Ke$ha Day 2

[koganbot]

I was with friends at Tokyo Joe's this evening, a quasi fast-food Japanese joint, and music was piped-in, adding noise to a place already full of crowd noise. Not sure what the purpose of the music is, since it's not loud enough to help create the ambience. Perhaps by adding more noise to the noise it provides cover for people who don't want the customers at adjacent tables to overhear them. In any event, within this overall noise is music that I don't attend to and that is not really discernible - except suddenly I hear a sound of hard compacted beauty emanating from the uproar, pulsing balls of beauty. I'm thinking "This is incredible!" and then realize it's "Blah Blah Blah." Throbbing prettiness within Ke$ha's aggressive clatter, emerging from above and joining Tokyo Joe's dinner clatter.

File photo of Tokyo Joe's, without crowds or clatter or Ke$ha. 1360 Grant Street, Denver:


"Blah Blah Blah" has the boshingest beat ever to hit in North America, even more bosh than Cascada. "Bosh" is a poptimists word that's not easily definable but evokes the most twistingly propulsive and opportunistically ear-attacking squelchy techno or acid house beats (or other genre names the Brits would know better than I) revving up from underneath some Polish (or somewhere) post-Italodisco hot tuneful Europop ditties, or disco-speed covers of "You Give Love A Bad Name" sung by fashion models or sisters-in-law turned "diva." But "Blah Blah Blah" being in white Anglo-America where fun is never part of the natural order but rather is as competitive as everything else, it intensifies the fierceness and the crassness. I used "Mony Mony" as my touchstone yesterday, for having a strong center and a messy party surrounding it; I also think of the Troggs' "Wild Thing" and the 7-inch version of Flipper's "Sex Bomb" (walking sludge that lifts itself up until it's thundering across the landscape) married to the dance-insistence of "Into The Groove." Modern touchstones might be Lindsay Lohan's "First" for its fundamental message of NOTICE ME NOTICE ME NOTICE ME!, and Britney Spears' Blackout for all its wormy little beats and riffs and background voices, a world of crawling creatures, Britney's own self-absorbed voice crawling and scratching and finding its way to a self-centered center. What I said yesterday about "Blah Blah Blah" making other music seem pale and bare in comparison: Britney's Blackout has that effect too, foliage with insects and annelids going about their own business, a minor cacophony on the margins.

But my needing all these comparisons to describe "Blah Blah Blah" just emphasizes its uniqueness. Nothing else on the album comes close to its bosh or bounce. A lot of yesterday's convo revolved around what Ke$ha might be doing, and while she gives the track aggression and meanness as the official party-girl master of ceremonies, this isn't about partying or the concept of the party any more than beer is about partying. Rather, it's the noise maker you use to create a party. "Blah Blah Blah" is pretty much its message, syllables, yammer yammer yammer (cf. woolly bully, a-hip a-hop, womp bomp a loo bomp, dang digga dang d-dang d-dang diggy diggy), that and the boshbeat and the insane prettiness.

The album is something of a surprise, now that I've heard it. It's pretty, too; in fact, I was expecting more aggression and less tunefulness (not that the two need be incompatible). In "Blah Blah Blah" prettiness is merely part of the overall assault, albeit a central part. On other tracks prettiness is almost the point. Dave is right that Luke has gotten himself under control on this album, maybe 'cause he's not on the most Lukish track, which is by people who aren't going for the supervolume that Luke would ruin his own tunes with. Dave's and my complaint when we mention Luke (producer-songwriter Lukasz Gottwald, and when we say "Luke" we sometimes mean frequent colleague Max Martin) is his tendency starting 2005-2006 to create a pulverizing landslide of overloud beauty in his choruses. (Megan McCauley's "Tap That," though an excellent song, and somewhat proto-"TiK ToK" in its Salt-N-Pepa stylings, was a harbinger of future Max 'n' Luke overkill.) Maybe what Luke is now doing right is that he's attaching the beauty to rhythm rather than slathering it all over everything. At least that's what he does on "TiK ToK." The most Lukish track is "Party At A Rich Dude's House" (that and "Backstabber" are my two favorites after "Blah Blah Blah"; neither Luke nor Max is on those three, though I do like some of theirs too), which has a balance that Luke never achieved; basically, what it's got over third-album Avril, which it resembles, is that - maybe inspired by Ke$ha's supposed party vibe - it moves faster, so it doesn't throw so much weight on the chorus.

