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● music
The real wild one
Unlikely hitmaker
Ke$ha crashes the
club-pop party with
purpose
by Brandon Soderberg
A
merican party music has
turned the club into an
idyllic, even antiseptic
place. In the club that’s collectively
illustrated by modern hits, which
pair European electro with this
country’s long tradition of pandering
pop, drinking too much is just a
telltale sign of how much fun is
being had. It rarely leads to bad
vibes or vomiting. No one cries when
they’re all caught up in their feelings
in this club, and going home with
some dude is a momentary fairy
tale, not a fun-ugly hook-up.
Ke$ha wages something like class warfare
on bottle-service-reppin’ party people, too;
her 2009 debut, Animal, includes “Party at
a Rich Dude’s House,” an implicit reminder
This bacchanalia has no backlash.
that she is, or at least was, not rich. On
But the bacchanalia does have Ke$ha,
“Sleazy,” from 2010’s Cannibal EP, she
a Nashville-raised, Los Angeles-mutated
bleats, “I don’t need you or your brand new
songwriter, singer and warts-and-all
Benz/Or your bougie friends.” Her friends,
spokeswoman who serves as a gut check to
meanwhile, swipe the drinks discarded by
the carefree cavorting. Ke$ha once boasted
the sort of patron that wastes Patrón. On
that she threw up in Paris Hilton’s closet.
last year’s Warrior, she merged the dirtbag,
She actually has a song called “Dancing
backwoods aesthetic of Guns N’ Roses’ Izzy
with Tears in My Eyes.” Her “Take It Off,”
Stradlin to catchy, guitar-crunching, sexin which she sings about
positive, feminist pop. In
liquor-fueled group sex
Ke$ha’s worldview, the
Ke$ha
without regret, is kind of
club is not meant to be
nasty and surreal. It’s also
cosmopolitan or polite.
with Mike Posner and
honest.
This isn’t bad for the
Semi Precious Weapons
Ke$ha is a big, black
singer who, only four
Red Hat Amphitheater
fly in the pristine, preyears ago, was the mostly
Wednesday, Aug. 14, 6:30 p.m.
packaged pop ointment.
anonymous voice behind
$40–$62.50, redhatamphitheater.com
She drank her own urine
Flo Rida’s hard-thumping,
on her 2011 reality show,
oral-sex request “Right
My Crazy Beautiful Life.
Round.” It might be
She is an ordained minister and performed a
initially difficult to perceive any difference
commitment ceremony for a lesbian couple.
between pap like that and Ke$ha’s sly 2009
She has worked with Iggy Pop and, more
introductory hit, “Tik Tok.” Within that
recently, with The Flaming Lips; they are
pulsing piece of danceable rap, though, the
scheduled to release a collaborative album,
then-23-year-old Ms. Kesha Rose Sebert
Lipsha, later this year. A segment of her live
compared herself to P. Diddy before daring
shows even features a giant penis, which
the cops to shut down the party. On 2012’s
smacks the face of a male in the audience.
“Die Young,” the philosophy of YOLO goes
Here, she flips the customary R&B conceit
too far, pop triumph slamming headlong into
in which a woman gets grinded upon by, say,
fatalism. The edge is unavoidable.
Usher and is supposed to cherish the moment
The differences speak directly to Ke$ha’s
into old age.
ability to dismantle modern pop by using
the same tools that built it. She works closely
with producer Dr. Luke, who has made hits
with Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and Pitbull. She
bends those sounds just a little bit, however,
adding nihilistic Berlin techno simplicity
to her big beats. Auto-Tune is decadently
slathered across her vocals, making them
sound slurred and demented, as though she’s
had too much to drink and too little daylight.
Ke$ha also raps. She spits (not particularly
well, but that’s hardly the point of most
proper rap right now) in an over-the-top
yodel that wheezes and giggles. Ke$ha
pairs the old-school, slap-you swagger of J.J.
Fad or Salt-n-Pepa with the hear-me-roar
vocalizing of riot woman Kathleen Hanna,
adding the say-anything-and-make-it-slang
ridiculousness of recent radio rap. She
rhymes “Kosher” with “for sure” and sells it.
This awkward embrace of hip-hop is key to
Ke$ha’s subversion. Sure, she is in part pandering to tweens by putting the vague coolness
of hip-hop in the mouth of a relateable white
girl. But she also understands hip-hop’s desire
for “real talk.” This isn’t Public Enemy or even
Kanye West-style agitprop, but Ke$ha uses
radio-friendly club beats to describe a realistic,
attainable, two-sided picture. What’s more,
she pairs it with a distinctly female sense of
pleasure-seeking on songs played in clubs that
don’t really play rap music.
