Gawker clears up something that should of been painfully obvious from miles away. Maybe even from outerspace. Quite literally:
Oh Ke$ha! The faux-drunken pop star with rotting Jack Daniels-teeth has released a new viral video in which she and her slinky friends change the famous Hollywood sign to say Ke$hawood. And people think it’s real! It’s clearly not.
Alas, Curbed. Sorry, Perez. Yes it is indeed fake, Vulture. Guys. The letters on the Hollywood sign are 45 feet tall. It is not remotely possible that a bitchy pop star in her underpants and an Indian headdress could — equipped only with a group of modelish fake friends and a few cans of spray paint — somehow hoist a giant tarp up and over the equivalent of a four story building in the middle of the night unmolested. She’d need a crane. When we asked a Gawker friend who lives right near the sign if he had seen it, his response was “Uh, no.” Oh well. At least she’s still sexxxy and flirty and fun. Or at least her people would really like us to think she is.
Perez Hilton must feel like such a dumbass. Not unlike every other day.
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I was hopeful that Ke$ha’s reign at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 would come to an end soon with “Tik Tok” being usurped by Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”. “Bad Romance” set a record for airplay last week, getting 10,859 plays and had good digital sales (currently eighth on iTunes). Now, according to Billboard, “Tik Tok” has broken that record just a week later, lodging more than 11,000 plays last week.
“Tik Tok‘“s initial success was fueled mostly by online sales but now that airplay has caught up (and how!), it could be number one for quite a while.
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With all of talk of the Pazz and Jop votes that came out Tuesday night, something interesting happened on the Billboard 200 charts that might have been easy to miss. According to Yahoo’s chart watcher Paul Grein:
Vampire Weekend’s sophomore album, Contra, enters The Billboard 200 at #1 with first-week sales of 124,000. That includes 74,000 digital copies, which is 60% of its total. This is the second week in a row in which the #1 album has sold more digital than physical copies. Ke$ha’s Animal debuted last week with sales of 152,000 copies, more than three-quarters of them (76%) sold digitally. These are the first #1 albums in chart history that sold more digital than physical copies in the weeks they were #1.
Four other #1 albums came close, with digital sales accounting for between 40% and 45% of their sales totals while they were #1. These albums, and their digital percentages: John Mayer’s Battle Studies (45%), The Fray’s The Fray (44%), Colbie Caillat’s Breakthrough (41%) and Coldplay’s Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends (40%). Note that all four of these albums were released since June 2008. I think this is what they call a growing trend.
I don’t think any more needs to be said.
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In Jim Derogatis’ essay on “Hootiegate”, he writes “A sarcastic sign about the star ratings hung in the Rolling Stone copy department advising that THREE STARS IS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU’RE SORRY. Think about that the next time you read the reviews section, though why you’d bother, I don’t know”.
That was the first thing that came to mind when I read Jody Rosen’s review of Ke$ha’s album Animal in Rolling Stone. Rosen is one of my very favorite music writers: he’s always intellectually honest and consistent and is smart as hell. This is what he said in Slate’s music club at the end of the year (I quoted part of this previously):
Ke$ha’s big hit, “TiK ToK,” has an irrefutable hook. Like Ann (Powers), I recognize that her strident party-girl postures are part of a whole post-post-post-feminist gestalt. But I’ve spent the last couple of days listening to an advance copy of Ke$ha’s forthcoming album, and it repulses me. It takes a lot to put a Black Eyed Peas fan in touch with his inner Allan Bloom. It takes songs with titles like “Party at a Rich Dude’s House.”
Ke$ha’s message, as best I can make out, is that drunken loutishness and sexual harassment aren’t just for the fellas anymore. (She’s the female BrokeNCYDE.) Unlike Ann, I don’t hear “fruitful comedy” in Ke$ha. Not if comedy implies laughing, and laughing implies access to neural pleasure centers. And despite Ke$ha’s monomaniacal focus on getting laid, I don’t hear much sex, either—just grim, Machiavellian sexual politics. (Sample lyric: “Don’t be a little bitch with your chit-chat/ Just show me where your dick’s at.”) I’m all for slutty vulgarity in pop music. But slutty vulgarity without pleasure? It’s depressing. Worse, it’s boring. Here’s hoping MIA puts out that third album soon to remind everyone what sexy electro-fied girl power is all about.
The above two paragraphs would indicate he thinks the album is terrible, right? His three star review in Rolling Stone says almost exactly the same thing (including saying it’s repulsive):
Not long ago, frat-boy antics were for, well, boys. But 22-year-old Ke$ha, the electro-upstart behind the hit “TiK ToK,” is here to let the world know that loutish drunkenness and sexual harassment aren’t just for fellas anymore. On her debut, she calls herself a pimp, brags about a “Party at a Rich Dude’s House” and tells one hapless love toy, “Don’t be a little bitch with your chit-chat/Just show me where your dick’s at.” It’s repulsive, obnoxious and ridiculously catchy — thanks to songwriter-producers Dr. Luke and Max Martin, who envelop Ke$ha’s bratty raps in percolating beats and buzzing bass lines. Fear for the future of civilization, and dance.
