Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

1. The mp3 runs 4:38 minutes long.

2. The Youtube video runs seven seconds longer due to the splash screen inserted at the beginning and end giving title and attribution.

3. It is a mashup, a new audio file created by extracting elements from pre-existing recordings and manipulating them digitally in order to fit together in pitch, rhythm and dynamics.

4. It is composed entirely of audio elements from the twenty-five songs named the most popular of 2009 by Billboard.

5. It was created by a fellow who goes by the name “DJ Earworm.”

6. It is the third such mashup he has created in as many years; if three is enough for a tradition, one of the greatest new year-end traditions is the United State of Pop mashup.

7. A representative comment left on DJ Earworm’s site is “That’s AWESOMEeeeeeee!!! Loveeeee it !!”

8. A representative comment left on a popular snarky online pop-culture magazine is “I am happy to say that I have never heard any of those songs on purpose.”

9. My own reaction to it can be gauged from the fact that it is by a wide margin the single song I have listened to most since January 1st.

10. This is only partly attributable to the fact that I quite like most (though not all) of the constituent songs that went into it.

11. (For example, I can quite easily imagine a mashup made out of those twenty-five songs that would totally suck.)

12. But this is a very different beast from the pop songs that make it up.

13. Structurally, it’s extremely different, being pieced together out of unequal parts; while there is a chorus (or choruses) of a sort, the “verses” don’t conform to any particular pattern.

14. In fact it’s structurally closer to twentieth-century art song than to the average pop song.

15. Which doesn’t make it not-pop — in fact I can think of few songs that would be more awesome for the cast ofGlee to tackle, especially if they keep the super-fast arrangement and trade off the vocals the same way.

16. Admittedly that wouldn’t be nearly as awesome as having all the original artists come out and sing it at say the Grammys, which would make the Grammys awesome for the first time ever.

17. Anyway, my deepest darkest fantasies aside.

18. DJ Earworm’s brief statement about the song on his website is: “This year in the charts, so many of the pop songs this year seem to tell the same story: Yeah, we’ve been through a lot, but right now we’re gonna celebrate with music and dance, and it’s gonna be ok.”

19. It’s that thematic coherence which makes “Blame It On The Pop” one of the greatest mashups of all time, far outpacing even Earworm’s earlier United State of Pop summaries.

20. So for the rest of this piece I will treat it as a coherent work of let’s-say-art, ignoring the piecing-together process which you can look up elsewhere.

21. It starts with a statement of intent: I know you want Pop/Dance/Rock & Roll/Symphonic Soul/Rockin Electronic Club Beats/Hip-Hop Music with the Future Flow.

22. (A later interation of this sequence interpolates Rumba, which is an entirely separate essay.)

23. The question of whether “we” want these things or not is a function of our response to DJ Earworm’s project; the world of the song, like all great pop, assumes that we do.

24. And the question of whether the song actually offers us rock & roll, or symphonic soul, or rumba (the rest are fairly indisputable) is beside the point: certainly the appearance of the All-American Rejects, the Fray, and Kings of Leon cheek-by-jowl with Miley Cyrus and Drake and the Black Eyed Peas supports the song’s claim of inclusivity.

25. That kind of inclusivity is at the heart of a certain kind of pop utopianism, the kind which expresses nostalgia about a Top 40 which “played everything,” or expresses glee about the Shuffle feature equally playing “everything” back to back to back.

26. But neither radio and Shuffle can go as far as DJ Earworm does, because they are constricted by the laws of time and space to only playing one song at a time.

27. (Or rather by the laws of copyright and listener-friendliness. You take my meaning.)

28. That one-song-at-a-time aesthetic, the means by which the vast majority of music is inevitably consumed, is like a library in which books are lined up in a row; they may be wildly different books embracing every genre, idea, or personality possible, but they are separate, each compacted into its own unique self.

29. The aesthetic of “Blame It On The Pop,” on the other hand, is that of some Borgesian ur-text, a book which contains all other books, a world which contains all other worlds: to use the terminology of a separate but analogous pop field, a multiverse.

30. That s. b. a. pop field being of course superhero comics.

31. And the all-inclusivity of “Blame It On The Pop” is best analogized not to “This month’s guest-star: Superman!” but to something like Crisis On Infinite Earths, where every corner of the multiverse however unlikely or silly is engaged in the same story.

32. But of course superhero comics, requiring conflict and danger and stakes-raising, are the opposite of utopian (except in brief flashes); pop, requiring only emotional narratives rather than physical/character-based ones, can be inclusive without positing existential threats.

33. Except, again, for emotional ones; thus the recurrence of the “down, down, down” line: the song is about ability of music to lift the spirit out of depression — and get down down down in the dancefloor sense.