To be continued. Haven't said much about Ke$ha's lyrics, 'cause I haven't attended to them yet, or her image, whatever it is. Her voice isn't much, which is surprisingly not a problem on a lot of these. Maybe she sometimes knows what she's doing when it comes to sound. The pretty, uncharacteristically spacey title song works best when Ke$ha lets it drift into the distance like Feist or Enya, but the track doesn't have the courage of its wimpy convictions, and Luke revs it up too much.

Comments

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Man, still not hearing this -- "Blah Blah Blah," I mean. I like the album fine. But to my ears, "Blah Blah Blah" really goes downhill after its amazingly visceral first 17 or 18 second (which I'd probably give a 10 to), and after that -- when the melody comes in, I guess -- it slips into averageness. Good averageness, but still averageness I'm having trouble caring about. Need to listen to the album more; honestly have yet to pick up on all the audaciously retardo lines everybody keeps raving about either, so obviously they're at least not jumping out of the background at me. Mainly, though, I guess I'm starting to realize that I might have no idea what people mean by "bosh" -- not clear to me, say, how this song is more HI-NRG Europop than, say, "Bad Romance" much less, I don't know, Aqua or Las Ketchup or Jordy or somebody. (Maybe they were too early to be bosh-worthy, or didn't get high enough on the charts? Though it is interesing Gaga and Ke$ha are Americans!) So basically, so far, I wish I was hearing more Scooter (and Dictators, and Flipper, and disco for that matter) in Ke$ha. But maybe I will, still. (Also not sure why people are pretending that nobody took Kid Rock or 3Oh!3 -- the former of whom I prefer to Ke$ha, the latter of whom I don't -- to task for singing about life as a big bumb party, because I thought people took them to task for that all the time. But maybe I'm strawmanning. (Should also mention that I haven't yet absorbed this entire post or the comments yet, much less other blog talk about her -- really falling behind on keeping up with in-depth Ke$ha analysis these past couple days! -- so maybe I'm saying things other folks have already said, I dunno.) (And at that, it's still one of my favorite albums of the year, fwiw, though that's got as much to do with lack of competition as anything else. Doesn't sound like a Top 10 worthy album to me, though that could conceivably change.)

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

"17 or 18 seconds" plural I meant, obviously.

Also wondering why nobody has compared the album yet to Licensed To Ill (not that I'm saying it's necessarily comparable, but that one definitely reminded me of the Dictators in its day -- and you could dance fast to it, too.)

(And right, I know it was Metal Mike -- not you -- who made the Dictators comparison {See my reposting of it on Dave's Tumblr and on Jukebox.} I don't even know what you think of the Dictators, come to think of it, Frank! And Mike was talking about her lyrics, where you're talking about her music -- get that. Yet somehow you end up in a similar place.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Don't think that "Bad Romance" is any less indebted, but I think "bosh" has to be a little less...I think the word is "tasteful"?...in its execution. The three you mention after "Bad Romance" may just pre-date the concept, yeah, though I think Aqua comes closest. There's also a specific strain of bosh in which non-Europop songs are given a throbbing techno beat (the ones I think of most readily are Cascada, though to be honest I think in some ways their version of "Sk8er Boi" is less in your face than the original). The only direct sonic Scooter link that I find on Animal is "Take It Off." But there's something about Scooter's single-mindedness that I think Ke$ha has in a way Lady GaGa doesn't.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

See, I don't hear how Cascada are less tasteful than Gaga, at all. (Not sure I hear how Ke$ha is either, though apparently it's in the lyrics and the noise I haven't yet picked up on.)

