1.) When trying to sum up this year, when reflecting on “what it all meant”, when trying to find one piece of pop culture ephemera to encapsulate the state of affairs in America circa 2010 there are many directions you go could: The now forever intertwined twin towers of Taylor Swift and Kanye West. The twitter explosion. The Social Network and Mark Zuckerberg. Lady Gaga. The Old Spice guy. The undead. But to me, one figure towers above them all in their social significance. A figure who started the year as a joke, became a supernova-like force, and now is already fading into the ether from whence she came. An “artist” who was both born and killed off as a cultural force in the course of a year, not just because of their lack of talent and versatility, but because they so embodied 2010 that they could not exist outside of it. A person who twenty years from now will be lucky to be a pop cultural footnote, but who will in fact encapsulate and symbolize more of what the experience of being alive and in this country these past 12 months was like than any historian could ever hope to be able to convey. Because as is often the case with pop culture, long after the specifics and the details fade their essence remains. We may not know anything about what life was actually like in the 1920s and could name off the top of our heads only a very few of the key cultural figures of the period, but we all have an idea what it was like to be alive at that time. We can’t tell you who specifically sang its songs, but we know what they sounded like. And so it is with our age as well. Long after humanity has forgotten exactly who P. Diddy is they will still be able to relate to the essence of waking up feeling like him. And long after the name Ke$ha has ceased to haunt the nightmares of our collective unconscious, the popularity of her music on our pop charts this year will likely, more than any other cultural force that 2010 produced, best define the year that was in Pop Culture America.
2.) If nothing else, Ke$ha’s popularity this year has produced one great new term:
“Keshy” (adj.) a combination of catchy and trashy
ex: That new Pussycat Dolls song is really keshy
3.) Speaking of dumb terms, can we talk for a moment about the line “my steeze is gonna be affected if I keep it up like a love sick crackhead”? (Strangely “steeze” is not in my spell check.)
The urban dictionary defines steeze as “a combination of style and ease; straight up easy flow and mad unique style. You either got it or you don’t.”
I’m not “urban” so I’m no steeze expert, but if I may, I’d like to elaborate a bit on my understanding of the term. As I see it steeze is a fighting back against the metro-sexual crowd and the trying-too-hard bunch. Because it’s not trying at all. It’s DIY, emphasis on the Y. It’s not engaging at all with style or trends or fashion or the culture at large. It’s our default setting when we pop out of the womb. It’s what’s inside each of us. (Provided that, you know, it is.) It’s what makes some old bed sheets a dress and adorning yourself in craft supplies “accessorizing”. And it’s the perfect term for our economically depressed, lazy, and sedentary times. And it is of course one that Ke$ha pulls off with great élan.
So please don’t make her be too interested in real meaningful human connection with you because then she might have to try.
And that sounds exhausting.
4.) Is Ke$ha the most authentic pop star of all time? Although she lives in a corner of the music industry built almost entirely on artifice, there’s seemingly nothing fake or contrived about Ke$ha. Sure the dumb, trashy, party girl thing is a marketing hook, but it also appears to be completely genuine. From everything I’ve ever read or heard or seen (yes, I did do research for this) Ke$ha the person is really what she seems, or at least pretty close to it. Sure she wasnt born with glitter on her face, but I feel pretty confident that she would be wearing it whether she was a pop star or not. She may be selling a specific image and lifestyle, but it is, from all appearances, the lifestyle she really lives. The Rolling Stones could trash a hotel room, sleep with groupies, get hammered every night, and then let their music reflect that, but name a modern mainstream pop star who could do the same, especially a female one. Madonna perhaps, but she was always chasing trends, trying to stay relevant, constantly reinventing herself. I’d be shocked though if Ke$ha ever reinvents herself. Because she never invented herself in the first place. She just was who she was and that person happened to be something the zeitgeist could embrace. And when the zeitgeist moves on, as it almost by definition always does, I feel pretty sure that Ke$ha wont chase it. She’s just gonna keep doing what it is she does audience or market trends be damned. She’s not going to be doing MTV Unplugged (if that was still a thing) or making an art rock album with Grizzly Bear. She’s just gonna keep making overly dumb dance music about partying and boys and having fun. And if that’s not what people in the future want to listen to in their flying cars with their robot maids, then fuck it.
Ke$ha’s success may be an accident, a coincidence, a case of right person right place right time, but it's hard to say it isn’t founded on something real. And is that in its own way a breakthrough? A step forward? Is Ke$ha a trailblazer? Is she deserving of respect? It’s a moralish conundrum. But at least it’s a real one.
5.) Ke$ha may not win a lot of awards for her contributions to music this year. And by “a lot” I mean “any”. But in the greatest year ever for so-bad-they’re-good lyrics nothing even came close to “don’t be a little bitch with your chit chat / just show me where your dicks at”. I mean we’re dealing with a year where “I get ten thousand hugs from ten thousand lightning bugs” isn’t even cracking my top ten. And yet that Ke$ha lyric is so head and shoulders “above” anything else that I’m almost tempted to say that nothing in history is ever going to be able to top it. Although lord knows Will.I.Am is trying.