34. Which is a familiar enough trope in pop, especially pop with dancefloor pretensions; perhaps the ur-text in this field is Martha & the Vandellas’ “Dancing In The Streets.”

35. But the utopianism of “Dancing In The Streets” is merely universal, encouraging merely everyone around the world to join them in the dance.

36. The utopianism of “Blame It On The Pop,” by incorporating the many universes represented by many different songs, each slightly (or immensely) different, is on the other hand multiversal: every possible person in every possible world is invited to get down down down.

37. Which is merely to insist on the necessity of interiority to pop: every great pop song involves every listener in a specific, individual emotional narrative.

38. The result is that the multiplying “I”s of “Blame It On The Pop” form a coherent self, engaged in a coherent narrative, for the sympathetic listener.

39. (The unsympathetic listener has probably not made it this far.)

40. But to be more specific about the narrative the song tells.

41. It opens with multiversal utopianism — I got pop, I got dance, etc. — and moves into encouraging uplift — baby don’t worry, it’s alright a-alright when it knocks you down — which works to posit the depression the song works to combat.

42. Then Beyoncé and Miley duet on the theme of self-actualization, capped by the ironic chipmunk-voiced All-American Rejects line “with a big smile on my face/and it never seems out of place” — this is followed by a call to blame this emotionalism on the pop, dance, etc. and a further acknowledgement of depression.

43. On the second break, Justin Timberlake pushes the theme of self-actualization further: “The old me’s dead and gone,” followed by the music dropping out; will.i.am’s got a feeling (woo hoo, remarks Fergie both ironically and spiritually) and the dude from the Fray has found God…

44. IN THE POP, DANCE, ETC. The music bangs, the “chorus” (different every time) explodes, and high priestess of the dance Fergie calls us to put our hands in the air (Beyoncé agrees), and Gaga mocks self-seriousnes as a “po-po-po-po-poker face.”

45. The celebration lasts for the next several choruses, until the music dies again and will.i.am again has a feeling (Beyoncé never had a doubt) that tonight’s gonna be a good night (hasn’t it been already? Is there more than this?), and Drake acknowledges the repetitiveness of the theme, but, Caleb Folowill admits, “I could use somebody.” (Woo hoo, agrees Fergie.)

46. Personal connection, it turns out, is the point of the utopianist dance, as Jason Mraz explains: “look into your heart and you’ll find love love love,” the triple repetition acting as a counterweight to the earlier “down down down.”

47. (Stepping outside that narrative, I want to admire DJ Earworm’s work in rescuing “I’m Yours” — the worst original song on the list by quite some distance — and positioning it as the utopian turn in an already utopian song.)

48. Stop stop stop feeling down down down, the chorus rebukes itself, and then the crystal-beautiful voice of Taylor Swift, held in abeyance till now, breaks in: “Can’t you see [love], Isn’t this easy [feeling love].”

49. With this, Taylor’s own rise in the (external-to-the-song) pop universe is explained not as a blonde, virginal corrective to the ethnic unwholesomeness of the rest of the chart, but as a sudden piercing restatement of pop’s original theme.

50. The Beyoncé/Miley duet returns, Taylor adds in a call not to be afraid, Gaga has had a little bit too much feeling down down down, and on to the fadeout, in which Taylor again has the last word: We’ll make it out of this mess, baby just say yes (pitch-shifted to sound equally similar to “no,” ambiguously enough.)

51. There’s so much going on in the song — not to mention the video, which I haven’t even mentioned but is posted above for your edification — that it rewards close and repeated listening as much as any pop song has ever done.

52. But for all that, it’s admirably simple too: its emotional effectiveness is not in its theoretical play or unexpected combinations, but in the big, broad dynamics that you can call either obvious or universal depending on how you want to spin them, but which it’s disingenuous to call anything but effective.

We are in the second week of the third month of 2010, and if the pop charts are any kind of measure, than the most important woman in the pop year to date is Kesha Rose Sebert, a twenty-three year old singer born in the San Fernando Valley and mostly raised in Nashville, who calls herself Ke$ha and pronounces the first syllable of her name to rhyme with bleah, or meh.

The reaction to her slow-bursting fame has been predictably varied. Her debut single, “TiK ToK,” hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 just as the new year turned, which seems like it should be significant, the way all random synchronicity does, and various voices have been raised suggesting that a) she represents the bottoming-out of popular culture, a new low beyond which we cannot go, b) her witless, party-all-the-time persona is yet another cruel blow to the self-respect and potential self-determination of a generation of young women, c) she’s a dumb whore and should be punished for it (and incidentally for inflicting knowledge of her existence on us), and d) hey shut up her music is fun to dance to and you’re the stupid one you big jerkface.