Do get how Scotter is less tasteful than all of them, though.

Actually, I'd say the synths in "Hot And Cold" by Katy Perry sound pretty darn boshy, or at least Europoppy, too.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This is why Cascada doesn't quite fit the example, it's just the one I think of most obviously as doing something boshy. Scooter seems to be the Center of All Bosh in my own mind, though.

Ke$ha's tone of voice, whether she's singing nonsense or not, often seems of the "neener-neener" variety, snotty and petulant (I even find this to be true in the more Katy Perry-like ballad songs, her singing voice having a certain throaty screaming quality to it), whereas Gaga actually makes even her gibberish signify somewhat...well, maybe "tastefully" isn't the word after all. But there's something cool about Gaga that Ke$ha doesn't have.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I think that cool has at least a little something to do with how much more stuctured GaGa's songs are. The melody/music is a lot more structured, for one -- in a lot of Ke$ha's songs, I found it difficult to tell when the verse was ending and the chorus was beginning as I listened to it for the first time, whereas I could always tell with GaGa (and of course GaGa's beats are much more rigid). But the vocals are more structured as well -- they both have tracks where they just singsong their way through the verses, passing time till the big chorus, but GaGa's singsong, like her beats, is more rigid and even. The overall effect is that GaGa feels cleaner, more stylish than Ke$ha.

[koganbot]

This'll no doubt by a xpost by the time I hit submit.

I'd forgotten Aqua, despite being the person who put "Lollipop (Candyman)" in my top ten of the '90s list. Aqua's beats might be too non-techno-aggressive to be bosh, though.

I think katstevens may be the person most responsible for popularizing the term "bosh" (at least in its poptimists use; I seem to recall that in the intertitles to the original Douglas Fairbanks' version of The Mark Of Zorro Don Diego's father always kept saying "bosh!" but I think he merely meant "nonsense," since in 1920 Eurodisco had yet to cross over to the U.S. in a major way). I don't know if Kat would endorse my view of the blah blah blah chorus as being essence du bosh, but I don't care; I think the blah-blah-blah chorus is the pinnacle of bosh, and I'll define bosh any way I want in order to get that result.

I would say that RedOne's aggressive bass push, which I don't always like, takes us near bosh (and rock, for that matter), and of course he's the producer of "Just Dance," "LoveGame," and "Poker Face." But GaGa still seems not "bosh," but something else. (Which isn't to say that she shouldn't be something else.) Didn't some of you decide last year on that ilX GaGa thread that she was old Belgian new beat?

You know, I've barely heard the Dictators. Beastie Boys certainly fight for your right to party, but in sound I'm getting them more "Kick Out The Jams" rather than "Wild Thing," which is to say not the garage Troggs punk I'm associating with "Blah Blah Blah" but the more reflective, probing punk that I wasn't calling "punk" until '77 of, say, the MC5 and the Stooges and Sex Pistols (was considering that not punk because I still associated punk with junior high school creeps playing tough, rather than thoughtful strong people probing toughness, not simply trying to act it out). Of course the MC5 covered the Troggs, but not very well.

(I'm not necessarily saying that "Blah Blah Blah" should be considered punk, by the way. Don't know how usable "punk" is as a term, anymore. Too respectable. But also, without anyone necessarily intending it, there was a sense in "Louie Louie" and "Wild Thing" that they were taking us at least a millimeter if not more away from where we'd been before, the very idea that these should be our anthemic party favors. I'd say that even Scooter has that sense. Whereas the Ke$ha party does just seem to be a niche and a cliché, the skank version of the L.A. thing, just more Hollywood Reporter and TMZ fodder. I wouldn't mind being wrong about that, though.)

people are pretending that nobody took Kid Rock or 3Oh!3 -- the former of whom I prefer to Ke$ha, the latter of whom I don't -- to task for singing about life as a big bumb party, because I thought people took them to task for that all the time

Not sure what you mean here; from the Jukebox thread a lot of the complaint about Ke$ha - at least a lot of Lex's complaints about Ke$ha - is that she's doing a boring old hat version of big dumb party, and he'd probably take Kid Rock and 3OH!3 to task for the exact same thing, and he did take Asher Roth to task for it. I mean, I don't think anyone's claiming that it's a breakthrough for Ke$ha to be taken for task for sounding like a big dumb party. Would seem to be an American perennial, the partying and the taking to task. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that supporters of John Quincy Adams took supporters of Andrew Jackson to task for dumb partying.