Ke$ha’s mom was a Nashville songwriter.
Before Animal hit it big, Ke$ha even worked
as a back-up singer and songwriter. She threw
up in Paris’ closet because she sang on the
Hilton heiress’ album; she wrote Britney
Exile in mainstream: Ke$ha
photo courtesy of Live Nation
Spears’ “Till the World Ends.” This pedigree
affords her an innate understanding of
when and how to pull listeners’ heartstrings.
More pleasantly paced near-ballads such
as “Animal” (a never-give-up anthem) and
“Hungover” (yes, about being hungover) are
conventionally beautiful and prom-ready,
save for their earthy titles. They quietly
display her vocal talents, too—always an issue
for Luddites who still kvetch about AutoTune. The emotions at stake in her music are
especially palpable on these slower tracks
because you’ve experienced, through song at
least, this person that’s drunk and stumbling
on the floor or crying so hard in the club. You
feel like you know Ke$ha because she keeps
bleating TMI, while the rest of our pop stars,
including Beyoncé and Rihanna, remain
aloof and untouchable.
Ke$ha, then, is the rapping white girl who
can write, comfortably sing somewhere
between heavy rock and light country,
party hard and be happy to tell you about
it all the next day. She is Lady Gaga minus
the performance-arts pomp and turned
up to 11. She is Rihanna if she ditched the
faux #DGAF attitude that mars so many of
her songs. And she is, at the moment, our
strangest pop star. p
Brandon Soderberg lives in Baltimore, where
he writes the No Trivia hip-hop column for Spin.
wednesday • august 7 • 2013
37
● music
Tastemakers always die
Now that we’re all curators, what is Diplo?
By Brandon soderberg
W
here were you in
2002? That’s the year
that Hollertronix 1, a
12-inch single with a green label,
introduced a nervous mash-up
of Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s
scrunched hit “Gossip Folks” with
The Clash’s punk-funk anthem
“Rock the Casbah.”
That platter served two purposes. Most
obviously, it marked the arrival of DJs Diplo
and Low Budget. Retroactively, though,
Hollertronix 1 inspired young music devourers
by actualizing a newly nagging frustration—
that is, sounds such as Southern hip-hop,
regional dance music and people-pleasing
hits could coexist in a single club. The epoch
of single-genre playlists was dying.
In 2013, a post-genre, see-what-sticks
explosion of ideas has become the norm.
Remembering or contextualizing how mindblowing it could be to hear less refined genres
like Atlanta crunk or Baltimore club played
with abandon, even in a mash-up, might be
difficult. But named after a gun-in-the-trunk
stomper by Bone Crusher, Hollertronix’s
2003 mix Never Scared was indeed a
revelation. That swaggering, underground
musical moment confronted tedious diehards tied to the tag “real hip-hop,” while
shoving too-cool kids onto the dance floor for
what might have been the first time.
In the decade since, Diplo has become
a brand. The globe-trotting producer, DJ
and canny schlockmeister now stars in
Blackberry commercials and authors books
about his adventures, having moved from
local underground hero to Internet hipster
tastemaker and beatmaker who tinkers
with radio play. His cyborg-sobbing beat
for Usher’s “Climax,” for instance, was all
build-up and no satisfaction, save for a steady
reverse comedown. One of last year’s most
remarkable songs, “Climax” sounds like the
next-level remix of a song that doesn’t exist
yet. Like the best Diplo work, it transcends
what it rips off—in this case, dubstep-house
fusionist SBTRKT and druggy R&B curiosity
The Weeknd.
That imitate-and-improve approach also
holds for Major Lazer, Diplo’s daffy dancehall
project with producer Switch. Given a
What a fashionable chap: Diplo
made-for-LOLZ origin story (the Major is a
one-armed avenging angel from the 1984
zombie war), the thumping project also
oozes authenticity thanks to guest spots from
Jamaican singer Vybz Kartel and the secondgeneration Puerto Rican sisters known as
Nina Sky. An autotuned baby makes an
appearance, too.