All of these (even c) have their place, and indeed are integral to what for lack of a better phrase I’ll call the Ke$ha Project. But this isn’t a reportorial piece: I’m not interested here in what the Ke$ha Project’s intentional goals are (I assume they don’t go much further than making Ke$ha a star and her producers, songwriters, managers, and record label a lot of money, and to the extent there’s more involved it’s standard-issue self-delusion), but what its cultural, aesthetic, and ideological implications are.

Buckle in. This gone get long.

ERRBODY GETTIN CRUNK CRUNK

Let’s start with “TiK ToK,” because that’s where she first came to most of our notice. I heard it in the early fall just after it was released, because I was downloading and listening to everything the Singles Jukebox covered, but I heard it a few days after reading about it and had forgotten which one she was and the first time I listened to it I thought she might be British and/or black. (I wasn’t listening to the vocals so much as I was responding to the thick, twisty blurt of the music under her; I could hear it coming from the land of Aphex Twin and Dizzee Rascal.) When, around Christmastime, I heard it on the radio, I got a little excited: wow, this weird underground pop song I’d mentally filed away as “not horrible” was making inroads into the mainstream.

And then of course I looked her up and saw that she had never been as underground as I’d thought, that she’d sung the hook for Flo Rida’s “Right Round” and was produced by Max Martin and Dr. Luke, and I made a seamless transition from being mildly interested in her weird bitchy noises to totally fucking rocking out in the car whenever this stupid awesome fizzy-candy song came on the radio. (My relationship with pop radio can basically be summed up as that of a thirteen year old boy to superhero comics: I don’t care how unlikely any of it is as long as I get that fix of eye-bleeding color, abstract sexuality, and stylized violence.)

“TiK ToK” is Ke$ha’s original statement of purpose, so fully and completely representative of her aesthetic that it ends up sounding a little washed-out and pointless on Animal, the subsequent full-length, because it only reinforces the entire message of the album and takes no developing turns into psychotic balladry or maudlin self-pity or aspirational indie rock. Its jocking beats and buzzing, squelchy synths back up a vocal that goes out of its way to annoy anyone with a more settled pair of ears than the thirteen-year-old to whom it is pitched, to sound bratty and clumsy and full of entitlement. It hovers just on the edge of being characterless, and its most thrilling trills and melismas are entirely the product of electronic manipulation.

(Which, if I may go big-picture for a bit, is actually rescuing pop vocals from the contentless affectations of the “soul” diva still much imitated on American Idol, which is always several years behind: those electronic melismas, precisely because they’re unachievable by the human voice, divorce the undeniable thrill of the sound from the ability of the performer, leaving the singer free to focus on the emotion at the heart of the song rather than showboating for showboating’s sake. Yes, I’m about to make a claim that Ke$ha’s affectless snottiness gets to the emotion at the heart of her songs.)

But Ke$ha’s affectless snottiness, the quality in her vocal delivery which irritates even practiced pop listeners unaccustomed to think of themselves as irritable, has a purpose beyond merely dog-whistling this is music which your parents and teachers will HATE. She is playing a character here, and the degree to which the character matches up with the details of her biography is essentially unimportant: what matters is the fidelity of the portrait. The reason it’s easy to hate Ke$ha is that it’s easy to hate the girl she’s playing, the entitled white skank with dead eyes and an aggressive, bottomless need for attention, the feminine equivalent of what in the modern taxonomy of youth culture is commonly called the Douchebag. (A point only underscored by the fact that 3OH!3, the avant-garde heroes of Douchebag Pop, guest on her second single.)

But let’s back up and take a closer look at two words I used to describe the character she play in “TiK ToK.” “White skank” would probably be a pretty uncontroversial description of that character, at least among people for whom the word “skank” is a stable descriptor of something that exists in the world (as opposed to a statement about the state of mind of the person who says it). But we’ll get to that. First let’s unpack “white.”

Since Ke$ha has been in the public eye she’s very much played up her whiteness, cultivating an shaggy blonde mane and choosing publicity photos that accent the pale freckles across her face; but her first (anonymous) introduction to most ears came as the singer of a hook on a hip-hop song, and in the “Right Round” video her presence is only suggested by a black model. She doesn’t sound particularly black; but neither does she sound particularly white, at least when singing hooks. (The party-girl half-talk-half-rap delivery of verses, however… see below.)

Which is nothing new; if you’ve been paying attention to pop music at all over the last ten years, you know that it’s impossible to demarcate where pop ends and hip-hop begins, especially in terms of production technique. Ke$ha is only the latest instance of the slow merge of black and white, from Em+Dre to Timbalake to the rainbow PCD — in fact several observers would probably mock me for even bringing up the old-fashioned idea that there’s any distinction in 2010 between “white music” and “black music.” And certainly Ke$ha’s use of bog-standard hip-hop tropes like phones blowing up, getting crunk, having swagger, etc. isn’t terribly remarkable; except I keep looking at her and thinking it is.