Shooter Jennings' "Daddy's Farm" ought to be part of this discussion, though that's a somewhat different strain of recalcitrance - the Blue Cheer strain, perhaps, mixed with Hank Jr. (whom I don't know nearly enough about). But in his way Shooter is as L.A. as Ke$ha is. --Sad that I didn't have enough nominations to get "Daddy's Farm" into the poptimists best of 2005 thing. By the way, while you weren't looking, Miranda Lambert and - finally - Ashlee Simpson got tracks that qualified for the next round of the best of the 2000s

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

junior high school creeps playing tough

I certainly get a vibe of "junior high school creep playing tough" from Ke$ha. It squares with the "13 year old's sense of what being a party girl is" commentary (perhaps the missing link between legit party girl and girlboymusic's vision of Ke$ha as something more like a street urchin). Maybe the difference between Ke$ha and Gaga is that Ke$ha would have terrorized Gaga on the playground, only for Gaga to get her revenge off the playground. Ke$ha still treats LA as a playground, and the game she's playing isn't very good -- her details aren't very imaginative, and she's been playing the same game for so long that it's more of a ritual than something one does for fun. Which would explain why there is a lot of disaffection in, e.g., her "blah blah blah." But there's also still a playground around it, which makes what she does in it secondary to the idea of where she's doing it. (OK, metaphor is starting to wheeze and buckle under its own weight here so I'll let it go.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

And no, I'm still not clear on why where Ke$ha chooses to play her games is different from where Gaga chooses to play hers. It's still just a gut feeling at this point still.

[koganbot]

I'm saying this in ignorance, since I haven't delved enough into either GaGa or Ke$ha, and this is conceptual as much as (or more than) it is aural, but GaGa is everyone is a star, it all can be art, which can come from the Merry Pranksters and the Dead and the Airplane as much as from Warhol and Madonna, but it's definitely an artist's viewpoint, someone who's committed to long-term creation, building your art over many nights and many dances, not the moment's pie-in-your-face explosion. And Ke$ha may actually be a long-term artist (though my money's not on it), but her sound and persona are the blotto and the instant blat.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

GaGa is everyone is a star, it all can be art... it's definitely an artist's viewpoint, someone who's committed to long-term creation

I see that in her videos and in pictures of her in magazines, obviously. Not so sure where it shows up in her music, though.

[koganbot]

Actually, Ke$ha's album turned out to be less blotto and blat than I'd hoped (though maybe doing the blotto and blat once very well and going onto other things is the saner course).

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Not sure what you mean here; from the Jukebox thread a lot of the complaint about Ke$ha - at least a lot of Lex's complaints about Ke$ha - is that she's doing a boring old hat version of big dumb party

Oh that's easy (though there's no reason you should know what I mean there, I was just strafing aimlessly by that point in my rant); it came from Dave's Tumblr yesterday (though I'm pretty sure Dave didn't write it -- with Tumblr, I can never tell who wrote what half the time, which drives me nuts): "I hear people talking kind of anxiously about how the emptiness of her (persona’s) party-always lifestyle isn’t reflected in the lyrics, and I wonder why I never hear that about 3OH!3 or Kid Rock or Lil Jon." I wonder where whoever wrote that has been for the last several years, myself -- though now that I re-read the comment, it may not have been saying what I thought it was saying; seems to imply people want the party-always lifestyle to wind up in her lyrics more?? (And maybe in Kid Rock's and Lil Jon's lyrics more too???) Weird. I thought the persona came from her lyrics. And whoever wrote that is apparently reffering to what others had previously written, which others I haven't read. And I may well also be taking it out of its intended context. Guess the comment struck in my craw, and I wound up referring to it where it made even less sense than where I had originally seen it. Hard to keep all this stuff straight.

