Ke$ha comes on like a well-worn worst nightmare, her manicure chewed and her morals thoroughly compromised. The 22-year-old music industry brat -- her mom's a songwriter who raised her family in studios and dives from Los Angeles to Nashville -- has irritated some critics by reinvigorating the Girls Gone Wild sexual recklessness of a few years back, but really her act reaches much further.
She's a classic screwball blond, brassy like Jean Harlow and saucy like Mae West. Hating Ke$ha for kicking pretty boys to the curb and vomiting in the closet of some rich kid whose party she crashed (allegedly, Paris Hilton) is like saying West was too forward when she told Cary Grant to come up and see her sometime.
What makes Ke$ha interesting, though, isn't the substance of her act. It's the way she and her producers -- primarily her mentor, hitmaker Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald -- refashion the screwball heroine role to suit a new era of aggressive superficiality and libertine self-empowerment.
The main lyrical idea behind "Animal" -- that a woman behaving like a sexist, inconsiderate male oaf turns the tables in a way that shocks but ultimately leads to freedom -- is neither new nor particularly useful. But unlike many of the pop ingénues who've tried on this attitude, Ke$ha offers a thoroughly fleshed-out character to embrace or despise.
Her total commitment to the deliberately stupid script "Animal" provides (one that she and her mother, who co-wrote several songs, helped devise) makes it work.
Part juvenile delinquent, part wisecracking dame, Ke$ha pulls the rug out from under the overly proper. She finds power in the modernizing toys of her time, enticing boys with drunken text messages and juicing her libido with the hottest dance-floor beats. If some of her vices, like Jack Daniel's and guys who look like Mick Jagger, both of which she mentions in her hit single "TiK ToK," are cutely antiquated, she herself is as thoroughly of this moment as is her doppelgänger, Taylor Swift.
Not being hip, I checked with my 14 year-old, and his eyes lit up instantly when asked about Ke$ha. "She's on my iPod," he said.
Well, she's 22, so perhaps she'll be good for some babe-blogging down the road as well. Here's the commercial video of "Tik Tok":
I like it. Although I wouldn't buy the CD, my young wife listens to this kind of trashy-sexy stuff that is on her station (I hear it when I am filling her tank - gas, that is, get your minds out of the gutter); and got that early Madonna 1980s energy - definitely the cute factor.
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