matt's uncut ke$ha review

The newspaper had to cut it, but you can enjoy it in all its splendor right now:

Ke$ha, Animal (RCA)

Oh, pop music! It’s hard to cough glitter, but you finally did it! Resident Ke$ha expert, Brittany Kemp, recently cited this Los Angeles kinda-diva’s rise as a stem from the world ostensibly falling apart around us, and this seems about right. There was another earthquake, there is a volcano, another teabag protest, everyone is dead: Ke$ha will make it better.

And Ke$ha does make it better.

She wants you to know how much she “just loves your ass, mmm.” She even reminds you, “when you write notes” on the chalkboard, how it “shake-shake-shakes (shake) shake-shakes” and sometimes such flattery is a nice thing to hear even if it’s from someone who’s visibly proud of having just thrown up in the closet, like she is when telling us about the rich dude’s house party she was at.

“Oh my god!” she exclaims, “The sun’s coming up / And I think I’m still [fluffied] up,” but, even though she may not know what’s happening or why she’s in a bathtub of ice or whatever, she isn’t going to whine about it. No, for her, the end of the night— a soggy afternoon— is when things start to really get moving: “Get [fluffied] up!” she affirms in the same astonishing breath; is this perhaps even the very exhalation once written of in Genesis?

Having been placed by various gossips as the superfluous link between Gaga’s ostentatiousness and Uffie’s underground charm, Ke$ha has become the awkward middle child and her debut album sounds like it. It’s up to you to decide what this means. Like— remember in eighth grade when your friends brought you along the afternoon they invited themselves to the rich kid’s house, drank all of his parents’ wine in an hour, and the neighbors called the police because there were a dozen sort-of-undressed 14-year olds screaming in the driveway? And someone tried to fight off the first patrol car with a garden hose even though water wasn’t really coming out? Did you think it was fun to get arrested? Or not? Do you still think getting arrested while unconsciously screaming in suburban driveways is an ok way to spend a Tuesday afternoon? Awesome! You and Ke$ha are getting Facebook married!

She may be, for now, the superlative personification of trashiness, but it’s the kind you see written on T-shirts while driving through the South which give reminder that “God don’t make no trash.” It’s the kind that makes everything ok. Writing in her still-unpublished essay, Ms Kemp affirms the latent merits found within Ke$ha’s lyrics: “You feel GOOD about this. I used to go to Beach House and Elliott Smith when I wanted to crawl into a ball and cry about my life being [bunnies], but now I listen to Ke$ha. I'm sure you feel the same way!!!” and it’s true. While Cat Power and Fever Ray are only going to drag you deeper into whatever existential hell you’re fussing with, Ke$ha understands this and makes feeling like [bunnies] fun.

And then you feel better!

Even though I’ve learned to control my impulses by this point in my life, Ke$ha's LP makes me feel 14 and like I should give handjobs to most things. Although I won’t. Because I’m not. Realistically, I’m probably not going to follow Ke$ha’s example until there’s at least four appletinis coursing through me, although this may not be true for the still-naïve eight graders of today because, like all junior highschoolers to ever come before them, these people just don’t know how to moderate their alcohol consumption. Where is Justin Bieber? I’m worried.

- Matthew Gaspersic