SO MANY ALARM BELLS

By Circe -
I know a lot of people like Ke$ha. I kind of understand that; I don't personally like her really big hits at all, but they seem to be good examples of whatever they are.

Pertinent video: "TiK ToK"

It bothers me that people seem to think she's original. She really isn't. She's not writing anything that other people haven't written about before her, and most of her musical structure is either pretty standard electropop or new wave ballad. You don't need to make original music to make good music, and the fact that people think you do irks me about as much as the fact that people have such short memories that this doesn't remind them of anything:

"Your Love Is My Drug"

She's also a good performer, if by "good" you mean "capable of hitting notes and creating pretty much the same spectacle live as she does on video". 

Saturday Night Live, "TiK ToK":

But there is something about her music which really doesn't sit well with me at all. Yeah, faux-drunken whore, yeah, assumed character for the public, yeah, yeah -- but I don't think she's faking very much. She comes off as excruciatingly self-absorbed -- and indeed, this interview with Ryan Seacrest sheds quite a bit of light on that:

Her mother being a punk musician kind of explains some of the hard-edged efforts to deliberately piss other people off. Does "We R Who We R" make anyone else vaguely uncomfortable? It's not just "We want to have a party and sticks-in-the-mud are not invited," it's got this air of "I've got mine, fuck you!" and "I don't really care if I trample all over your life to live mine."

Other things in that interview just set off so many screaming red-light alarms I don't even know where to begin. She doesn't want to know who her father is in case he's "a loser"? Her mother had a baby just because she wanted a baby and doesn't even know who her father is? Some dude calls up saying 'hey I might be your dad' and she moves in with him? Then decides he's too much of a loser to be her dad anyway and goes to live in her grandfather's car? Sneaking into Prince's house totally didn't sound that crazy in her head?

Either this woman is the very personification of "crazy bitch" or she is a troll of the highest order. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near her.

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