Ke$ha
“Take It Off”
from Animal
RCA, January 2010
I’ve got a theory that a lot of pop music today actually strives to be annoying on purpose. From Drake’s nasal obnoxiousness to Katy Perry’s bullfrog croaking to Lady Gaga’s goofy monosyllabic chants to Nicki Minaj’s Judy Tenuta-like stream of funny voices, it’s something radio commercial jingles have known for decades: If you’re going to be heard primarily in snippets–ringtones, network bumpers, the background of TV shows, flipping around the car radio–then from a sales perspective what really matters isn’t making a great song, it’s getting the song stuck in your head. Quality songcraft and strong vocal performances can do this, sure, but so can simply being irritating, as anyone from the New York City area who’s heard the commercials for “1-877-Kars for Kids” can tell you. The method is inconsequential; the goal is simply to lodge in your brain, by hook or by crook. Of course, some folks are literally hook crooks: As I’m fond of pointing out, two of the past year’s biggest songs, Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK” and Katy Perry’s utterly inescapable “California Gurls,” both swipe the pre-chorus melody of Kylie Minogue’s “Love at First Sight” for their choruses. But what I didn’t know until recently is that the co-writers/producers of “California Gurls” also swiped it from themselves–they’re the co-writers/producers of “TiK ToK” as well. That’s how nakedly mercenary this stuff is: If it ain’t broke, do it again, right down to the “three bars of lyrics, one bar of ‘oh-whoa-oh’s” lyrical structure.
Same as it ever was for pop, of course. And to be fair, it’s possible to dance along the fine line between stupid and clever without falling over: There’s something almost mighty about that “Rah Rah Ah Ah Ah” thing from “Bad Romance,” like you’d been waiting all your life to hear it; Minaj is simply the latest in a long line of fun, funny court-jester MCs, the complicating detail being her vagina; and I’ll admit it, it’s hard for me to resist the pure-dee lyrical idiocy of lines like “Call me Mr. Flintstone–I can make your bed rock” or “I’m trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful” (the latter sung by Akon with hilarious anthemic gravitas, right before a chorus consisting of the words “Damn, you’s a sexy bitch” no less–hey, he said he was trying, not that he’d actually pull it off).
And then there’s Ke$ha, an artist whose entire career–singing style, subject matter, party-slattern image–appears calculated to rub people the wrong way. From the name on down! I’ve seen folks proclaim, apropos of nothing, that they’ll be damned if they’ll ever use that dollar sign when writing it. (We at Attentiondeficitdisorderly have no such qualms.) Ke$ha’s gigantically popular first single, the aforementioned “TiK ToK” (note the MySpace-style capitalization–not an accident!), is notable for vocals that alternate between speak-singing that sounds like (and at certain points throughout the song actually is) a taunt and autotune that sounds still sillier and more strident, all in the service of lyrics in which she brags about being insufferable. The follow-up single refined the strategy by centering on the obnoxious sounds you make when someone is being obnoxious to you: It’s called, and its chorus consists largely of, “Blah Blah Blah.” Even the relatively buoyant and radiant love song “Your Love Is My Drug,” for all its pleasant bounciness and relative sincerity, ends with thirty seconds of deliberately stupid-sounding studio banter, culminating in the non sequitur “I like your beard.”
Where can you go from there? You can base a song on “There’s a Place in France (Where the Naked Ladies Dance)”? Such is “Take It Off.” Songs kids sing on the playground or while jumping rope or whatever have been a source of material for ages; surely it was only a matter of time before someone went for the kind of kids’ song that’d get you in trouble if your first-grade teacher heard you singing it. Personally I hope Ke$ha does a whole series of these; I can hear her hit version of “Milk, Milk, Lemonade” in my head even now.
But the problem with “Take It Off,” and Ke$ha in general (“Your Love Is My Drug” excepted, perhaps) is that while obnoxiousness is good enough, it’s not actually good. There’s nothing new or interesting about the “place downtown where the freaks all come around” she’s singing about. The description is half-assed (“lose your clothes in the crowd”–I’ve never been anyplace where that’s happened, and I’ve actually partied naked). The rhymes are either lazy (“when the dark of the night / comes around, that’s the time / that the animal comes alive / lookin’ for somethin’ wild”) or just uninspired doggerel (“it’s a hole in the wall / it’s a dirty free for all”; “where they go hardcore / and there’s glitter on the floor”). The title/chorus is a lowest common denominator catchphrase. The autotuning makes Ke$ha’s already weak vocal instrument even harsher and less pleasant to listen to as it trails down below her register with every other line. The beat and the parts of the melody that aren’t “The Streets of Cairo” are simply inert. For the work of laser-focused pop gunslingers, it’s firing blank after blank.
Like I said above, I’m not objecting to the notion of pop music that blurs the line between catchy like a tune and catchy like a virus. Look, you don’t own multiple Ministry records and not understand the value of being grating now and then. But the irritation is a foot in the door–once the song gets inside the foyer, does it make you feel anything, think anything, want to sing or dance or screw along? If not–and Ke$ha, for me, is “if not”–all the earworms in the world can’t get past that. We deserve better.