Picking up on a few things I said either here or elsewhere, I've been distinguishing between "the heart of the party" and "reflection on the heart of the party," a kind of second-hand recalling of the party with some kind of undercutting edge. On Animal Ke$ha falls somewhere between these two poles, at her best getting right into the heart, where the nonsense syllables become content and stage trumps character, but most of the time there's something a little more off-kilter about it. On the times where it almost-not-quite connects I find myself just as captivated as I am when I play the more obvious party tracks (and there's an almost-not-quiteness even in "Blah Blah Blah," I think, but the song itself is massive enough to make this more irrelevant). Nowhere in any of this do I have sense of Ke$ha as a character, but maybe as ringleader or (shock) emcee. And in that sense I see her like a Tim Burton character -- specifically the mayor from Nightmare Before Christmas, who has only two faces (Cheshire cat grin carnival barker and terrified kabukiesque worrywart) but seems to "exist" somewhere between the two. But like that character, she's more of a guide through the stage than an interesting character in her own right.