(Theory for later development: is the reemergence of country as a powerhouse pop form e.g. Taylor Swift a way for white people uncomfortable with all this blackness to rope off a pop preserve unindebted to hip-hop norms, Darius Rucker being the token redshirt so we can claim non-racism?)

Of course, race is always complicated by class in America. Hip-hop or not, Ke$ha’s music is intentionally, gloriously vulgar, full of hard, jacking beats, shiny synths and excessive, tacky AutoTune — which it shares with the emerging up-from-the-depths agenda of (pop) hip-hop as set by Soulja Boy, Kid Cudi and Lil Wayne. The elegant excess of Beyoncé and the highbrow madness of Lady Gaga are equally beyond her reach; Ke$ha is without their poise and so decides that her clumsy obviousness isn’t a bug, but a feature.

Which brings us to “skank,” a word that connotes as much a class slur as a gender one. Skanks are not only easy, they’re cheap — anyone from any social stratum can be a whore or a bitch or a slut, but a skank is judged not only for her promiscuity but for her low intelligence, offensive person and poor taste. To call Ke$ha (or, properly, her persona) a skank is to imply that she has no value on any level, a brainless aggregate of bad impulses void of self-respect who therefore (for some reason) deserves none from us. “Us” being the implicated listener, we who are called to sit in judgment on this woman for being a skank.

There are more misogynist, classist, racist, and nihilist implications in the common use of the word than can easily (or briefly) be teased out here; enough to say that the Ke$ha Project, without ever using the word or as far as I know caring one way or the other about its use, reclaims skankiness as a positive attribute in much the same way that 90s feminists did with words like bitch, by turning the concept from one of other-focused moral judgment to one of self-focused strength.

Yes, the lyrics to “TiK ToK” are ridiculous; no one with functioning taste buds brushes their teeth with a bottle of Jack, no one with a sense of self-preservation declares so blithely that when they leave for the night they’re not coming back. And nobody born after 1960 thinks Mick Jagger is any ideal of hotness. That’s not the point; the point is that by naming these things as possible in the world of the song (all songs create sub-universes in which they are true, just like stories; didn’t you know?), she basically turns herself into a superhero, a woman whose appetite for alcohol, sex and dance is so strong that she’s basically indestructible. (Can you think of an image more terrifying to what feminism with such enviable economy calls the patriarchy?) The only moment of vulnerability, appropriately enough for a story told in song, is when the DJ addressed in the second person plays music, when she’s out the dancefloor that is the object of her heroine’s quest, where she raises her hands in the classic image of surrender, and at the end of the bridge, has what I can only describe as an electronic orgasm.

Followed by “Now the party don’t start till I walk in,” which is simply than a statement of fact. This song is Ke$ha’s world, bought and paid for; nothing in it has existence without her.

FIGHT TILL WE DO IT RIGHT

That was a long way to go just to talk about one song. The lady has thirteen more to her name so far; but not all of them are created equally.

As I’ve said, “TiK ToK” lays out Ke$ha’s party-past-the-point-of-fun agenda. What happens past that point depends on the song, or even on the moment in the song; ecstasy, regret, psychosis, depression, and a mystic oneness with the universe (and more) are all on offer on Animal. This is an unusual pop-star album for a couple of reasons: first, despite being entirely produced under the supervision of the Max Martin/Dr. Luke factory, it’s oddly schizophrenic in its sound. Aside from Ke$ha’s own wasted drawl (when she’s not submitting to the Zen discipline of AutoTune), there’s nothing to tie the songs together sonically, unless Frank Kogan’s formulation of Kat Stevens’ “bosh” is it. (Those massive, brain-numbing Eurodance beats, basically.) The other reason it’s odd is that it’s incredibly coherent lyrically. Ke$ha is listed as the principle songwriter on every track in the album, which helps — but she repeats herself, slipping the same themes and even the same phrases into song after song.

Perhaps the least-analyzed (that I’ve seen) line in the chorus of “TiK ToK” is “Imma fight till we see the sunlight,” in itself an admirably concise distillation of the party-as-ritual (and not necessarily an enjoyable one) ethos of the album. Bodies wear out, brains fry, but Ke$ha promises not to give up on the party; she will push past her own exhaustion, boredom, whatever, to achieve its transcendence. But “fight” has other meanings too, of course.

