"Momma's tellin' me I should think twice...!"
It was a line from the Ke$ha (uh, yeah...about that...) song 'Your Love Is My Drug', to which I replied aloud, without thinking really, "There's no fricking way that girl ever had a momma."
When I did, one of the people I work with - barely eighteen - gave me a perplexed, and a moment later fairly dirty, look.
Three years ago, the exact same thing happened with another Kesha song (sorry, just can't do the dollar sign)... This time the song was'Tik Tok', and the line, chanted similarly: 'When I leave for the night I ain't coming back!'
To which I replied, again out loud, and without thinking: "Okay... so who's watching your kid, then?"
That time, a different individual, a bit older but still hopelessly young, snapped, more defensively than I'd have thought my remark (and Kesha) deserved, "That's not what the song is about!"
To which I was moved to reply, 'In a real world scenario, that's what it WOULD be about!'...
Trenchant. Irrefutable. But you have to choose your battles carefully as you make your way through this crazy world, so I kept my mouth shut. Still, it has now been revealed to me twice not only that Kesha is here to stay (as opposed to a one hit wonder), but some kind of hero apparently amongst young people, particularly young girls. She just might be, *gulp*, the musical voice of this generation; moreso, I'd say, than Lady Gaga or Rihanna (for instance), who each has her own unique thing going on (Gaga especially), and a modicum of talent with which to forge artistry, and in spite of this, or maybe because of it, doesn't hit the nail on the head as squarely.
And Britney...well, she'd have gotten my vote once. But she's old news at this point. I'm talking about the generation on the doorstep of tomorrow, barely out of their teens or still in their teens - the ones who were born the same year as Google, who don't know why we say 'dial' a phone number, who absolutely don't see - or have - a need to learn penmanship in school.
Kesha had better hit a nail squarely, because she has little in the way of discernible talent, either as a vocalist or a musician. She reportedly writes her own songs, but a cursory listen reveals not much in the way of creative energy being expended. Her hooks are simplistic, her lyrics are trite, her vocals a bland mix of chanting and warbling, not unlike a karaoke singer at about 11:17 Thursday night, who's one or two shots past not caring that she has to work tomorrow. Kesha has only a contrived showmanship, mostly shock value to barter with. 'We running this town just like a club!' she chants with an artless lurch of her hips, glitter makeup smeared across her face like war paint. She dresses unattractively down, Tweets naked pictures of herself, makes a bra out of human teeth (sent in by her fans) and of course makes sure it winds up being reported somewhere by someone. All of this carefully prescribed 'craziness' is followed by an equally calculated shrug of her shoulders, as though she just can't figure out what everyone's problem is.
When Kesha first arrived on the scene, I thought she was a joke. Seriously, I thought she was great satire, like the 'Drunk Girl' bit on Saturday Night Live back in the day, a musical snipe at every 'drunk girl' in every bar in every town in America on any given night, laughing all the way to the bank. But no...Kesha is serious. She really thinks she's running this town just like a club.
:-/
And yet, the reason Kesha's longevity surprises me isn't because she assaults the senses, it isn't because she does no female generational 'voice' before her - from Aretha Franklin to Janis Jopin to Stevie Knicks to Madonna to Alanis Morissette - any justice, but rather because I don't buy it. There's something about Kesha that doesn't convince me. I think she tries way, way too hard to be whatever it is she tries to be. 'The party don't start til I walk in...' she groans restively, as if struggling to place the assertion in a spot where it's most likely to be seen. All of her songs are a battle cry to defiant behavior and hard living, the party lifestyle attendant to youth, and while nothing about that is new to pop music surely, Kesha carries it out with an overly-compensatory certainty and affected accent, an absurdly stylized combination of Valley Girl and Ebonics, that serves only to get me thinking she'd be the one tagging along at parties rather than holding court.
I'm surprised kids don't see through that.
And I could be wrong, I guess. I am old and lame, I tend to overthink things, and by Kesha's own admission, they 'r who they r'. When you think about it, from an artistic point of view, she's the perfect songstress for the inorganic times in which we live, perfect 'voice' of the generation that has been overly fed, overly sheltered, overly coddled, raised on constant reassurances of greatness (if only to counterbalance their parents' feelings of inadequacy): she is fatalistic and forthright about everything, choosing to believe she's keeping it real, merely reporting the news through her art, but mostly being faux and vulgar.
