Ke$ha recently went into rehab for an eating disorder and came out as Kesha.
Notice the difference? Yes, she’s dropped the dollar sign. She’s no longer part of the dollar holla bill rappers club that includes the likes of Ma$e, Curren$y and Joey Bada$$. Of course, there’s also Top Dollar from Endless Boogie, but he doesn’t have an S in his name, so what are you going to do? And he’s not a rapper.
Kesha (with or without the dollar bill sign) is not the type of musician who normally attracts my attention. With millions of fans worldwide, I’m sure she loses little sleep over that.
Nothing against her. She just doesn’t make music for me and my ilk: grizzly, old, seen-it-all-before types.
Her shtick is that she’s the heavy-duty queen of party times. I respect that. But my partying now extends as far as face paint, fairy bread and two-year-olds wrestling over Tonka trucks.
But there are little things about Kesha that have me stumped.
It isn’t the music, which sounds like what I imagine guzzling a six-pack of energy drink in one hit would feel like. She did a song with Pitbull. That’s about all I need to know. I understand the appeal of Pitbull even less than Kesha.
But like I said, who am I to question this shit. I’m sure if I walked into a nightclub on a Friday night there’d be plenty of people dancing to Kesha and Pitbull songs at 1am, drunk out of their heads, faces painted, eating fairy bread and wrestling over Tonka trucks.
I remember dancing to Shania Twain. Those were gentler times.
But Kesha. There is something about Kesha that got me thinking.
In the scheme of things, she’s a mid-tier pop star. She’s certainly not pop royalty like Beyoncé or Lady Gaga. In football terms, she’s scrapping with the Rihannas, Katy Perrys and Pinks of this world for a Europa League spot.
She also doesn’t seem to have a hometown constituency like Taylor Swift does with Nashville to fall back on if she started to slide down the pop ladder. You get the idea that if Taylor Swift wanted to, she could quite easily go back to Nashville and make an album of Dock Boggs covers, playing old-timey clawhammer banjo, and do alright.
But I keep coming across these weird titbits about the party hard princess of trash. Skerricks of hearsay and rumour that make me think a little more about who Kesha might be and where she might be going, especially in the post-rehab, post-dollar sign phase of her “crazy, beautiful life”.
The first thing that caught my attention is her apparent fondness for the Residents.
Who are the Residents? They’re an art collective, probably best known for their musical output, who have been around in one form or another since the late 1960s. In the pantheon of underground rock, they stand eyeball to eyeball with the likes of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart: Pioneers, originators, strange motherfuckers.
Classic albums by the Residents include Meet the Residents, Third Reich and Roll and Duck Stab/Buster & Glen. If you like the Rolling Stones, you might not like what the Residents do to “Satisfaction”.
Part of Kesha’s stage show last year involved a phalanx of dancers dressed in tuxedos with big eyeballs for heads. This, as any outraged Residents fan will tell you, is one of the signature visual motifs of the band. The eyeball head is as emblematic of the Residents as John Pasche’s tongue and lip logo design is for the Stones. Apparently the band was not especially impressed with her homage/rip-off.
She’s also been seen wearing a Residents t-shirt; in the first episode of her reality TV show, My Crazy Beautiful Life, she’s wearing a Duck Stab t-shirt. Big deal. Three-year-old kids wear Ramones t-shirts these days and do you think they’ve got a clue that Sheena is, in fact, a punk rocker?
There was a mixed reaction from Residents fans about Kesha wearing the t-shirt, everything from “how dare she” to, as one fan on a Residents Facebook page put it: “she may be another person who likes good music but plays boring yet accessible music to spread the word on bands most people wouldn’t hear about otherwise.”
Maybe she’s like 60s crooner Andy Williams, who was apparently a bit of a Sunset Strip scenester and a fan of the aforementioned Captain Beefheart? So the story goes…
Then there’s her dalliance with the undisputed self-proclaimed heavyweight champion of party times, Andrew WK. The non-stop party fun went as far as Kesha giving Andrew WK a “line” tattoo – high times for this decade’s equivalent of the Algonquin Round Table crew.
Some might know Andrew WK as the host of the TV show Destroy Build Destroy, which is like a hybrid Mad Max and Steptoe and Sons (that’s Sanford and Sons for you Americans); or they might know him from his highly orchestrated Wagner-meets-Mutt Lange party anthems like “Party Hard”; or they might now him from his work with noise/arty rock bands like Wolf Eyes, Boredoms and Sightings.
Andrew WK does a hell of a lot of things. Hanging out with Kesha back in 2011 was just one of those things. Though it could be argued Kesha’s party-hard shtick is heavily indebted to Andrew WK’s guiding philosophy, which itself seems to spring from the Beastie Boys’ invocation to “Fight for Your Right (to Party)”.
Again, like the Residents t-shirt, hardly conclusive proof in my developing conspiracy theory that there’s more to Kesha than meets the eyeball.
So what to make of the album she is supposed to have recorded with the Flaming Lips, tentatively titled Lip$ha? A taster of the collaboration, a song called “2012…You Must be Upgraded” can be heard on the Flaming Lips album The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends. The song heavily references the Stooges’ “1969”, including Iggy’s classic “oh my and a boo hoo” line.
She’s also recorded a duet with Iggy, called “Dirty Love” on her Warrior album.
But, again, so what? Iggy has had a fondness for recording duets with female artists over the years: Kate Pierson of the B-52s; Deborah Harry; Peaches.
Recording a duet with Iggy is not necessarily a sign Kesha’s going to give up her pop ways and assemble a band of young punks to record a blazing album of Stooge-like rock power. Just like hanging with Andrew WK doesn’t mean she’s going to start making noise albums. And we’ve all known people who wear band t-shirts even though they don’t listen to the band or even know who the hell the band is – think of those three-year-old kids in Ramones t-shirts.
If Kesha were to find her alternative rock mojo, she might just stumble into the territory of the baddest living badass in rock music: Jennifer Herrema.
Good luck with that, Kesha.
Herrema has been making dirty, noisy, rocking, smart, sexy music with Royal Trux, RTX and now Black Bananas for almost 25 years.
Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if Kesha’s post-rehab career saw her shake off the shackles of her pop Svengali minder, Lukasz “Dr Luke” Gottwald. If it’s true that Dr Luke was constantly harassing Kesha about her weight and musical direction, then I sincerely hope she gives him the flick and starts living her own “crazy, beautiful life”.
She could do worse than start with a Stooges-inspired album produced by Andrew WK, with the Flaming Lips as a backing band and a Residents-themed stage show.
Or she could just do her own thing.