The chorus of “Party At A Rich Dude’s House” contains the line “We’re gonna fight till we do it right” (in the middle of a very “Kids In America” mass singalong; note that for later). Again the implication is that partying is a discipline which must be practiced to be perfected; but the verses bring out the destructive, violent connotations of the phrase. It’s in this song that she promises to piss in the Dom Perignon, throw up in the closet, and in short act like the worst nightmare of the rich dude in question.

Which brings up class again: Ke$ha identifies herself as “young and broke” in the bridge, and it’s easy to see her trashing of the place as a pathetic attempt to take revenge on the inequities of the social structure. Which I’m all for, don’t get me wrong! but she encourages this view by giving us no information at all about the rich dude. He’s rich, and that’s enough of a reason. (Apparently at least some of these lyrics are based on incidents at Paris Hilton’s place. Which matters more for Hilton’s symbolic status as the culture-wide whipping girl for unearned privilege than for the truthfulness of the anecdote.)

But class solidarity is never stable in America, and Ke$ha’s destructive glee turns just as easily on her young and broke peers as on the rich dudes and dudettes of Hollywood. “Backstabber” is a snotty kiss-off to gossiping friends (she inconsistently — but it’s perfectly consistent with the character! — accuses her friends of making her private life public when she does nothing else over the course of the album). It’s a solid little Lily Allenesque character piece with a punchy phased horn sample and a lyric that repeats words so many times that they become a recursive echo. In fact the echo is laid so heavily on the song that I can’t help wondering whether it’s all taking place in her head. My cue was that she rambles towards the end into the line “you’re looking like a lunatic” — but hold that thought.

After rich dudes and so-called friends, who’s left to fight with? Boyfriends, of course, which she manages in two different ways (well, three, but the last one’s a special case; see below). “Kiss & Tell” suffers from an over-obvious chorus, but is otherwise satisfyingly nasty, making fine distinctions between “baller” and “tool,” calling the cheating bastard “a chick” and ending a verse dismissively “I hope you cry.” That’s bad feminism, of course, using gendered referents to imply weakness and pitifulness; but who expected feminism from the Ke$ha Project? Anyway the real feminist point is that Ke$ha, far from being a victim of the entrenched double standard in which guys play the field while girls are either virgins or sluts, is the one enforcing her own standards. Again she’s a superhero, a larger-than-life fantasy figure dishing out revenge on behalf of the girls branded sluts everywhere. In the crude terminology of dick-measuring contests, hers is bigger than his.

The same is true of the other boyfriend kiss-off on the album, “Blind.” This time it takes something out of her: she admits to feeling low, but even more so the music is darkly dramatic, a sobbing emotional backdrop suitable for a post-Brown Rihanna ballad. But in Ke$ha’s hands the darkness turns again to revenge: she’s not going to cry, he’s the one who’ll miss her till the day he dies. Death and blindness are the overriding images of the chorus, but they don’t apply to her. This is the destructive impulses of “Party At A Rich Dude’s House” taken to operatic extremes; she’s snuffing out a life for cheating on her.

If “TiK ToK” gave us the best-case scenario for the Party — dancefloor ecstasy — these other fighting songs give us other options: class warfare, girlfights, emasculation, death. None of these are the party done right; but they’re also not particularly original topics for pop. Ke$ha can go weirder.

EVIL GIRLY GAMES

Two phrases that she employs with some regularity throughout the album are “hot mess” (surely non-coincidentally the title of a recent Cobra Starship album) and “sick obsession.” The first is a tidy encapsulation of the persona she’s putting forward; the second hints at darker, or at least less usual, themes.

Partying past fun can land in ecstasy, or in the banality of Jerry Springer relationships. But it can also end in weirder places. Of course Ke$ha is very far from being the first pop star to claim to be a freak; in fact her most blatant “I’m a freaky girl watch out” song, “Take It Off” is one of the least inspired on the album, a conventional riff on the “there’s a place I know” theme not helped by borrowing the hook off “The Streets Of Cairo” (better known on playgrounds, or it was in my day, as “All The Girls In France”). There’s more destruction and violence in the verses, but for the most part it tells rather than shows. This doesn’t apply, by the way, to the buzzy, gothy music behind her rote choruses — there’s a dark sparkle to the production that almost convinces that Ke$ha’s partying has a more sinister edge than the booze-sex-dance trivium we’ve seen. But ultimately the pathology of “Take It Off” is theatrical, played rather for campy kicks than as anything serious.

“Your Love Is My Drug” goes more or less the same route, a bunch of winking references to drug use and addiction covering up one of the shallower love songs in recent memory (not only is it a poor introduction to the album, it’s not even as good as the Puffy AmiYumi song of the same name, let alone Roxy Music’s epic cathedral). But as the standard bosh of the chorus winds down, Ke$ha’s personality peeps through, singing short phrases at irregular intervals (probably to give Dr. Luke AutoTune fodder), cracking up at herself, and then ending in a mocking gurgle, “I like your beard.”

