Ke$ha's glittery and gross, ostentatiously trailer trash, and, surprise! I don't hate her.
I started compulsively downloading the free music on iTunes back in the summer of 2009. As I've previously mentioned, the songs tended to be alternative, which was and is my preferred background noise when writing. At some point, they started putting up music videos as well. One of the first videos they offered was for "Tik Tok" by Ke$ha. I wasn't terribly picky, so I downloaded it. Now would be a good time to note that I don't usually preview free iTunes stuff before downloading it. In the grand scheme of things, it's probably been a good thing.
Once "Tik Tok" had finished transferring itself onto my computer, I pressed play, then sat transfixed in front of my computer as some sparkly blonde tramp pranced about for three and a half minutes, causing mild chaos with the indifferent grin of someone far too soused to see reason. When the video was over, I seriously considered deleting it, but decided against it. Somehow, even getting rid of something free seemed wasteful. I'm pretty sure I then rewatched it, just to make sure I hadn't somehow dreamed it up. I hadn't. After that, I didn't think of the song too much, as the entire thing -- visuals, lyrics, music, the idea of using alcohol to perform dental hygeine -- put a bad taste in my mouth.
Fast forward to the beginning of the school year, which meant I spent much more time in the car listening to Top 40 radio with my carpoolmates. One afternoon, I happened to hear "Tik Tok" come oozing out of the radio. At that point, I had almost forgotten the song -- and by extension, Ke$ha -- existed. And then, suddenly, it was everywhere. I barely had time to be mildly smug about having known about the Next Big Thing before the overwhelming irritation started to set in. "Tik Tok" had very striking imagery, and that made it infamous almost overnight.
What's more, it brought terrible, terrible people out of the woodwork, eager to lay down their two cents on this phenomenon. New parodies of the song seemed to be generated daily, and not just idiots on YouTube, but big names. I distinctly remember The Simpsons opening with a parody of it, you know, back when The Simpsons still clung to a shred of immediate relevance. There were also people who seemed to seriously think that the song was advocating that children should use alcohol to brush their teeth, and, even more remarkably, other people were reporting on this as if it had national relevance. All this overexposure meant that the song was inescapable, and my previous stance of "well, this is kinda gross" was rapidly deteriorating into "this is the worst possible thing." (I thought this with all the hyperbole a fifteen-year-old who could not have imagined the "Friday" phenomenon could muster.)
This, of course, meant that Ke$ha was thrust into the limelight as reporters asked how she felt about all of this. And so I learned that the glittergrime aesthetic from the "Tik Tok" video was apparently her everyday look. My disgust was compounded, but I couldn't help but follow her progress in the pop music world. The bile fascination meant that even I couldn't quite look away as she released more singles, which all felt like retreads of the same ground "Tik Tok" had covered. (Mostly because, well, they were.) Also, her live shows were apparently remarkably terrible. I had sudden hope that she would burn out. She didn't immediately, but when all the singles had been wrung from her album, she seemed to drop out of the pop scene completely.
In the long period of silence that followed, I rethought some of my previous notions about Ke$ha. Once the hype had died down, one piece of information really stood out in my mind: Ke$ha is apparently really smart. Like, high-percentile-on-the-SAT smart, the sort of smart that I could directly relate to, being in the process of taking that test myself. I remembered an interview where she had claimed she would go to college if the whole music thing didn't work out for her. When I was fifteen, that bothered me. I felt like she was either lying or, worse, utterly squandering her potential. From the vantage point of writing college application letters, however, her choice seemed more then sensible. It seemed brilliant. Why the hell shouldn't she make absurd amounts of money as a pop star? Intelligence doesn't necessarily go away. Besides, even if she never did go to college, she still had a definite career.
With that mindset, I began to listen to her songs with new ears. Suddenly, the idea that she herself might have been in on the joke occurred to me. The delicious possibility that the whole thing was a grand parody stretched out in front of me, entirely plausibly. I found myself not disgusted with Ke$sha so much as with the culture that warmly and unironically embraced her music. As for the artist, I began to feel something akin to respect.
Fast forward to this past year. Between the heady rush of college concerns and my inability to tune into pop stations from my dorm room, I had all but forgotten that Ke$ha was meant to have an album coming out. It was a surprise, therefore, to hear her voice blasting out of my car radio on the way home for some vacation. This was partly because I forgot she existed, but even moreso because I legitimately enjoyed "Die Young" and found myself singing along to the chorus in no time. I'm sure my fifteen-year-old self would be appalled, but that's okay. I'm not quite her anymore.
I tell this story in particular because it's the best example of why I do what I do. When I was in high school, I was deeply disdainful of pop music and the people who liked it. There was some truth to this; the late 2000s were not a pretty time for music. A lot of it, though, came from just being a teenager and hating the things my peers liked because they seemed vacuous, trashy, and common. I felt this way about popular literature, too, believing that a world full of Twilights and Pitbulls was one that I could do better than, that other people should do better than. I still believe that about literature -- I want to be a YA editor and have the chance at improving the quality of that genre in any way -- but my opinion about music has changed.
Some of it is bad, sure, but plenty of it is just harmless fun. Listening to pop music and reading celebrity gossip have become my mental junk food, something simple to take my mind off of studying. It's entertainment, and I've realized that I'm happier when I don't feel bad about enjoying pop music. There's a good song by Freezepop about the concept. Lindsay Ellis also said essentially the same thing three years ago, which maybe makes this post a little redundant in the grand cultural scheme. I still want to tell it, though, because reaching this epiphany helped me to understand a lot about how and why I consume media differently now than I did back then.
Don't get me wrong, I'll still rant about pop music. I've already done so on this very blog. I'm just picking my battles with a little more discernment these days. Being aloof to the pop scene just because most of it is objectively inane in any serious context cuts you off from a lot of fun, especially right now when the charts keep changing their mind about what will define this decade's music. It's a good time to be listening, and there's still time for you to listen with me. C'mon. It'll be fun. We'll point and laugh at all the silly things, like Justin Bieber's saggy pants, and all will be well.
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