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

[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.