The pathology of drug addiction was just a pretense for a love song; but that muttered phrase points to other possibilities. She sounds like a teenager trying to get a rise out of an authority figure, phrasing her mockery in the form of a compliment in order to say “whut I said I liked it” and cackle with her friends when he goes predictably off. The fake freakiness of “Take It Off” isn’t Ke$ha (or even her character) — but the infuriatingly charming brat who picks and pecks, finds an annoyance and rides it, is.

And then there’s the real freakiness.

“Stephen” has become my favorite song on Animal, and I hate it. Well, that’s not quite fair. I would probably have hated it, or even been afraid of it, when I was younger; but the tempered judgment that comes with age appreciates its craft and the elegance of its misdirection. I can’t listen to it often, though, or not without being seriously creeped out, because far more than “Every Breath You Take” or “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” or “You Belong With Me,” this is a perfect encapsulation of stalkerdom as actually practiced by young, insane women who think they’re cute.

The production is far lighter than on the rest of the album, giving her an almost Caribbean setting for her voice, which she deploys within a narrow range high in her register. Throughout the rest of the album when she hits the chorus she goes all out in a foghorn blast, pushing the needle into the red and the dynamic range past the edge of coherence, but on “Stephen” she uses a voice synthesizer and drags her phrases out into curlicues and simpers, throwing every silly affectation she can think of into the performance. If you’re the kind of guy whose nerves grate when girls play up the ultrafeminine eyelash-batting cute squeak (I am), this is already kind of off-putting. But then the lyrics start twisting.

It starts out ordinarily enough: she likes this guy’s ass, she thinks his girlfriend’s a bitch, and wants him for herself. So far so Ke$ha. Then she calls him her sick obsession. She’s feeling pathetic, she can’t take rejection. This isn’t the Ke$ha who stomped a guy’s balls for being a slut — and then the bridge comes in. She’s doing the little-girl thing on purpose: “I’ve got guys waiting in a line/For me to play my evil girly games with all their minds/Just watch me, got it down to a simple art/Just bat my eyes like this and there’s a broken heart.” (To cap it off she pronounces “eyes” with the New York accent of Helen Kane, whose voice Betty Boop was originally a parody of.) Delusional, confident; this is more like our Ke$ha. Then “I’m thinking that maybe you think I’m crazy.” Well, there’s crazy and then there’s crazy. “Don’t you think I’m… pretty,” she simpers, and alarm bells go off. (Really, it’s a masterpiece of pronunciation.)

“Cause you’re my object of affection, my drug of choice,” she sings again, “my sick obsession/I want to keep you as my pet to play with and hide under my bed/Forever.” Okay; this is Kathy Bates with a sledgehammer stuff, and once I realized that I got chills every time I heard that line, as well as the subsequent “I’ll knit you a sweater [WHAT not Ke$ha], I want to wrap you up in my love forever/I will never let you go.”

Maybe I’m a commitment-phobe. Maybe I’ve heard one too many comedy sketches where Casey Wilson plays a psychotic obsessive ex-girlfriend. But if Stephen isn’t running his legs off to get away from this girl, he’s a doomed man.

Which is of course awesome. This is the song that most thoroughly breaks with the party ethic of the album, and it’s interesting to speculate on why. Is this the girl Ke$ha would be if she didn’t have the release of partying? (Since she admits to being wasted in the first verse, unlikely.) Is it another in our maze of choose-your-own-adventure endings to the party, ending in psychosis and whimpering, dehumanizing need? Is it (more frighteningly) a real song to a real person?

And then I thought about it and I can’t name a single other song written by a woman to a man that uses the man’s name like this one does. Men, of course, sing women’s names all the time: Alison, Amie, Angie, Billie Jean, Caroline, Cecilia, Gloria, and on and on. But outside of conscious gender-benders like Tori Amos, there aren’t too many songs of direct address sung by young females. Which fits with the conventional gender roles reinforced by pop, of course: men are direct and confrontational and specific, women are indirect and deflective and general. Except Ke$ha’s in ur gender roles redrawin the lines.

I’M ABOUT TO BARF SERIOUSLY

I brought up Casey Wilson not just because I’m a comedy nerd and happened to hear her recently on the Comedy Death-Ray podcast, but because one of the unremarked engines of the Ke$ha Project is comedy.

Not comedy in the organized, semi-official industry sense — there are no jokes in her music, no setups and punchlines, and it would be shitty if there were, we don’t need a distaff Weird Al — but in the sense that her approach to her music contains the anarchic sensibilities that are also present in a great deal of modern comedy. The “I like your beard” interjection (and the decision to retain it), the over-the-top delivery of so many lines on the album from “oh my god I think I’m still drunk” to “I can find someone way hotter, with a bigger… well”  are meant to provoke laughter — or at least they do provoke laughter in the sample group of one which is my only research instrument.

