The eighth installment of a recurring feature where we listen to and analyse the latest number one Australian single so you don’t have to.
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Ke$ha
'We R Who We R'
(RCA/Sony)
'We R Who We R', which debuted at #1 in Australia this week, is Ke$ha's second #1, after 'Tik Tok'.
Ke$ha - 'We R Who We R'
Ke$ha's adult-baiting teen pop has been a constant presence in the singles charts, this year: 'Tik Tok' was at #1 when 2009 turned into 2010, and since then she has had three other top five singles ('My Love Is Your Drug', 'Blah Blah Blah', and 'Take It Off') and two top twenty singles ('My First Kiss' with 3oh!3, and the tasteless-even-for-Ke$ha 'Dirty Picture' with Taio Cruz). And yes, Dr Luke (along with Benny Blanco and Ammo) is the producer, and the song is exactly what you'd expect from the man behind 'California Gurls' (
review), 'Tik Tok', and 'Dynamite' (
review).
In fact, there are several aspects of the song that rip off other Dr Luke productions. 1) The opening riff to 'We R Who We R' is almost identical to the one from 'Dynamite'. 2) The chorus to 'We R Who We R', with its cut-and-pasted edited vocal repeats –
“we're dancing like we're dumb, dumb, du-du-du-dumb” - is very similar to the cut-and-pasted edited vocal repeats in the verse of 'Dynamite' -
“I'm wearing all my favourite brands brands brands brands”. 3) The pitch-shifting games (e.g., the deep-manly voice singing part of the chorus towards the end of the song, which is actually Ke$ha pitch-shifted down) are straight from Ke$ha's 'Blah Blah Blah'. 4) After the intro, you can imagine Katy Perry launching into the first line of 'California Gurls' over the same beat – it's nearly the same beat at the same tempo. 5) The synth sound on 'We R Who We R' is almost exactly the same as the one on 'Tik Tok'. 6) All of these songs open with a syncopated synth line, and then contextualise it with a straight 4/4 disco beat. Dr Luke knows exactly what a #1 single entails right now – these lifts from 'Dynamite', 'Tik Tok' and 'Blah Blah Blah' are catchy, after all - and by Jove, he is going to keep making different versions of the same song until it is squeezed dry.
'We R Who We R' has been publicised as a response to the
“It gets better” movement, an internet phenomenon inspired by the writer Dan Savage in response to a wave of gay teen suicides in middle America. The idea of the “It gets better” movement is to point out that, although being a gay teen can be pretty difficult – especially in the more conservative parts of the US, such as Tennessee, where Ke$ha grew up - it gets better. After all, there are plenty of successful gay and lesbian adults out there who live happy lives with people they love. Several notable high profile Americans have made YouTube videos for the project, from the team at Google to
Barack Obama. I have a (probably bad) habit of assuming that these #1 hits are mostly listened to by 14-year-old girls, but it is definitely the case that gay teens and men are a core audience for someone like Ke$ha.
Of course, charity pop songs don't always have the intended effect – a
piece in the New Yorker this week argues, for example, that the money raised by charity pop songs like 'We Are The World' has had the opposite effect to what was intended; such aid has often had the effect of keeping the same people in power in third-world countries, and thus there has been no real change. So it might be that 'We R Who We R'; will reinforce the stereotypes that middle America has of gay people, and give them the impression that gay people have terrible grammar and spelling. After all, its portrayal of “who we R” could be construed as stereotypical hedonistic gay culture, and I'm not entirely sure how many gay teens who are contemplating suicide are going to identify with that. But it will almost certainly be the case that some teens, at least, will hear this song and identify with it. And that that identifying will contribute to their staying alive, even if they never hear about the link with the “it gets better” thing. This is quite common in pop – plenty of successful musicians have stories about how fans tell them that hearing their (often innocuous) songs stopped them from killing themselves, so one can assume Ke$ha is no exception.
