Off The Record: Ke$ha Coverage Fail

On January 5, pop-rapper and future celebrity rehab candidate Ke$ha released her first album, Animal. Bolstered by the history-making success of her first single, “Tik Tok,” which netted 600,000 downloads in a week and currently sits atop Billboard’s singles chart, the disc has been drawing rave reviews and plenty of attention from the media, as much for her attention-grabbing “originality” as her evidently irresistible pop savvy. The only problem with this is that not a single review I could find made mention of the source of her creativity – namely, the style and music of another twentysomething female rapper named Uffie.

Like Ke$ha, Uffie is also a barely-legal (in persona, at least), American-born pop star exploiting postfeminist liberation and hip-hop convention in order to carve out a career for herself. The problem, however, is that she’s been doing it for almost four years, and Ke$ha introduced her style about four months ago. Yeah, yeah, Ke$ha’s been an “active musician” since 2005, a whole year before Uffie debuted her first double-sided single, “Hot Chick/ In Charge.” But listen to “Hot Chick” and tell me there aren’t glaring similarities not only in terms of the two performers’ content and style, but even their music:

Now listen to “Tik Tok:”

I’m not entirely sure what’s more problematic, the fact that Ke$ha effectively bit her entire persona and style from Uffie, or that the media thus far has either had too little interest or knowledge to call her on it. Sadly, a Google search for Ke$ha reviews produced a wealth of accolades for her feisty take on female sexuality, but other than a few articles that decline to take sides, such as this one on LA Weekly’s music blog, there’s been virtually no serious effort to analyze or deconstruct, much less make mention of this glaring theft. Further, a number of outlets have interviewed Ke$ha in recent weeks and not one of them had the fortitude, or more likely, familiarity with Uffie to ask her about the similarities between the two.

The real problem with this is that most music reporters, even ones who are so-called authorities, don’t know or care enough about music as a medium to explore or examine anything other than what they “like.” Beyond even our penchant as a species to settle into comfortable, complacent patterns of behavior that satisfy the same appetites and make us fearful of change or difference, the supposed viability of rock music and the preponderance of white, rock-loving critics has effectively marginalized all other genres as “niche.” This is not only why you probably haven’t read anything about Uffie until now, but also why you end up buying only one or two electronic or hip-hop albums per year, if that many: they’re the only ones deemed “worthy” by mainstream critics, because they’re the only ones that even they venture outside their comfort zone to hear.

 

That said, it’s understandable that you haven’t heard (or even heard of) Uffie, based on the three 12” singles she’s released in as many years, good though all of them are in precisely the same kind of irresponsible, clumsily charming trainwreck of a way that Ke$ha is currently capitalizing on with her album. But Uffie has been on two Ed Banger compilations, both of which received nods (or at the very least, acknowledgment) from the mainstream press when they were released, and guest-starred on electronic group Justice’s “Tthhee Ppaarrttyy,” which to my knowledge was regarded as a standout track on the French duo’s debut LP.

 

In which case, are the people assigned to cover Ke$ha unaware of the recent history of electronic music and its increasing permeation of mainstream pop, or do they just not give a shit until it hits the Billboard charts? I’m not sure which assumption gives them more credit, since it seems like the norm rather than the exception not to know about anything other than new rock and pop. But doing research isn’t just the responsibility of critics and journalists, it’s the responsibility of real music listeners, of which there admittedly seem to be a dwindling few. If you like something or are interested in it, check out who else is doing music that’s the same or similar. See where it comes from or read up on what inspired it. And then, even if you’re not going to write about it, or think about it for one more second after that, at least you’ll know what you’re listening to. (For example, Jack White did not in fact invent the blues.)

 

Ultimately, I prefer Uffie not just because she “came first,” so to speak, but because she seems a lot more self-aware, and quite frankly smarter than Ke$ha, whose provocative behavior seems at least as frivolous as the celebutantes that she likes to make fun of. Then again, Uffie spends much of her new single “Pop The Glock” singing the praises of DJ Feadz, a producer boyfriend whom she apparently broke up with two or more years ago, in which case maybe her own creative judgment is no less suspect (mentioning a lover by name in a song is the musical equivalent of getting a tattoo of their name – you might as well break up immediately).

 

But fans and critics alike, even the nonprofessional ones, should at least have some sense of context when considering the merits of Ke$ha’s (or Uffie’s, or anyone’s) music, and it’s the professional ones who should be providing it. Otherwise, that coverage is not just mediocre journalism, analysis or criticism, it’s ignorant and borderline irresponsible. Imagine, for example, if everyone believed that, say, Green Day invented punk rock, or perhaps more realistically, that Elvis invented rock & roll. Mind you, no one’s saying that either of these young women is reinventing the medium as we know it, but there’s no reason that en route to one or the other’s inevitable shaved-head paparazzi showdown, much less their transformation from pop diva to folk songstress, the media can’t also capture all of the steps, both personally and professionally, that led them and us there.