Of course the most comic song on the album, and therefore the most deliriously awesome, is “D.I.N.O.S.A.U.R.,” which has drawn comparisons with Daphne & Celeste, L’Trimm, and Northern State (and I’d throw Fannypack, Toni Basil, and Aqua into the mix). It’s a one-joke song, bagging on the old guy who thinks he’s still cool enough to hang out with Ke$ha’s (character’s) young-and-broke crowd, and while none of the actual put-downs are terribly amusing in themselves, there’s an infectious energy to the chant — plus a stroke of loopy production genius, a sample of a giggle that pans all over the stereo space while shifting up and down in pitch — and one line that always makes me laugh, which is in bold at the top of this section. (It’s the delivery.)

Speaking of barfing, I haven’t done an exhaustive study or anything but I have to imagine this album has one of the highest ratios of vomit to love song in pop history. This is of course another comic trope — a particularly juvenile one, but as Dave Holmes pointed out Ke$ha’s persona is a thirteen-year-old’s idea of an adult, when vomit is still funny as well as gross instead of just an indicator of having made poor choices.

Bagging on old people and authority figures: also popular with middle schoolers. The only two people I’ve ever heard sing a Ke$ha song in public came out of the women’s restroom giggling hysterically and were collectively not old enough to drink.

WITH EVERY MOVE I DIE

But of course Ke$ha is not thirteen; she’s twenty-three, and there are still a couple of options unexplored in the maze.

“Hung Over” and “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes” are, as far as I can make out a consensus, the least-liked songs on Animal, ballads (even power ballads) where she turns a) regretful and b) suicidal, respectively. As character pieces, they suffer from being standard-issue and maudlin; if I liked emo better or had more of a tolerance for self-pity in any form, I might have more to say about them; I’ll only say that they’re entirely consistent with her character: if “TiK ToK” is about the preparation for the party and the excelsis during it, “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes” is the maudlin aftermath — or a maudlin aftermath. There are always more options, which is why the record doesn’t end there.

“Animal” is the last song on Animal, and it’s a complete gear shift. (At least until the chorus kicks in; there’s the bosh.) Ke$ha sings the verses in an exaggerated indie croon, which people have compared to Feist and Kate Bush, but I mostly hear as Dolores O’Riordan. Regardless, it’s right out of the Arcade Fire wing of inspirational indie: world ending, last chance to connect, truly be alive, in love with everything. She does it well — at least whenever the jackhammer disco thumps leave her alone — and I’m caught between thinking she’s devaluing the rest of her album by comparing it to this Real Serious Music, and believing that she’s elevating the tropes of inspirational indie by incorporating them into her own weird, pulsing, trashily alive hot mess.

BABY SHUT UP HEARD ENOUGH

Well, that, as far as I can work it out, is the Ke$ha Project. I don’t think it’s entirely successful, but it’s a first album and the Martin/Luke factory isn’t really known for its quality control. I wanted to spend the rest of my wordcount talking about what else I heard in the record, what I jotted down as “influences and reminiscences.” Influences you’d have to read interviews and do some biographical work to find out about; but of whom do I find her reminiscent? I thought you’d never ask.

It struck me as I was marvelling at the weird mind games of “Stephen” for the fourth or fifth time this week that Ke$ha may be the first pop star to grow up with two Courtney Loves as a role model, both the angry, sarcastic feminist of Live Through This, and the desperate party-hound of the past decade. In fact her publicity shots are sometimes startlingly like the cover image of Live Through This. I have no idea, obviously, how feminist (or not) Ke$ha herself is; but the worlds she builds in her songs don’t map very well onto the standard patriarchal narratives, especially the ones about sluts and skanks.

One of the benefits of the half-talk-half-rap delivery she uses for many of her verses is that it’s infinitely plastic; she can adopt any tone, apply any level of sarcasm or referentiality. At various times throughout the album I thought I heard Kim Gordon, Moon Unit Zappa, Johnnette Napolitano, Debora Iyall (Romeo Void), Deborah Evans-Stickland (Flying Lizards), Kathleen Hanna, and Laurie Anderson. Which if you’re trying to make a list of feminist forebears is about as good as you can hope for, and I hope I’m not just hallucinating the similarities. (Definitely not with Laurie Anderson.)

