On the Animal that is Ke$ha

By Connor Hayes     4/22/10 7:00pm

When unmarried 40-year-old hip-hop mogul Sean "P. Diddy" Combs gets out of bed every morning, he probably doesn't have much to worry about. After all, Combs made over $30 million last year and employs a staff to take care of his six children, make him breakfast, dress him and most likely bathe him.23-year-old Kesha Rose Sebert, more commonly known by her stage name, Ke$ha, probably has more difficult mornings. Yet, when she uttered the words "Wake up in the mornin'/ Feelin' like P. Diddy," she used Combs' sunrise routine as a muse for her hit single "TiK ToK." The subsequent Facebook statuses and tweets from "look at me, I drink!" females around the world were soon to follow.

I somehow managed my way through Ke$ha's first album Animal, and I can safely say that it is by far the worst piece of music I have ever listened to. Don't get me wrong - I'm not a snob who simply writes off anything that is played over the radio or at a Martel party. One must remember that I regard Jeremih's "Imma Star" as the best song of the past decade and that my iTunes tells me I have listened to "You're a Jerk" by the New Boyz more than 85 times since its release last spring. Yet with Ke$ha, every song seems to be pre-fabricated, overproduced, riddled with repetition and concerned with the same subject matter - a constant rotation of "I'm partying," "This guy likes me" and "I'm too hot for this guy!"

Speaking of subject matter, I was inspired to compose this column when I woke up last Thursday feeling more like Sean Connery than Sean Combs. I went to the bathroom on my way to class and, just as I prepared to defecate away my stomach's sorrows, a familiar whining, almost moaning, note came over my iPod's headphones. It was Ke$ha.

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Something funny happened when my iPod arbitrarily decided to subject me to her song "Blah Blah Blah" while I took a hungover crap: I couldn't stop listening. Not to say that I was physically unable to change the song, I just had every desire in the world to listen to "Blah Blah Blah" in its entirety. For the same reasons I had locked my door each time I had scoured the Internet in weeks prior, trying to find remixes of "Tik Tok" that I could listen to without being chastised, I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of emotion. I hated her, and didn't, at the same time. I realized that Ke$ha was the scum of the music world, yet I loved her . I wanted to be her.

What are we to make of people like Ke$ha who in many ways are the female answers to male musical abominations such as Soulja Boy and T-Pain? While their marketability, social manipulation and production are near flawless, their talent is nonexistent. Ke$ha inexplicably lists artists such as Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Aaron Neville among her influences. With an extensive background in songwriting and musical production, Ke$ha and other similar artists seem to be just poking fun at the ease with which they can dominate the charts through cookie-cutter media. Much like the rise of reality television, America knows the music industry is becoming a dumbed-down ringtone metropolis. And nobody seems to mind.

I wanted to try to solve this problem while I sat on the pot that morning. I hated myself for humming along to "Blah Blah Blah" and its exceptionally terrible lyrics. It was then that I had an epiphany: Is this even a problem? Can we not just put aside our pretentious preconceived notion of what good music or good television is supposed to be? I had a dream that day: a dream that one day, a group of grown men could sit together and listen to a catchy Ke$ha song during a commercial break while watching VH1's "Charm School" or "I Love New York."

That dream ended when my iPod fell in the toilet.

Connor Hayes is a Baker College junior and Thresher Backpage editor.

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