Ke$ha, Feminist Pioneer

This is the first in a series of articles on women in popular music today.

By Nick Cox

A few months after its release in August of last year, Ke$ha’s hit song, “TiK ToK”, achieved a moderately significant historical benchmark: it sold 610,000 copies in one week, more than any single by any female artist ever.  It outsold the previous record-holder–“Just Dance”, by the formidable Lady Gaga–by a margin of nearly 200,000.  It also topped the US charts on January 2nd, becoming the first number-one hit of the new decade and remaining so for nine consecutive weeks before finally losing the number one spot to Gaga’s “Telephone”.  In August, no one had heard of Ke$ha; by March it took the two most well-established women in pop music, along with the most outsize music video in ages, to best her.  This sort of success doesn’t happen by accident.  Ke$ha, as Louis Armstrong might say, has got “that thing”–she has the talent, the charisma, and the work ethic that constitute genuine star-power.  But despite her enormous success, she has won little of the reverent praise that is constantly heaped upon Gaga.  Listeners and commentators, regardless of how they feel about her music, are reluctant to take her seriously as an artist or as a star.  In this article I offer a possible explanation for this reluctance, and argue for why Ke$ha deserves far more respect, as an artist and as a feminist icon.

When her popularity was at its peak, Ke$ha was also amassing more haters than just about anyone in the music world.  Her main rival on this front, Justin Bieber, was and remains mostly a cute little punchline: people poked fun at him for looking like a nine-year-old and for his mediocre music, but it was all in good humor.  Ke$ha-haters, in contrast, are dead serious, and their jabs are often joltingly vicious and mean-spirited.  For instance, a story on Starpulse.com from back in February, headlined “Ke$ha: STFU”, responded to a droll comment from Ke$ha by addressing her, in the second person, as follows: “Okay. We get it. You’re competing with pop star idols like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. But stop whoring yourself out for attention.  You’re trying to [sic] hard.”  Another story from a few months later, about the “Your Love Is My Drug” music video, had just the same nasty tone, telling her, “don’t get rid of your stylist—that’s the only thing you have going for you!”  The hating only increased in the wake of the “TiK ToK” craze, as though the last nine weeks had been an insane bender that people wanted to put behind them.  The question, as with all such morning-after disavowals of the past, is: What is it about “TiK ToK” that makes people so ashamed to have liked it?  In those nine weeks, what truth was revealed that the masses of now-sober revelers would rather have kept secret?

The above quotes from Starpulse.com are more than just garden-variety culture-blog trolling.  Everyone gets made fun of on the Internet, but not like this—this has “personal” written all over it.  With its formulaic, bargain-bin sarcasm, its seeming indifference to the usual need to be funny or sound clever, its palpable eagerness to start saying mean things as quickly as possible, this criticism feels inspired by some sort of vendetta, as though Ke$ha had just tried to sit with the popular girls in the high school cafeteria.  In a sense, though, that’s exactly what she’s done, which may well explain why so many people take such pleasure in hating her.  With her ratty cowboy boots and her beat-up 1978 Trans-Am, her drunken forearm-flailing dance and her occasional disregard for personal hygiene, she is undeniably quite a bit different from any major female pop star in recent memory, different in ways that vex people severely and prompt them, almost like a scorpion when you touch it, to lash out at her, if only to make sure everyone within earshot knows that they are firmly in the anti-Ke$ha camp.  A lot of people like her, but few want to be known as the type of person who likes her.

In my view, the reason everyone is so keen on hating her is exactly why, as a feminist, I think so highly of her.  Simply put: she messes around with gender identity in a way that many people find genuinely discomforting.  The myriad nasty jabs hurled at her have one thing in common: they tend to smack mildly, if not heavily, of sexism.  They are usually expressed in terms associated with femininity in all its basest stereotypical associations, as if trying, with great vehemence, to force Ke$ha to be more feminine, to be a lady.  The sarcastic Starpulse barb about Ke$ha’s stylist, alluding to her respectable-looking “Your Love Is My Drug” coif, is also an underhanded comment about the unruly blonde locks that she waves around unabashedly in the “TiK ToK” video, which some, like the author of this odious article, have deemed insufficiently ladylike.

