Let me explain it this way. Pop Music is like dating girls: some you date for awhile and break up, some break your heart and some marry you and you spend a lifetime with.
It takes time to see how it will all work out
But you go into each date with the hope of it working out.
People take one look at Ke$ha, and without even bothering to listen, figure they have her figured. Now ask em how many samples they can hear on the album. Give up? None. This is a very old fashioned production job, Jim Farber mentioned Ace Of Bass. Exactly, maybe even latter day Abba. It’s not analogue but it isn’t the slush of multi-tracking. Dr. Luke -who is Swedish and can do the trick of slush easy, he did it on Flo Rida’s brilliant last album, is doing something else here. It moves backwards and forwards simultaneously.
Ke$ha was raised by her single Mom, a West Coast singer song writer in her own right, and nursed backstage at concerts. She bleeds sound. Her Mommy taught her to write songs. And because she is real serious about this stuff the songs are thematically bound: party girl, partying out of bound. You know, the way B-52s are allowed to.
But Ke$ha has her own sense of integrity. Even before “Tik Tok” hit big she turned down an offer to have one of her songs in a fast food commercial. How many of your heroes would do that?
Look, I loved Ace Of Base and I love synth driven dance music with a bad girl attitude, so I am bound to love this highly superior product. Maybe it won’t last forever. Maybe we’ll break up at some point. But right now I wanna second date.
Maybe you don’t.
But you definitely won’t if you spend your life reviewing people’s photographs instead of their music.