Taken together, “Climax” and Major
Lazer summarize The Diplo Formula. He
funnels stellar curation into flirtations with
the mainstream. He then ties an Internetlike fuck-all concern for cultural pilfering to
dumb, meme-generating viral ephemera that
seemingly exists only to entertain Diplo’s
core fans and provide a pitch for PR weasels
and a hook for easy bloggers. This pattern has
appropriation are passé, there’s a telling video
made him a star.
of Harlem residents in shock that the name of
It’s beginning to make stars of his protégés,
their home-brewed dance has been
too: That more-than-the-music impulse hit
commandeered and turned into something
a tipping point recently with the massive
else entirely. “Yeah, I know the Harlem
success of Brooklyn producer Baauer’s
Shake,” one viewer proclaims, “but that ain’t
“Harlem Shake,” released by Diplo’s label,
the Harlem Shake.”
Mad Decent. The song is a raucous slab of
Indeed, the branding of both Diplo and
energetic EDM. But it went viral thanks to
Mad Decent hinges on highlighting obscurea video dance campaign, encouraged and
to-the-mainstream music and tweaking
marketed by the label,
it here and there to
which can monetize
make it more palatable.
Major Lazer
fan-made viral
Some might argue that
Dragonette and Gent & Jawns cultural appropriation
videos with YouTube
Thursday, March 7, 9 p.m., $28
advertising. Even as the
has been here since
Cat’s Cradle, catscradle.com
tune has shot to the top
rock music’s start.
of the charts, “Harlem
Others might shrug
Shake” has been
and simply say, “Hey!
subsumed by its own cultural contagion.
Postmodernism, bro!” But sensitivity to such
But “Harlem Shake” shares a name with a
an issue should increase over time, shouldn’t
legendary hip-hop dance that’s actually from
it? And in a culture of tweets and quick links,
Harlem, a plunder that upsets people. For
we don’t take the time to read the references
anyone who thinks these concerns of
and footnotes and acknowledged influences;
we can scan, skim and move on.
Diplo’s careless curating can feel nihilistic,
especially now that everybody can go coolhunting with the Internet. In the last two
years, Diplo has co-signed Chicago rapper
Sasha Go Hard, zen Internet absurdist
MC Riff Raff and slow-groove subgenre
Moombahton. His approval has felt a little,
well, late. By attaching his name to these
sounds, Diplo keeps Diplo relevant and
current, as what hits mainstream music
websites tends to bubble up days earlier
on personal Tumblr and Twitter accounts.
The rise of a next big thing is now rapid and
bottom-up, rendering Diplo’s once seemingly
prescient savvy dated and useless. He’s now
part of the machine, the guy that will nod
along to your weird music soon enough.
Superstars now play the part of Diplo in
their spare time: Drake and friends run a
blog called October’s Very Own that first
highlighted The Weeknd. Rihanna recently
performed on Saturday Night Live with a
background that nodded to a ’90s nostalgia
aesthetic called #seapunk, whose origins
can be traced to Tumblr. And did you catch
Rihanna’s photo shoot for January’s issue
of Complex? The most fascinating photo
is Rihanna, lounging almost on all-fours,
staring at her MacBook Pro. It is a poignant
symbol of where artists must be now—on
the Internet, digi-digging always, like Diplo’s
been doing for years.
That might be a small victory for someone
who made his name being ahead of the curve,
but all of these people closing in the rear view
must be frightening, too. More than a decade
after Hollertronix 1, it often seems like Diplo
now needs us more than we need him. p
Brandon Soderberg lives in Baltimore, where
he writes the No Trivia hip-hop column for Spin.
photo by Shane McCauley
48
wednesday • march 6 • 2013
● music
Getting mediocre
Frat-rapper-in-transition Mac Miller proves most anybody can make a pretty OK album
by Brandon soderberg
T
he problem with Pittsburghborn, 21-year-old rapping
white boy Mac Miller isn’t
that he’s bad. It’s that he isn’t very
good, and we’re now treating him
like he’s great.
Miller layers skittering drums over gulps
and squeaks of wordless vocals. He tosses
out in-the-pocket, middle-class, dude-bro
boasting and sounds like the best rapper on
your college dorm floor: “I just want to ride
through the city in a Cutlass/ Find a big butt
bitch somewhere, get my nuts kissed/ That’s
the way it goes when you party just like I do/
Bitches on my dick that used to brush me
To this point, Miller’s career hinges on
off in high school.” Imagine the privileged,
right-place, right-time fortuity, combined
raised-on-porn prick kids of Superbad if they
with an ability and willingness to genuflect
really
liked Big L. Why wouldn’t the young
before his core fan base. For most, he
and dumb rock this?
