Ke$ha
Both ambiguously blonde, unsettlingly loud and at any moment likely to contain more sequin than person, Ke$ha and Lady Gaga have been compared by lazy Internet music writers seemingly for as long as there has been lazy Internet music writing.
You can’t blame them. It’s an easy comparison to make: Besides their glittery, heavily made-up looks, Ke$ha and Gaga both have crazily devoted fan bases (dubbed The Family and Little Monsters, respectively) and a style that flits between lowbrow trash pop and more avant-garde pretensions. But where Lady Gaga’s image is calculated and feels endlessly manipulative, Ke$ha — an unselfconscious populist crusader — is the embodiment of what “art pop” should actually mean in 2013.
That is to say: Lady Gaga tries to pass off cheap pop music as high art. Ke$ha disguises high art as dirty Top 40, and feels infinitely more genuine as a result.
Lady Gaga, for all of her stunts, seems bound to archaic notions of celebrity and fame: She relies on the idea of mass culture, on the idea that everything she does as a pop artist will be dissected and disseminated by mainstream outlets. To quote Gaga herself, she “lives for the applause” — but at the same time, she tries to cultivate an aura of mystery, never divulging too much about her past and openly contradicting herself in interviews. She claws at the spotlight by pretending to shy away from it.
And in doing so, Gaga tries to turn herself into an enigma. She so carefully controls and crafts every detail about herself that getting to know the “real” Gaga becomes a fool’s errand. As a marketing strategy, this has been effective — to a point. But in a post-Instagram world, Gaga is clinging to a mentality that skews closer to Dick Clark than Katy Perry. That is, by meticulously crafting her image, she reveals its hollowness, calling attention to her own irrelevance. Lady Gaga is trying to be the millennial Madonna, all the while deliberately ignoring the fact that Madonna as we know her can’t exist in the new millennium.
Pop stars can’t be mysterious anymore. Pop stars can’t be perfect anymore. And no one understands this better than Ke$ha, the paragon of authenticity for a post-ironic age. Where Gaga clings to old media ideas and very obviously tries to turn her life into a public spectacle, Ke$ha embodies public spectacle — there is no difference among music, performer and personality. There is no divide between public and private.
Ke$ha may be a punch line, but she lives the punch line: When she drinks her own pee on MTV, or makes a necklace of her fans’ baby teeth, or creates a Tumblr called “Put Your Beard In My Mouth” (it’s self-explanatory), she does it with a completely straight face. Or an “over-it” smirk. Which, let’s be honest, has become pretty much the same thing.
This divide between Gaga’s antiquated reserve and Ke$ha’s progressive populism is everywhere in their music. Gaga is a wash of ’80s synths and “love yourself” empowerment anthems; Ke$ha is dubstep and trap and redneck country gloriously smashed together. Gaga is oblique and impersonal; Ke$ha is prone to oversharing (check “The Harold Song” or “Gold Trans Am”).
Gaga is old-school pop star sexuality, full of come-hither invitations for male gazes (just listen to new single “Do What U Want”). Ke$ha, on the other hand, flips pop’s typical gender balance; she is the sexual aggressor; she has the agency; she is in full control of her body and she wants men to stop acting like such little bitches.
And for all of her supposed activism and inclusiveness, Gaga’s music is all about what will sound cool to a very particular set of people, full of Clarence Clemons solos, borderline blasphemy and European art references aimed squarely at sweater vest-sporting Pitchfork writers. Ke$ha, in contrast, is all about what will sound cool to Ke$ha (e.g., duets with Iggy Pop; so-lame-it’s-fun Strokes homage; songs about sleep-f—g ghosts). Gaga tries to define good taste; Ke$ha is playfully tasteless. Gaga is party music for the upper class; Ke$ha is puke on the wall of a rich dude’s house party.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that Lady Gaga desperately wants to be a generation-defining voice, while Ke$ha unapologetically wants to get drunk and grind up against a bearded stranger in a dirty bathroom stall — she just happens to make decade-defining music about it.
Authenticity is a tricky thing to discuss in 2013: In a socially mediated culture, appearances are both irrelevant and all-consuming, and no two pop artists embody this paradox quite like Lady Gaga and Ke$ha. There can only be one queen of dance pop, after all.
And while Lady Gaga works hard for her place at the throne, Ke$ha, that post-ironic merry prankster, is still the one wearing the glitter-and-vodka-splattered crown and making it seem effortless.
This piece is part of our Friday package about Lady Gaga in light of her upcoming Artpop.
