Warm skin that’s moist from the body heat. Ears are ringing from the music and everyone’s voices are inaudible. Eyes are blurry and your footing is off-balance. Confidence and euphoria overcome you and you feel like you’ll never get old and the night will never end. This is what it feels like when listening to Ke$ha’s debut album, Animal (RCA/Jive) A collection of rainbow-colored electro-pop full of punk-inspired hooks, Animal has the same effect as a bottle of Mike’s Hard Ice: Animal’s sugary intoxication is fast-acting. The album exists for the simple purpose of making people dance until their clothes come off and 22-year-old Ke$ha knows this. She’s young and she doesn’t take herself too seriously. Even on the more introspective songs she still makes clear life is her party, and in a cruel world full of layoffs and terrorism who wouldn’t want to be invited to her party?
Every song on Animal is up-tempo or mid-tempo making them always danceable. The album is a hybrid of electronic music and joyous pop-punk because of the futuristic synthesizers (that always lend themselves to thoughts of the future), and Ke$ha’s often Auto-Tuned vocals that have become requisite for pop-punk music and its emo leanings. Emo music is characterized by an emotional vocal style that includes a lot of belting. As much rapping as she does on her tracks like “Tik Tok” she also performs vocal runs that are definitive of pop music. Just think of Kelly Clarkson’s vocal gymnastics on “My Life Would Suck Without You” filtered through a voice similar to pop-punker Avril Lavigne’s and you have Ke$ha’s vocal performance.
Ke$ha sums up Animal’s theme in a matter of lines on “Tik Tok”: “I’m talkin’ ‘bout everybody gettin’ crunk, crunk/boys tryna to touch my junk, junk/and I’ll slap him if he getting’ too drunk, drunk.” Ke$ha splits up Animal into three subjects that are partying, obsessive love and invasions of privacy, but all the subjects revolve around partying. Ke$ha’s approach to music seems to always involve intoxication whether it’s becoming intoxicated by alcohol or obsessive feelings about love. This approach is executed perfectly on Animal’s opening song, “Your Love Is My Drug,” on which Ke$ha says she might “need some rehab” and her “heart is fried.” Maybe Ke$ha’s preoccupation with intoxication accounts for her tipsy persona, which she exhibits in interviews as well as her music. Since Animal is meant to be escapism for people to listen to when they want to feel carefree, the songs like “Drug” and “Hungover” seem like glimpses of the less carefree aspects of life that Ke$ha keeps to a minimum. She makes it clear that she’s aware that life isn’t always a party, but people should still try to party as much as possible. Ke$ha’s goal is not to remind people of their myriad problems, but to inspire them to be happy. On songs like “Tik Tok” and “Take it Off,” Ke$ha presents an image of herself as the ultimate party girl. The image Ke$ha presents of herself within these type of songs is of a party girl, but not like a Britney Spears who is the sorority girl type of party girl who gets dolled up in miniskirts and heels to party. Instead Ke$ha prefers to dress down to party in 80s memorabilia T-shirts, Doc Marten boots with her blond hair a mess. She’s the party animal who can out drink the guys and adopt their pimp logic and use it as a sort of female empowerment, but of course not in a too-serious way.
Throughout Animal Ke$ha channels her fellow female pop stars, who have all had #1 hits created by Ke$ha’s mentor super pop-producer Dr. Luke. Some of these pop stars include Kelly Clarkson (“My Life Would Suck Without You”), Katy Perry (“I Kissed A Girl”), Avril Lavigne (“Girlfriend”) and even Miley Cyrus (“Party in the U.S.A.”). Dr. Luke has made his career from always having big, urgent hooks that are maddeningly catchy, so it only makes sense that some of past hits would work their ways into Animal. Ke$ha is a songwriter in her own right writing a song on Miley Cyrus’ latest album. She even takes some “ooh-whoa-ooh-whoas” from Miley’s “Party in the U.S.A.” on Ke$ha’s somewhat melancholy “Blind.” Despite the influences, the perpetual facetiousness in Ke$ha’s voice keeps the Valley-born singer’s songs sounding distinct. The Max Martin-produced “Kiss N Tell” is very similar to Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You.” “Dinosaur” has that playground chant appeal that brings to mind Avril Lavigne’s Dr. Luke-produced “Girlfriend.” With its vocal gymnastics and urgency “Hungover” has a similarity to Avril’s “I’m With You.”
Animal’s coda is its title track, which Ke$ha uses to address her need to constantly party as a way to deal with life’s un-pleasantries. Lyrics like “I’m not asleep, I’m up for the fight/into the magic/and I don’t want the concrete, I am alive/comes with the tragic” make crystal clear that Ke$ha’s partying is essentially her fight for life. Maybe if she stopped dancing she would just become another victim of this warzone of a world. The title track has a driving pulse much like a heartbeat, and is urgent. It’s the song that steps aside from the other songs on Animal and reflects on what all the songs mean as a whole. As Ke$ha sings on the chorus, “the world is spinning at the speed of light” and time is not on anyone’s side, not even the young and people might as well enjoy life’s often fleeting moments of fun. Ke$ha’s Animal is not fleeting, but it is one of life’s rare moments of fun. Bring Ke$ha’s magical brand of party pop into your life and drink it up.
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