Anyone who knows me knows that I have a completely unabashed love of pop music. Over the years I have tried to make it into some grandiose statement about engagement with the cultural zeitgeist: oh Pop music is like Kundera's definition of kitsch, oh pop music is the end point of a vast alchemy that transmute incoherent emotion into something tangible--an anthem of consistent, relatable feeling. It's likely that all of it is bullshit and I mostly like listening to easy, un-challenging music. But with Ke$ha (whose spelling of choice is such an elegant solution to the Prince problem) I feel some kind of uber-connection. I should explain, first of all, that I am kind of a prude. Not in terms of my behavior which has occasionally detoured pretty heavily into vice-alley. But those behaviors are marked with a huge amount of self-loathing and a too-perceptible judgement of others. I am my own worst slut-shamer. I'm not proud of it. Consider this blog an apology.
But with Ke$ha... there is something in her complete indulgence in trash that transports me. She's not adjectivally trashy, she is trashiness: primally trashy. Ur-trash. And I admit, I get a guilty buzz out of it. But I also think it's more than that. So, without further ado, here is my analysis, for better or for worse of her newest single: "Die Young." Here is the youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCTfZUEUNxA
Let's start with the opening lines (which happen to be the chorus):
"I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums./
Oh what a shame that you came here with someone./
So while you're hear in my arms,/
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young."
It's not, on the surface, such a strange message. She is hardly the first artist to make the point that dying young is preferable to growing old. Alphaville did quite a good job of that twenty-five or so years previously. What is worth paying attention to here is the recognition of the club being a liminal space. In previous songs, Ke$ha expresses her hedonism not as a patronage but as a lifestyle. Who can forget that she "brushed her teeth with a bottle of Jack" in her first big hit. Here however there are some spatial and temporal limitations. She recognizes that her would-be lover "came here with someone" and, even more importantly, she characterizes it as "a shame." The narrative turns on the idea that their time is limited. Those limitations have everything to do with the world outside the club. The "someone" that the object of the narrator's affection came with is never defined. Perhaps it is a girlfriend, or a wife or just a date. She spells doom for the narrator's ambitions. Whatever moment of connection is being posited must, by necessity, end--maybe even at the end of the song. Rather than being a lament for the things that cannot last, Ke$ha proposes that they exist fully within the limited venue provided them by fate. "So while you're hear in my arms, let' make the most of the night like we're gonna die young," she says. The listener must be most struck by the desperation in the line (the crux of my argument here). Given that the exploration of their attraction must entirely exist within the confines of the dance, Ke$ha imagines that only death waits on the other side of that embrace. To imagine a life where her would-be lover returns to the person he arrived with is to imagine an abyss. Unlike most songs touting the virtues of youth and dying before one ages, this is a plea enjoying that which is limited and unsustainable.
The cynics among us may want to characterize these lines as a reinforcement of the easy-hedonism that characterizes most of the Ke$ha canon. Reading the "while you're here in my arms" line as something more akin to "Let's grope before your girlfriend gets mad." There is certainly some evidence for this reading. The first verse states, quite clearly:
"Young hearts, out our minds,/
Runnin' like we outta time./
Wild childs lookin' good./
Livin' hard just like we should./
Don't care who's watching when we tearing it up. (You Know)/
That magic that we got nobody can touch. (For sure!)"
Essentially, this relationship, because it occurs in a public space, must be shameless and, in it's shamelessness meaningless. The cynic wants to read "don't care who's watching" as a lurid, voyeuristic invitation. They are wild children whose mid-club coupling is only the basest expression of a feral lust.
As I said, validity in the above-reading and certainly in-line with Ke$ha's previous expressions of a world of endless hedonism. I would like to focus in on the second and final verse, however.
"Young hunks taking shots,/
Stripping down to dirty socks./
Music up, gettin' hot,/
Kiss me, give me all you've got./
It's pretty obvious that you've got a crush. (you know)/
That magic in your pants is making me blush. (for sure)"
It's a rather stark denial of expectations. Ke$ha gives us a world of typical club sexuality: free-flowing alcohol, removal of clothing (note the double entendre in the use of the word "dirty"), a crescendo of libidinous music and actual physical contact. When we get to the final couplet, however, we see a hint of something unexpected. Though the couplet primarily treats on her lover's erection, she ends the line with the assertion that his physical arousal is "making [her] blush." Despite the claustrophobic sexuality all around them and her previous assertion of the public nature of their coupling, the most intimate moment of possibility--the recognition of his actual sexual capability, transforming desire into action--is rendered as innocent. The narrator blushes at his arousal. She is caught off guard by the revelation that their desire could be made manifest. Though the entire tableau is Dionysiac and debauched, at its core is a kernel of un-jaded, unexpressed erotic exploration that can still cause the "wild child" to "blush."
This moment is quickly drowned out by another stanza in which she asserts:
"Looking for some trouble tonight. (Yeah?)/
Take my hand i'll show you the wild side,/
Like it's the last night of our lives. (Uh huh)/
We'll keep dancing till we die."
The narrator goes back to playing the role of half-feral seductress, perhaps as an overcompensation for the discomfort experienced in realizing she still had the capacity to experience sexuality in a way that wasn't constructed by the jaundiced eye of the club environs. She describes her lover as a source of "trouble" and her purview as being "the wild side." I see it as Ke$ha's attempt to defend against the critic that is made uncomfortable by her expressed discomfort. Again, death becomes the only viable way out of the situation. Though she employs a simile at first, "Like it's the last night of our lives," she quickly turns it into metaphoric call to action, "we'll keep dancing 'till we die." The line is repeated in ghostly echoes several times "die young, die young." By the end, it is not even a request, it is a command. Dying young is not, like Alphaville professes, the answer to the indignities of ageing, it is the only way make the impermanent eternal.
We then return to the chorus which is repeated, sometimes even layering over itself in the lines' desire to be spoken. It is a shame. A shame that a world outside the club even exists. The music will stop and the narrator and her lover will have to part ways, he must go back to the "someone" he came with. She must accept that this return to blissful, erotic innocence must end. She will again become one of the jaded, shot-taking dancers, stripped "down to dirty socks" and unable to blush at the "magic" in the pants of her next partner. In a situation like this, clearly death begins to look attractive.
The genre of trashy club songs relies upon the amorality (but not the immortality) of it's protagonists. They are lost in a world of drink and drug-addled hedonism that removes any culpability for the impulsive actions of a moment. Ke$ha has presented her heroines as mindlessly cruel pleasure seekers who cannot be blamed for their fickle affections because they are unable to be any different than their environs demand. But in this song, there is a profound vulnerability. It is not only the cuckold and his/her partner that suffers. The temptress/cad is shown to exist in a world of impermanent objects and desires that do not change because they are hollow. Rather, these desires change because they must--because they are acted on by outside forces. Ke$ha is the abandoned, even in the center of her own comfortably careless milieu. Those things that cannot last, despite their erotic intensity and exploratory innocence, take their toll. Better to die before the music stops than to continue in such an endlessly ephemeral vein.
Brava, Ke$ha! You seemlessly blend the ribald with the poignant and yes: it is a shame that you came here with someone.
