I want them both to work with Benny Blanco

[koganbot]

Jonathan and Tal take issue with an obviously snarky photo equation, Erika correctly points out that it may not be snarky (I'm not sure she's right, but she makes a case), and I pitch in with what I think Taylor and Ke$ha may have in common:

They both have something of a killer instinct (though maybe it's Benny Blanco who deserves the credit for Ke$ha's), they're both musically opportunistic, they're both willing to hurt people with song, and - for all Taylor's reflectiveness - they're both riding a mess of emotion. In any event, last week I was fantasizing that Taylor would go to Benny Blanco and say, "I want to do a couple of tracks that have the eruption that you achieved in 'Blah Blah Blah.'" I'm totally certain that Taylor could pull it off. I also think she needs to try. (But these singers are always so hesitant to take my advice; I don't know what's wrong with them.)

Comments

[talrose.livejournal.com]

I like Erika’s answer, but my issue is not with what people think about Ke$ha—I honestly could care less, my second paragraph was meant as an aside about her music, since I haven’t said too much about it—it’s with the “like” button. Maybe people do take it to mean what Erika says, but how can we know? For example, I could post a picture consisting of ((“Dancing zombies in ‘Thriller’ video”) + (a picture of little children) = (Present-day incarnation of Michael Jackson)) and my intention could be that the horror of Michael Jackson’s psyche combined with his stunted childhood says something about his music, but that’s not what anyone’s going to think. But how would anyone know what my intentions are? My issue is with the idea of a conversation where nobody says anything—and this happens on Tumblr A LOT, or at least it does with a lot of the people I’m following. Whereas what I see as really useful and interesting on Tumblr is that people can actually respond to one another in a format that’s more aesthetically interesting and even slightly more user-friendly than LiveJournal, but it seems like they often choose not to.

[koganbot]

There's plenty I dislike about the livejournal format; they try to make you pay if you want your blog to be more user friendly (not that I'm sure how they'd make money if they didn't, since I doubt that their ads really bring in much). One thing for sure is that they should find a way for communities to have a full-scale "New Answers" feature, which right now is unavailable no matter how much you pay. For the type of convo I like most, ilX is still the best format by a long-shot; the reason I'm not there more is that most of the people I want to read aren't there as much as they used to be.

What's kept me from tumbling for Tumblr is more the culture than the format, though it's a combination: I simply don't like that everyone's trying to be au courant and is jumping in on today's conversation while stepping aside from convos that are more than one day old. Tumblr does have features by which you can track a conversation over more than a day, as long as someone wants to repost. But as a matter of the way people tend to do things there, old convos are dead convos. And of course this is a problem on lj too, but at least on poptimists there's the habit people have of visiting posts over a week's length of time.

But in general in my musicwrite world, people give up on conversations far too soon, so that when the same issues re-emerge, they seem to always re-emerge in the same spot, wheels as much in need of invention as they were the first time.

[koganbot]

As for Ke$ha's being funny, I take her seriously whether or not she takes herself seriously, just as I take the Ying Yang Twins seriously. The complexities are there whether they're intended or not; and her walking the line between vomit as integrity and vomit as dysfunction will never fail to interest me, even if she's making herself the butt of a joke - which I'm not sure she is, by the way. Or that's not all she's doing, or all that what she's doing does, anyway. It's not like she can choose to limit or control what we make of her. In any event, just because she's not making Meaningful Statements like Peter Laughner and Lou Reed doesn't mean her slapstick party-girl shtick doesn't take her into the territory of Peter and Lou.

I do wish that, in general, she used more vivid imagery, fewer clichés. (Maybe she should study Taylor.)