Later that very same night, I was cruising around YouTube, and I came across Pink Floyd's 'Live at Pompeii', and in what felt like a stinging slap in the face I realized I was watching nothing less than the anti-Kesha, and realized further, that Kesha - the artist - is not something people who know better should just throw their hands up in defeat over. Truth be told, it is to weep, helplessly and bitterly, for these kids that she is the songstress who feeds their Zeitgeist.
Most music historians will agree that the fire died out of Pink Floyd in the early 1980s; some music purists might argue it happened in the mid to late 70s. But I've been a fan for a long time, singing the praises of Pink as a) pioneers of the prog rock movement b) another example of Britain's astonishingly fertile creative ground, and c) in this particular 1972 concert film, as they perform Echoes, a musical outfit with a sound as thin, sharp and deadly as piano wire.
"When you think about it, from an artistic point of view, Kesha's the perfect songstress for the inorganic times in which we live..."
And there is a point in the performance when they launch into an extended jam, where, whatever you think of them in general, their musical craftsmanship cannot be denied. As the camera pans slowly across the four of them, in a fittingly slow sideways scrape of the sunlight, their genius is encapsulated thusly:
Four skinny Brits with stringy hair and bad teeth, absolutely killing it.
In 1972, that's all they had to be, all anyone had to be: Four skinny Brits with stringy hair and bad teeth, absolutely killing it. No need for image or spectacle as the first consideration.
There was, of course, bubble gum pop back then, pretty faces for the sake of pretty faces, and Pink Floyd themselves would get into plenty of 'spectacle' in coming years. But their spectacle never eclipsed their musicianship, and they would proffer philosophical lyrics as part of the deal, complex and sweeping arrangements that were as savage as they were spacy, intelligent as they were sad, frightening as they were soothing. They produced a body of work that got the listener thinking at the very least, transported him to a higher plane in the best moments.
Never could it be said Pink Floyd were wearing teeth around their necks merely for attention, some half-baked push to stay in the limelight.
Today, pop music is devoid of this type of luster, or grandeur. Kids throw around the word 'epic', but there really isn't much epic going on anymore. As a means of artistic expression propelling the listener to that higher plane, it has all but ceased operations. An allusion to celebrity, perhaps, serves as the 'higher plane' (it's certainly the predominant story being told), but that is (can't help but be) image-conscious and restrictive, offering little latitude for personal interpretation. That is, offers no comfort. No succor.
Is innovative music being made? Are the Pink Floyds out there? Sure. But they are marginalized, exist in an ephemeral 'alternative' world that must be sought out and never gains enough traction to really make history, and that is the point: Pink Floyd was a Top 40 band, emblematic to the 1970s. Songs like Time and Wish You Were Here and Comfortably Numb occupied slots on the same 'countdown' that now hosts We R Who We R and Blah Blah Blah.
And Pink Floyd is just one example, my go-to example. It speaks nothing of the other groups that once fed a generation: the Beatles, the Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Supertramp, Queen, Zeppelin (could a song like Stairway to Heaven even exist on modern radio today?). And for that matter, let us not forget the myriad singer/songwriters - your Jim Croces, James Taylors, Carole Kings and Jackson Brownes, or the Suzanne Vegas and Tracy Chapmans in later years (lest anyone think I'm championing a particular era rather than chronicling a descent into barrenness), more recently Tori Amos, Sarah McLaughlin - all of whom, for a while, achieved that rarefied nexus of artful expression and commercial appeal. Where the hell did they go? Why do they live on the periphery these days?
The last dying breath of mainstream (musical movement) artistic outrage just may have been in my generation: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, progenitors of 'grunge' all shrieking out collectively that something wasn't right, not just in music, but society, that something had changed, or was in the process of changing. Rocky shoals ahead.
And they were entirely correct. Something was changing. Something happened, man...somewhere, sometime, I think we ran aground.
The day rhythm eclipsed melody as the primary concern in the construction of a pop song, the day fitting the suit became more important than singing, the day singing (that is, one's ability to hit outrageously high and powerful notes or shriek in some melismatic orgasm) became more important than what was being sung, and the money starting coming in uncountable denominations, was really the day the music died.
The Millennial generation doesn't appear to know this. And they're not really supposed to, I guess. And perhaps they shouldn't. They'd want their money back for sure.