There’s nothing inconsistent in what Rosen wrote in Slate and what he wrote in Rolling Stone. Right now, Ke$ha has both the number one single and album (at least until the new Billboard charts officially come out on Thursday) and should RS decide they want to put Ke$ha on the cover of their magazine (she sells records, why wouldn’t she sell magazines?), the intellectually-honest reviewer wouldn’t be the one having to say “sorry”.
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As much as I dislike Ke$ha and find her shtick annoying, there are few things more grating than hearing someone call a pop star “stupid”. It’s rarely true and Ke$ha’s biography is no exception. In a mostly unflattering portrait, Gawker wrote earlier today:
Ke$ha plays up the idea that she’s a wild child—two oft-repeated stories, both of which are repeated in her official bio, involve her breaking into Prince’s house to give him her demo, and throwing up in Paris Hilton’s closet—but she was an honors student who would’ve gone to Barnard if she hadn’t dropped out of high school at the behest of Dr. Luke and fellow producer Max Martin, who wrote Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time.”
I get that pop stars don’t create their public personas on their ability to split the atom or anything, but I do wish more people who don’t listen to pop would think about the above comment from LA Times music writer Ann Powers on Twitter, and substitute any other pop singer for Ke$ha.
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“Tik Tok” by Ke$ha is now the number one song in the country, knocking Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ tourism jingle “Empire State of Mind” off the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
While “Tik Tok” (a song I hate, by the way) is the number one song overall, it’s only the number two song on Billboard’s pop charts (Iyaz’s “Replay” is the number one pop song right now). I wondered how that was even possible, and last week the difference was even more striking: “Tik Tok” was the number two song on the Hot 100 and fifth on the pop charts. The answer, I found, is on how each chart is tabulated.
The brilliant Chris Molanphy directed me to this explanation from Billboard for how “Tik Tok” was number two on the Hot 100 last week while Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” had greater digital sales and radio airplay last week but came in below “Tik Tok” at three. Billboard says:
On the Hot 100, it is, indeed, a rare occasion when a song leads another in airplay and sales, yet trails on the Hot 100. The Hot 100 is mainly an airplay and sales hybrid chart. However, online song and video streaming from AOL and Yahoo! contributes, as well, and when airplay and sales totals are close, streaming can be a tie-breaker.
So the Hot 100 is a composite of airplay and digital sales of singles, with online streaming from AOL and Yahoo! also factored in. For the pop chart, Billboard says it’s “the week’s hottest pop songs, ranked by mainstream top 40 radio airplay detections as measured by Nielsen BDS.”
The airplay is good but it isn’t what’s propelling the song; that’s coming from digital sales (just passing Lady Gaga to be number one on the Digital Songs chart and is currently the number one single on iTunes).
For better or (much, much) worse, “Tik Tok” is a big hit, even if it’s a confounding one - in many different ways.
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As it stands right now, Ke$ha’s single “Tik Tok” is number twenty-two on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, starred for having the highest gain over the past week from digital sales or radio airplay. It’s likely coming from sales because “Tik Tok” is currently number six on the iTunes chart. Before too long, the song will probably find its way into the top 10. But is it any good?
Sort of.
It’s a catchy, trashy, white-girl rap that was co-written and produced by Dr. Luke. When studios pay his salary, they expect catchy songs with big hooks. In that sense, it does what you would expect it to. Ke$ha won’t ever be mistaken for a skilled emcee (no, she’s no Lady Sovereign). Her delivery sounds like she’s woken up with a hangover that will last the rest of the week.
Ke$ha (pronounced Kesh-ah) was in Seattle for the first stop on her tour with awful “party” rapper Mickey Avalon and her set was a disappointment by any objective measure.
Midway through she proclaims “I’m not drunk, I’m just glittery” after running in to (and proceeding to run into) her band members and swagger across the stage. To be fair, she was “glittery”, covered in the stuff (and had a dollar sign written in Sharpie across her forearm). She asked the all-ages crowd “who likes blowjobs?” Which was only appropriate because her shtick rests on getting her audience horny. If that wasn’t the objective, why would she have her guitarist pour a bottle of water on her chest?
Ke$ha’s set was a brief twenty minutes that was heavy on sexual innuendo (which is fine when pop stars have sexy songs to rely on). The one song that sounded good was “Tik Tok” because she remembered all of the words to it (but hell, I know all of the words to it and that’s just because I listen to the radio). In her five-song set, I would be hard-pressed to find a second hit.
Rarely can someone sleep their way to the top of their empirical food chain. Ke$ha’s album won’t be released until sometime in 2010, so who knows what it’ll sound like, but if she wants to be successful (or at least an interesting pop musician), she’ll have to learn the difference between sexy and slutty. Not every day can be Halloween.
Setlist:
1. Backstabber
2. Party at a Rich Kid’s House
3. Dinosaur
4. Blah Blah Blah
5. Tik Tok
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