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.
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