In their desperation to neutralize this threat to the stability of traditional gender roles, the Ke$ha-haters push her into both extremes: they want her to be a ditzy, blonde-haired, bubbleheaded—and, presumably, promiscuous—party girl, and at the same a time shallow attention-whore (pardon the phrase) with a fake image calculated to sell records.  The parody video “Glitter Puke” manages to rope both of these Ke$has together into one narrative with a clever plot twist, but most of the hating lacks such logical coherence.  The vengeful critics oscillate freely between one pole and the other, like it doesn’t even matter which one she is so long as they’ve made her into just another woman.  They feel threatened because none of our stereotypes fit her, and yet somehow she still exists; we must therefore shove her violently into the ones that we do have, lest they begin to lose their credibility.

Most obvious, although almost universally overlooked, is how non-sexual she is, at least in “TiK ToK”.  (The rest of her album is, I will allow, a different story, but “TiK ToK” is the hit single and therefore the song that really matters.)  Her denim shorts are admittedly very short, but she still routinely wears way more clothing than almost any major female pop star in years—especially around her middle-to-lower torso, which nowadays tends to be the most fetishized part of women’s—and, increasingly, men’s—bodies.  Her dress remains disarmingly modest, and her midriff covered, even while she is crouching over a toilet and making sex noises in the stupendously icky music video for Taio Cruz’s “Dirty Picture”.  And her style—in her words, “white trash dumpster-diving chic”—has the added effect of making her come off as an actual human being rather than some sort of materialized male fantasy or a glorified lingerie commercial.

She doesn’t merely flout the now-conventional hypersexualization of women, though; in her songs and music videos, she actually satirizes it and undercuts it in some enormously clever ways.  We are perfectly accustomed to women who get drunk and have sex, and also with women who do neither, especially if the latter are young and innocent and corruptible.  Ke$ha, though, is a woman who gets drunk without having sex, and underscores her striking unpromiscuousness in the “TiK ToK” music video by reversing the conventional drunken-hookup narrative: instead of waking up naked in a stranger’s bed, she wakes up fully clothed in a bathtub belonging to an uptight-looking suburban family who didn’t even realize she was up there until she walked in on their pancake breakfast.  And by the end of the video she has, like the guy in that immortal foiled-hookup ballad “Norwegian Wood”, crawled off to sleep in another tub.  In the course of the video, she has taken us through a full day of carousing and a full night of drunken partying without any evidence of ill-advised hookups.  She does enjoy picking up guys “who look like Mick Jagger,” but only, it seems, for their throwback appeal—and she defends herself handily if they try to “touch [her] junk.”  She is, in short, a woman who can get drunk without having sex—the douche-master bros she lampoons in “Blah Blah Blah” are right to fear her.

By far the cleverest part of the “TiK ToK” video, though, is the breakdown.  In the past five years or so, exotic dancing has broken out of its rightful place in the dregs of society and become one of pop culture’s most ubiquitous memes, especially in music: the Pussycat Dolls proudly announced that they were all former exotic dancers, and the “Gimme More” music video featured Britney Spears pole-dancing on a strip club stage.  The breakdown of “TiK ToK”, in which we see Ke$ha thrashing drunkenly about in a whitewashed basement, is a dead-on satire of this most troubling of pop culture trends.