There are two songs I haven’t covered. “Blah Blah Blah” is the current single, featuring 3OH!3 in a marvelous Skank & Douchebag Power! gesture of solidarity — perhaps the only way the Ke$ha character could find satisfaction with a guy is if he’s just as much an invulnerable, selfish dick as she is — and “Boots & Boys” is resisting my efforts to nail it down. Something about the rubbery synth makes me want to pull in comparisons with mid-90s Blur, and there’s something about how the tightly-wound crescendo in the middle eight mirrors the vocal orgasm in “TiK ToK,” but it’s not coming together and it’s already far too late.

I’m not going to post this immediately, but if I read it over and decide to let it go, then this is what you’re stuck with. I’m not writing more than 5,000(!) words on Ke$ha. Until she puts out another record, this is my definitive take.

Harry Chapin, Sniper And Other Love Songs

File Between: Jim Croce and David Ackles

Comments: My most significant emotion about Harry Chapin for the last seveal years has been regret that I included “Taxi” in my Hundred Songs Of The Seventies, mostly because I’m never in the mood to listen to it and always skip it when it comes up on the playlist. So this record started out with a strike against it in the form of totally unjustified irritation with a song from a completely different album. And it only partly won me over. You really have to be in a specific headspace to allow the Chapin magic to work on you — the kind of headspace where clumsy rhymes and great whacking obvious metaphors don’t bother you, what matters is the conviction and the imagery — but as I get older and more fastidious about the kinds of lyrics I won’t roll my eyes at, I’m less and less willing to move into that headspace. His band is good — I especially liked the gestures towards rocking out on “Burning Herself” and “Woman Child” — but his song structures are so ungainly that I kept being reminded of a specific form of late 60s/early 70s cultural expression, the Narrative Poem For Children, with its ugly, rubbery illustrations (the inside-sleeve illustrations here partake of the same Gormenghastian aesthetic) and conviction that Structure was a Hidebound Tradition of the Past, and Freeform is Where It’s At, right kids? And I totally hated the nine-minute title track. The Boomtown Rats did it better with “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and they didn’t need to make their killer whine about how nobody listened.

A Keeper? That said, there’s enough loveliness and actual lyrical heft here to make up for the bits I didn’t care for. Chapin is one of the great weirdo singer/songwriters of the period, and it’s a shame that most people only know him for “Cat’s In The Cradle.”

Vinyl Rip: Barefoot Boy

Fantagraphics · 2009

If it were ten years ago, I’d have been the first in line to buy this the morning it was released. A whole book by Al Columbia? Are you shitting me? After all these years?

But it’s not ten years ago, it’s now, and I’ve only checked it out of the library and will be returning it Monday morning. It’s not that it’s bad, that it’s a disappointment, or even that Al Columbia is not still the supreme twisted genius he’s always been; I’ve just reached a critical-mass point in my comics consumption where I can’t afford to buy handsome hardcovers I’m not going to be returning to again and again.

And sadly, despite the fucked-up gorgeousness of the images Fanta has scanned, blown up, and lovingly curated in this book, I’ve read through it once and won’t need it again. I’m a narrative guy, and while there are snatches and hints of narrative here, bleeding through the unfinished artwork and close-cropped panels, it’s not enough to satisfy me.

But I did enjoy what I got. The title characters are the boy and girl on the cover, and Columbia makes them the Hansel and Gretel of his own private funhouse nightmares, old black-and-white Disney or Fleischer cartoons gone horribly awry. Dismemberment, eyes being gouged out, and the slick slice of razor against flesh are only a few of the repeated horrors committed upon Pim and Francie in varying states of cartooniness, a method which I’m sure a worthwhile critic could work up into a symbolism if they cared to try, but to my jaundiced eye reads more like the plain fact that this material was all drawn over a period of decades and a man’s style is bound to change. It hardly matters, anyway: the book follows its own sinister dream logic, bouncing from zombie apocalypses to flesh-eating flowers to multi-limbed serial killers to horrific swing-dancing accidents with the manic glee of a Winsor McCay under psychiatric evaluation.

It wouldn’t be an Al Columbia book if it wasn’t incredibly frustrating: what’s been published is clearly only a fragment of a vast body of material he’s been working on off and on for years (the number of repeated images, sometimes only slightly tweaked, reveals the depth of his obssessive perfectionism), and the tantalizing glimpse of further panels just beyond the border of the page makes you wonder what this book might look like if he had followed through on what was clearly at one point a fully-fleshed narrative with its own mythology and characterization.

But on the other hand this nightmare collage may be more effective. Pim and Francie die horribly in many ways throughout the collection, and the reset button at the turn of each page follows the kind of logic that only dreams, of all the major narrative forms, ever achieve. The artwork is stunningly beautiful — his tight, slick brushwork and sense of composition is second to none — and the grisly imagery suitably depraved; I just can’t help feeling that it’s all going to dissipate inconsequentially the moment I wake up.