After all, music is a social, communicative thing – and is very much more so in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, where everyone participates in the making of music. If you sing with someone, if you identify with the music, you feel like you belong with them. This is why people who are depressed often seek solace in music. There are plenty of people who can't understand why you'd want to listen to ol' miseryguts like Elliott Smith or Leonard Cohen – won't it just make you more depressed? But if you are depressed, stuff like Elliott Smith's 'Miss Misery' or Leonard Cohen's 'Avalanche' doesn't make you more depressed, it makes you feel less alone – after all, that someone else feels the way you do, and is able to put it into a song, means that your feelings are shared, that you belong somewhere. I am very aware that 'We R Who We R' and Elliott Smith's 'Miss Misery' are very different in quite a lot of ways, but both songs share the “making you feel less alone” function of music – the title of the Ke$ha song (and the upbeat Dr Luke-ified dance track that the song is) is pretty explicitly about celebrating who you are, about belonging to Ke$ha's “we” and being proud of it.
So, who R we, according to Ke$ha? Teens trying to piss off parents, or so you'd gather. If rock and roll is about making music that will piss off parents, Ke$ha is rock and roll. For example, part of why auto-tune is so omnipresent in teen pop is because it is irritating to anyone with musical taste (e.g., adults, and thus parents). Perhaps even the fact that the song sounds so derivative of 'Tik Tok', 'California Gurls', and 'Dynamite' is meant to annoy you. Ke$ha's music portrays a cartoonish version of sexuality, designed more to reflect what will annoy parents. The lyrics of songs like 'Tik Tok', 'Dirty Picture', and 'Take It Off' are meant to appall parents - “Help! My daughter is listening to music about getting wasted, about taking her clothes off and about taking dirty pictures!”. In creating Ke$ha's musical persona, it's like they read
Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy, and decided to be everything Levy hates (e.g., the idea that stripping to entertain men = empowerment).
There are plenty of things in the lyrics of 'We R Who We R' that could raise some parental ire: the poor grammar of “and yes, of course we does”, the mental image of
“we make the hipsters fall in love, when we've got the hot pants on and up”, the refusal to accept responsibilities in
“I'm so sick of this, so serious, it's making my brain delirious”, and the bare double entendre of
“hitting on dudes – hard”, etc. The lyric of
“got Jesus on my neck-a-lus” also seems like parent-baiting – “Mum, I'm doing all this even though I look prim and proper to you!”. I imagine Ke$ha and her co-writers/producers sitting around a table trying to think of the lyrics that would most efficiently bait the parents. I am almost certain
“and yes, of course we does” got a great big laugh at the table. And I suspect that the gay clubbing scene's embrace of teen pop and the hedonistic lifestyle embodied by Ke$ha also has something to do with a rejection of the values of the straight America that they do not feel a part of.
This is the same as it ever was – controversy sells records. To be truly controversial in the US, you need to be white trash from the South or Midwest of the US, you need to blatantly reject conservative family values, you need to be explicitly sexual, and you need to buy into the mythology of good and evil in Christianity (while not necessarily being a pious Christian). Oh and need to make music influenced by African Americans. This description applies to the Insane Clown Posse, to Marilyn Manson in the 1990s, Madonna in the 1980s, Alice Cooper in the 1970s, and Jerry Lee Lewis in the 1950s . And it mostly applies to Ke$ha – she's the daughter of a single mother, who grew up in Tennessee and lived on food stamps for a while, she sings about brushing her teeth with Jack Daniels and about taking dirty pictures. Her music has distinct echoes of African Americans - the disco beats echo what was a black music, while her sing-speak vocal delivery echoes the likes of Missy Elliott. She hasn't yet bought into Christian mythology, beyond the line about having Jesus on her necklace. I suspect she'll get there eventually. The point here, though, is that this stuff being controversial tells you something about what respectable conservative America (or Australia) fears, what it doesn't like to talk about in public – class, sexuality, race, and the darker side of religion.
But Ke$ha, I suspect,
wants to be controversial, rather than
is controversial – nobody's burning her records just yet (question: how
would one burn records in the age of iTunes downloads? A YouTube video of you deleting the mp3?). And perhaps part of why she has not actually become controversial is the top 40 blandness of her music - if controversial is what she's going for, she would be better served with edgier, less formulaic production for one. Anyway, pop music fans are fickle – they like things to sound the same, but eventually get bored with the sound and find something new to fixate on. There will come a point where Dr Luke and Max Martin can no longer just shit out a song and have it land at #1. I just hope it's sooner rather than later.
Tim Byron