arrived less than three years ago, in the
They did: Blue Slide Park, Miller’s 2011
midst of a flashpoint where blog-fueled
debut
album, sold 144,000 copies in one
hip-hop pushed major label rap further into
week
and
became the first independently
irrelevance. Fellow Pittsburgh weed rap
distributed debut to top
twerp Wiz Khalifa—a
The Billboard 200 since
major contributor to the
Mac
Miller
with
Chance
1995. He had stayed with
varied, DIY Internet rap
the Pittsburgh-based
the
Rapper,
The
Internet
scene—broke through
label Rostrum and, as a
to the mainstream,
and Vince Staples
result, was relatively free
selling out amphitheaters
Tuesday, July 9, 8 p.m.
to do as he wished, giving
and climbing charts
The Ritz, Raleigh, $25, etix.com
his debut a rare sort of
internationally. Miller
integrity in top-selling
swerved into and stuck
hip-hop. If the past is any
with Wiz’s cargo shortsindication,
a
major
label would’ve cleaned up
appealing lane, and he found his own throng.
this
locally
grown
oval-faced
goof, delayed
Miller expertly re-enacts all the core
his album a half-dozen times, and made him
elements of “real” hip-hop: His hooks are
rap over dubstep. His independent insistence
chanted rather than handed over to a good
paid off.
and proper singer. His beats hit hard but feel
Last month, Miller released Watching
third-spliff-of-the-day breezy. He indulges a
Movies With the Sound Off, the follow-up to
strained “whoa, man” delivery that suggests
Blue Slide Park. He again stuck with Rostrum,
he’s stunned by his own ability to rap. Like
but stylistically, Miller attempts something
Drake, he pairs it all with an approach to
much more ambitious for his second LP.
rhyming that’s certainly rudimentary but
He augments his gee-golly persona with
smartly rides close enough to the beat that it
an abstract “lyrical” style of rapping, plus
tricks new listeners into thinking he’s totally
weightless and horizontal production to
killing it.
match. The main influence here is the freely
On the aspirational “Donald Trump,” from
associative, hot-sounding nonsense of hip2011’s free download mixtape Best Day Ever,
You like me? You really, really like me?
Photo courtesy of The Agency Group
hop absurdist MF Doom. On “Suplexes
Inside of Complexes and Duplexes,” Miller
offers, “Young sire, slap the fuck out of
Jon Cryer, rough rider.” The guests are
high-profile products of Internet rap: Odd
Future’s Earl Sweatshirt, Black Hippy bug-out
extraordinaire Ab-Soul, eccentric street tough
Action Bronson, underground recluse Jay
Electronica—friends who let Miller borrow
their bona fides. Sometimes, Miller even
sings in a pouty voice that indicates his life
is getting tough and he’s been thinking real
hard about it. He’s a post-grad now.
Watching Movies With the Sound Off is not
a bad album. Miller, undoubtedly a serious
rap fan, knows how to make a “solid” and
“cohesive” album because he’s listened to a
lot of those in his 21 years on this planet. He
begins with a mood-setting druggy yammer,
locates an emotional apogee with a song
about a dead friend, and wraps it all with
a singsong track that could play over the
final credits of the next Zach Braff movie. It
doesn’t do much that’s quantifiably wrong.
But that’s why the narrative that’s forming
is so ridiculous: Mac Miller is now pretty
good at rapping, and his former doubters
are now starting to treat him like a young
god. If this were high school basketball,
he’d be the kid who goes from missing the
rim of a free throw at season’s beginning
to making a few open-court layups in the
playoffs—except he’s also talking now about
skipping college and heading straight to
the pros. Pitchfork, who gave Blue Slide Park
a 1.0 out of 10, afforded Watching Movies
With the Sound Off a pretty respectable 7.0
and sold the idea that Miller’s addiction to
codeine-laced cough syrup and public bouts
with billionaire troll Donald Trump fueled a
dark-night-of-the-soul rap album. The New
York Times’ Jon Caramanica lightly praised
the record, claiming this not-even-a-couplet
offered a “bolt of emotional clarity”: “I still
don’t got the heart to pick my phone up when
my dad calls/ Will he recognize his son when
he hears my voice?” Apparently, it is now
enough to make a moderately enjoyable,
not entirely embarrassing rap album of
underground mimesis and pass muster into
the mainstream.
Here is an edgier and less shameless
Macklemore, a frat-friendly facsimile of
paranoid, third-eye-opening hip-hop. Mac
Miller gives people exactly what they want
and, this time around, it is the illusion of
sophistication. That doesn’t mean he, nor
anyone else, should be celebrated for not
being completely terrible anymore. p
Brandon Soderberg lives in Baltimore, Md.,
where writes about hip-hop and comics.
wednesday • july 3 • 2013
39