In the first shot of the breakdown we see her hanging by one hand off a wall-beam, as though she were trying, fully-clothed and totally drunk, to pole-dance.  Like a shaman, she conquers the demon of the strip club by repeating it on her own terms, thereby mastering it and neutralizing its power.  The dance calculated to please the hungry eye of the anonymous but ever-present male audience is transformed ritualistically by Ke$ha into goofy, innocently shit-faced flailing.  And instead of the male audience we have a far more wholesome remote relationship: Ke$ha is singing, not to some anonymous man she is trying to bewitch, but to the DJ, who has her under his spell along with everyone else at the party, male and female alike.  The pole-dancer dances to excite the male gaze that is fixed on her unclothed body; Ke$ha dances because she feels like dancing, because the DJ is making her dance.  And the lyrics of her serenade—“You build me up, you break me down./My heart it pounds, yeah you got me”—suggest that the DJ’s set mirrors the cadences of the sex that she went for twenty-four straight hours without having.  If Ke$ha doesn’t hook up at that house party, it might just be because the DJ knows how to satisfy her better than any man ever could.

As I mentioned, the remarkable non-sexuality of “TiK ToK” does not extend to most of her other songs.  In “Blah Blah Blah” and “Your Love Is My Drug” sex (euphemized as “love” in the latter) returns to its usual front-and-center position.  What persists throughout the album, though, is the strange sort of quasi-androgyny that lies at the heart of Ke$ha’s persona: she is a woman who can carry masculinity as though she owned it.  An avowed believer in reincarnation, she told Rolling Stone in a recent interview that she thinks she was a guy in a past life.  In the very first line of “TiK ToK,” she mentions “feeling like P. Diddy” as though invoking a deity, as though calling upon Diddy’s notoriously huge ego for strength in battle.  This spirit stays with her all day and all night, effortlessly plowing over any stereotyped feminine behaviors that get in the way of her fun (hook-up drama, dental hygiene) while keeping the ones that she likes (pedicures on our toes, trying on all our clothes, etc.)  And she’s “got plenty of beer,” not plenty of Cosmos or plenty of Bacardi Breezers.

Most importantly, “The dudes are lining up,” not because we’re hot or because we have nice racks, but because “they hear we got swagger.”  That phrase, undoubtedly borrowed from M.I.A.’s classic “Paper Planes” (“No one on the corner has swagger like us,” maybe the greatest song lyric of our time), may pinpoint precisely what it is about Ke$ha that makes people hate and fear her so much.  The exact definition of “swagger” may still be in dispute, but it is clear enough that women are not supposed to have very much of it.  “Swagger” implies the sort of easy confidence and effortless charisma that are considered masculine.  Men are expected to have the spontaneity and the independence and personal power that is swagger; women are expected to be dependent, obedient, predictable, and powerless.  This is already reason enough for people to hate a woman who has swagger like Ke$ha.  The real offence, though, is her claim that swagger is actually what makes the dudes line up: it means that a woman can have swagger, and at the same time continue to play the female part in our still-mostly-heteronormative world, without seeming in any way contradictory.  We all know women like this, but we are still unaccustomed to seeing them become famous.  And I’m sure any talent agent will tell you that, man or woman, no one makes it unless they have swagger—it’s just that the women are supposed to act like they don’t have it, because that’s what sells.  Ke$ha’s success has demonstrated to us that the world is ready for women to stop hiding their swagger.  When the secret gets out that what makes the dudes line up is not mascara or push-up bras or feigned weakness but just swagger, it will be a great day for feminism.

When asked which 2010 pop star is doing the most to challenge traditional gender stereotypes, most people would probably say Lady Gaga, but it seems clear enough to me that Ke$ha is going just as far, and in a way that, unlike Gaga’s painstaking put-togetherness, feels genuinely unforced, almost accidental, just like good rock ‘n’ roll always has.  Gaga’s “Just Dance,” in which a woman comes to the decision to let go of her hang-ups and just do you-know-what, is inspiring.  But “TiK ToK” is even more revolutionary: Ke$ha sounds like she never even had hang-ups in the first place.  Seeing a woman with that sort of freedom is still too much for some people.  The backlash against her should remind us of a crucial truism of feminist social epistemology: that true vanguards are often hated in their own time.  Gaga’s good-natured provocations have captured the attention of feminists, but we are more needed in the defense of people like Ke$ha, who are branded degenerates.  It is our job to respond to her haters, and show why they are wrong, before she starts believing them herself and we lose another pioneer.

Image from stevegarfield’s flickr.