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The lyrics of her megahit Tik Tok splutter on to the sidewalk as Ke$ha swigs on beer'n'Jack Daniels, parties till the police come and generally channels the spirit of P Diddy. It's the sound of an endless party in an autotuned package. The Valley Girl-who-couldn't-care-less persona has been a certified success: Tik Tok went Top 5 in the UK and stayed on top of the Billboard charts for nine weeks. Photoshoots show the singer on the lash, and we're regularly hit by news of her latest madcap WKD moment. She spends days wearing her placenta round her neck! She defaced the Hollywood sign! She puked in Paris Hilton's wardrobe! Oh Em Gee, she peed in someone's champagne bottle!
Scratch the surface, though, and it turns out things aren't so kerazee after all. Questioned about her bacchanalian credentials, she told Billboard, "Am I a party girl? I'm having a party in this weird office, hanging out with you, totally sober. If you mean 'party girl' like at a club with a short skirt on with no underwear, then no. I've gotten drunk before but never gotten a DUI. I don't go to clubs. I try not to let my vagina hang out. I don't do drugs, but I think I'm a walking good time and I talk kind of funny, so people think I'm messed up all the time. I'm not." Cancel the Jägermeister, make her's a lime and soda.
Around the same time, a leaked 2002 demo revealed Ke$ha as more of a Vonda Shepard fan sipping on Aqua Libra at the Lilith Fair, than a lush stumbling down Sunset Strip.
She has been an exemplary exercise in marketing: hoover up some underground sounds (Uffie, Princess Superstar, CSS), recycle them with the guy who wrote Baby One More Time, jerk out some rebellious tales, et voila! – one bad girl popstar is born. Courtney Love surmised the shallowness of the tale, saying, "When I watched the YouTube of (her) I lost a little soul."
But it's not a new phenomenon. Parallel to the lineage of genuine bad girl pop stars whose lives have been given the proverbial airbrush treatment for mass consumption (Madonna, Debbie Harry, the Go-Go's), there's been a history of snazzy marketing to mythologize the rock star quality of the more vanilla female singers. Thanks to riot grrrl, the success of Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill and tabloid thinking seeping in, the past 15 years have seen a shift, with popettes either given a relatively grungey makeover (Avril Lavigne) or forced to rack up the faux-lesbian headlines (Katy Perry). And with the recent "exposure" of the middle-class, stage school pasts of our most popular female singers (Pixie Lott, Marina), perhaps we've just become more used to pantomime naughtiness than the real thing.
As Britney Spears's Fowley-esque former manager Sam Lutfi recently tweeted in a rare moment of insight when Ke$ha mouthed off about the former Mouseketeer, "Don't try to knock Britney Spears to try to make headlines. Might as well just shave your head and hang out with me for the week."