[koganbot]

I think what that person meant was that this is a silly thing to take Ke$ha to task for, for not saying that there's a sad emptiness that underlying her partying, and so the person would be asking, how come no one's criticizing Kid Rock and Lil Jon and 3OH!3 for not themselves writing songs that portray the sad emptiness that underlies their partying. (Seems to me that Rebel Without A Pause did have sad emptiness songs, and Ke$ha does have one herself, which I'm sure that the people over on Tumblr were aware of and I'm typing fast and not checking back, so now that I think of it I may just be confused; Dave and Erika were saying that they consider Ke$ha's tears of a party clown song one of her worst; I'd place it in the middle; it has a nice tune.)

But then again, I don't know if Lil Jon or Kid Rock ever did a song about brushing their teeth with Jack. I wouldn't put it past the Ying Yang Twins, however; though I'd hope that they wouldn't follow it up in concert with "Wait (The Whisper Song)."

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Seems to me that Rebel Without A Pause did have sad emptiness songs

Yeah, I'd probably put "Only God Knows Why" and "Black Chic, white Guy" in that category. And as Kid's gotten more country tears-in-your-beer sorry-for-himself later in life, I'd guess that his sad emptiness quotient has increased, if anything.

But okay, I do see how I probably misread that (twice) now.

[(Anonymous)]

That was me (http://aceterrier.tumblr.com) who wrote that, and I'm positive that Chuck's right and I'm wrong about people not taking Kid Rock and 3OH!3 to task for their consequence-free party-hearty music; I just haven't seen any of that taking-to-task. (Where have I been? Mostly listening to very old music; I've only really started trying to participate in current pop discussions within the last year.)

And also of course Kid Rock addresses the emptiness plenty. (I don't know 3OH!3 beyond the one hit, or Lil Jon beyond his guestwork.)

Just another girl alone at the bar

[koganbot]

Welcome Mr/Ms Terrier. I generally find your commentary to be ace, and would hope that you continue to visit us.

30H!3 do address the emptiness, but in a rather empty way. "Don't Trust Me" and "Starstrukk" are no Earrings Of Madame De..., that's for sure. (Earrings is the superb Max Ophuls flick in which Charles Boyer declares to Danielle Darrieux, "Our marriage is only superficially superficial.") I justified my liking for "Don't Trust Me" over on poptimists' Yet Another Year In Pop.

[koganbot]

Rebel Without A Pause is actually Devil Without A Cause. ("Rebel Without A Pause" is a Public Enemy song.)

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Didn't some of you decide last year on that ilX GaGa thread that she was old Belgian new beat?

Well, somebody decided that -- wasn't me, or anybody whose name I recogized at the time -- and I liked the idea, but had no idea whether they were right or wrong about the issue. I'd guess, though, that Belgian new beat (inasmuch as I've heard it) and bosh (at least in the Scooter sense) are probably not all that far apart in the first place (though maybe it's mostly just the uber-Aryan Sprocket-rap vocal style those two have in common, I dunno. Which also makes me wonder how much, say, Real McCoy or Rammstein songs that have hit in the States fit into the bosh equation.) (Okay, Real McCoy were early. And I'm joking about Rammstein. I think.)

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Also, re Shooter btw: If you haven't already, you should read what's been said on ILM Rolling Country and Rolling Hard Rock about his strange, audacious, and mostly pretty awful new art-grunge-metal tea-party-era police-state conspiracy concept album featuring Stephen King. (George Smith also mentioned that Shooter had been in failed L.A. glam metal bands before his country career, which I somehow wasn't aware of myself.)