a party at a rich dude's house, and if you were in the closet pissing in the Dom Perignon, you were seriously missing out. There was way crazier shit happening than that! But "Party at a Rich Dude's House" just slops out another helping of the same wild-n-crazy Ke$ha's been serving up all album long. Drunk! Barfing! IRREVERENCE! Peepee! There's nothing that focuses on the experience -- not Ke$ha's experience, not my experience, not anyone's experience -- of crashing a party at a rich dude's house. It could just as easily be "Party at the Offices of a Major Media Conglomerate." "Party at Your Aunt's House." "Party Outside a Liquor Store Where We Ill-Advisedly Spent a Lot of Money."

aceterrier, whose real name I don't know, made a good point in response to the "dumbest Ke$ha lyrics" thing over on Tumblr:

The dumbest ones are the ones where she tries to be all vulnerable and ends up just sounding like everyone else.

I don't necessarily agree that this is tied to her trying to be vulnerable (some of her best stuff is in her vulnerable songs) but I do agree that the big problem with Ke$ha is, try as she might to create some sort of personality for herself, she doesn't sound any different than anyone else. And it's because she's a bad storyteller. As a songwriter, as a pop star, as an interview subject, she consistently chooses to come back to the most generic concepts: alcohol, sex, swearing, rebellion. She hardly ever peels back the layers of those things, exposes the details, makes them personal and distinct. And that's what I mean when I say she sounds well within her depth: She doesn't seem like she's bitten off more than she can chew, she seems like she hasn't taken a bite at all.

I suppose it might be an issue that I prize "distinct" over everything else, but I'm a writer. I'm trained to look for time and place and character and conflict. And the songs I like all have those things, or at least start down the road toward having those things. "Take It Off." "Stephen." (Although musically it just riffs off of Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek." Someone should tally up the number of times Animal sits on sounds established by other artists -- there's "Dinosaur," there's "Take It Off.") "Animal," where her voice hits a sweet spot between Fall Out Boy's emo whine, that Katy/GaGa vaudeville brass, and Rihanna's burnt hardness. The bit in "Backstabber" where she bitches about how all she ever did was drive your broke ass around.

But overall, she fails. She fails at establishing time and place and character in her conflict in her songs and in her persona.

Which is not to say that "starting down the road toward those things" won't be enough for me in the long run. it was enough for me with Lady GaGa. And even as I'm writing this, I can tell that in a week I'm going to turn around on Ke$ha, just like I did with Lady GaGa (and maybe turn around on her again, just like I did with Katy Perry). But even then -- the way I feel about Lady GaGa is very different from the way I feel about Lily Allen, or Demi Lovato, or Ashlee Simpson. I like Lady GaGa's songs. I have a relationship with Lily's and Demi's and Ashlee's.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

When I mentioned Pink and Avril etc. I'm talking about a distinctive strain of Dr. Like hit-making in "Girlfriend," "So What," etc. The Allison Iraheta song (two L's, two L's, two L's...) is "Friday I'll Be Over You," not a cheerleader chant or anything, but the same basic cheerleader-stomp sound Dr. Luke used in his post-"Girlfriend" stuff.

It's weird because I think I consistently agree with your criticisms. But it's the fact that these songs seem to be sticking with me despite your being totally right on about almost all of this that suggests to me that something else is going on here -- not necessarily in any visionary or even sustainable way, just in a flukey sort of "well who'da thunk THAT would work" way. Like, I agree with you about "Take It Off" -- sets a fairly generic, if detailed, scene and goes no further with it; yet the neener-neener "place in France" chorus does it for me -- that's the one that made me think of Scooter initially. The thing boshes!

"Party at a Rich Dude's House" is as tautological as Andrew WK -- "WE ARE HAVING A PARTY BECAUSE A PARTY IS FUN AND IT IS FUN BECAUSE IT IS A PARTY." The details are blank -- rich = caviar, =Dom, =...swimming pool limousines? What is this, an Aaron Carter video? So the song, rather than trying to outline a situation, simply rides on the mere fact of itself, not unlike "I'm on a Boat" or "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell." And like those, I can't quite put my finger on why it works when it shouldn't work.

She fails at establishing time and place and character in her conflict in her songs and in her persona.

I mean, YES. She totally does, which is why my persona for her, encompassing a kind of desperation and sadness as an undercurrent of fun, has a lot more depth than her stated one (and why I don't want to rely too much on it, it being a series of contortions to find meaning where meaning doesn't obviously present itself). I think that place and character and conflict, when she even attempts them, do nothing to substantially improve her songs, because she's bad at it, and what she's good at should be translatable to just about anyone, yet everyone else I can think of as a forbear I for the most part actively dislike. If I liked it just because it was catchy, I don't see why I would hate "Girlfriend" or "So What." But I do kind of hate those songs.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I love both "So What" and "Girlfriend." WE MAY BE ONTO SOMETHING.

I don't get the cheerleader stomp vibe from "Friday I'lL Be Over U" (it strikes me as more pre-"Girlfriend," very Veronicas/Kelly) but "Robot Love" is seriously cheerleader. It samples a song from Jock Jams!

(It might not be two ls, that's just how I spell it.)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Also, I already put my finger on why "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" works for me, and as far as I'm concerned, there isn't a reason why "I'm on a Boat" shouldn't work -- it's a simple parody of hip-hop conventions, in which things we might think of as inherently cool (yachts, money, T-Pain) are paired with things we might think of as inherently uncool (nerdy white guys, being overly enthusiastic, the words "flippy flops") so that we will be forced to re-think our assumptions about both concepts.

Which is to say, they're comedy. "Party at a Rich Dude's House" isn't, as far as I can tell. although even if it were it wouldn't matter -- all the things that make it sub-par as a serious song make it sub-par as a joke as well. It's just too generic, and doesn't do enough work, writing-wise, to succeed as anything.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

But in both situations, the mere fact of a thing's happening at all is its main selling point -- the rest is subtext (and similarly, my subtext for Ke$ha is that there's something desperate and sad about her flailing for attention). And debatable subtext at that -- for me the comedy in "I'm on a Boat" isn't the juxtaposition, but the odd rightness of the pairing. Like yes, even for this simpler pleasure the "we are in the process of taking over the world" theatrics are totally appropriate.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Mm, I disagree. In the case of "I'm on a Boat," any situation would work as well as being on a boat -- that's the whole point, the juxtaposition of the hip-hop video theatrics with something we haven't been conditioned to think of as theatrical on its own. (Although actually, a more mundane situation probably would have worked better -- like, "I'm on a Subway," or "I'm in a Reasonably Priced Mid-Size Sedan.") In the case of "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," the fact that they're at that particular combination of fast food restaurants (and that that combination exists is important -- "Combination Starbucks and Chipotle" would have been an entirely different song. The thing that's happening is integral to the subtext's existence in both cases. If that particular thing weren't happening, that subtext wouldn't exist.

[koganbot]

The link for "aceterrier" (who is actually Jonathan Bogart) is now this:

And I threw up in the closet/And I don't care