6.) While we’re talking about dumb lyrics, has anything ever made less sense than “kick ‘em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger”? Even in his younger sexual prime I don’t think anyone was really that into Mick Jagger for his physical appearance. He was a supremely confident and charismatic rock front man who oozed sex, carnal energy, and aggression, sure. But I don’t think the particulars of his physical appearance were exactly what he was most known for. Still, even if in theory he was a major looker back in the day, he’s now 70 years old. If a guy who looked EXACTLY like present day Mick Jagger approached Ke$ha at a bar and offered to buy her a drink I can almost guarantee you she would laugh in his face and/or be more than a little creeped out. When people say that leather is out I’m assuming they don’t just mean for clothing, but for skin as well. Maybe I’m missing something and hooking up with anorexic looking 67-year-old men with faces that look like they’re melting is all the rage, but I’m pretty sure that “we kick ‘em to the curb if they look anything even remotely like Mick Jagger” would be WAY more apt.
7.) Some people worry that Ke$ha will make young people think it’s cool to party all the time and drink and take drugs. Some people worry about the implications her popularity has on the future of intelligence and education and enlightened discourse. Some people worry that kids are going to start thinking its acceptable to walk around dressed in torn up garbage bags. Those might all be valid concerns, but me, I mostly just worry about her bad influence on our kids’ dental hygiene. I mean brushing your teeth with a bottle of Jack is not only unhealthy but outright dangerous. And if we don’t fight back against Ke$ha’s message, pretty soon we’re going to be faced with an entire generation of people with some pretty serious gum disease.
8.) The thoroughly bland and uneventful Rolling Stone profile of Ke$ha from a few months back (which I can’t link to because Rolling Stone still operates as though it’s 1972) posits that she is always making edgy and controversial comments, giving as an example her statement: “I like wiener”. Which indeed is very cutting edge and shocking. To a fifth grader. And that’s the thing - our standards for what we find outrageous and edgy have fallen to such a degree that bad fashion sense and studied stupidity now qualify as “edge”.
We used to fight things in this country. The system. The man. The safe, the plastic, and the status quo. We had real outrage and real sense of purpose. Thirty years ago someone like Ke$ha would have had place in the music scene. She could have been a punk. Her lack of polish and “talent” would have been an active choice and a statement. A statement against “the way things are”. It would have made us think and question our values and see the world in a new way. But as pop culture has ostensibly “loosened”, what with our sex and violence and foul language more omnipresent on the TV and what not, things in the actual day-to-day culture of life have actually grown more safe and provincial. Hell, even a decade ago there were people on MTV like Marilyn Manson who played with ideas of gender identity subversion and nihilism. Who would have thought I would ever be yearning for the days when nihilism was seen as an activist worldview? But I do, because even Marilyn Manson could never exist in anywhere close to the mainstream today, let alone The Sex Pistols. Now “I like wiener” is edgy and outré and punk bands have musicals on Broadway. And so instead of fearing that musicians are going to destroy our culture, topple our government, and forever change our safe placid way of life, now the only outrage they generate is “ugh, her music is stupid and she dresses tackily” or “man, he seems really egotistical and says crazy things on twitter”. And that seems to be enough for us. Is this the depths to which modernity has sunk us? Has the perpetual outrage machine really worn us down to this? No wonder the war in Afghanistan drags on with no end in sight…
9.) If in Europe Ke$ha’s name is not instead K€sha then that might be the greatest missed opportunity in branding history.
10.) I don’t know that Ke$ha’s love is my drug, but I’m pretty sure that it’s my syphilis.
11.) What’s with people keeping their best songs until their later singles? First, “Paparazzi” was the fourth single released from The Fame, and then “Your Love is my Drug” was held out until after “TiK ToK” and “Blah Blah Blah” had been released as singles off of Animal even though its CLEARLY her best song. And I’m using pretty much every word in that last sentence very loosely.
12.) If it’s true that every generation gets the artists it deserves then we truly have earned Ke$ha. She doesn’t write her own music, play any instruments, or even sing. And in our era of famous-for-being-famous celebutants, it’s fitting that arguably the biggest pop star of the moment is a singer who doesn’t sing. An artist who adds almost nothing to her art. A “talent” with no real discernable talents. She is exactly the pop star America deserves. She is our Warholian Age of Fame worldview sprung to life. She is what we think about when we don’t think at all. She is the us that has trouble sitting through YouTube videos because they’re too long, considers twitter heavy reading, and zones out every night in front of reality TV. She is us as we spend considerably more time reading celebrity gossip blogs than we do reading about the relief efforts in Haiti. Ke$ha is the vapid id to our Lady Gaga super-ego. She is who we R.
She is our steez.
13.) I like your beard.
