Ke$ha is that book-smart pretty girl who decides halfway through her sophomore year that, hey, schoolwork is fine and all, but it’s not really doing much in the way of actual, you know, happiness or personal relationships. So she sets her chemistry textbook on her alphabetized bookshelf, pulls her hair out of a pony tail and dials up her freshman roommate Katy; the one that goes out every night, the one that everyone knows Ke$ha secretly wishes she could be.
Only, Ke$ha doesn’t know when to stop: When she shows up to the party, she’s wearing blue lipstick and eyeliner, claiming her name is spelled with a dollar sign and making animal noises at guys she thinks are hot. And it’s fine on Friday – everyone is glad she’s coming out of her shell (“You brushed your teeth with what? That’s hilarious!”) – but by day two, the act wears a little thin. This sets the stage for Cannibal.
It’s as if Ke$ha cobbled together her musical sensibility by watching hundreds of hours of TRL, then worked in a practiced disdain for celebrity culture that inevitably follows watching that much MTV. It’s a tough balancing act, especially with her newfound fame. On the song “Sleazy,” a minimalist drum machine a la Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” beat provides a convincing stage for Ke$ha to proclaim, “I don’t need you or your bougie friends/ or your brand new Benz.” Yet, just a few tracks later, there’s “Crazy Beautiful Life,” a trash-chic fashioning of Fergie’s “Glamorous” complete with wide, major electric cording over which Ke$ha can’t help bragging about “the next night/ on the next flight/ Yeah I guess we’re doing alright.”
The haphazard pop amalgamating extends to the music behind Ke$ha’s lyrics. For the two slowest songs on Cannibal,”The Harold Song,” and “C U Next Tuesday,” Ke$ha pulls out an impressively passable Taylor Swift imitation. But the backing to these tracks, a back and forth between soft, relatively unfiltered keyboard during verses and thumping electronic chorus melodies is distractingly inconsistent and ends up accomplishing exactly the opposite of what is indented, that is, reminding the listener that, yep, this is still the person who did “Your Love is My Drug.”
The experience of listening to Cannibal is summed up almost perfectly by Ke$ha herself on the dance track “Blow.” On that song, a bass-heavy techno-synth rhythm takes a back seat to Ke$ha’s patented half-sung, half-spoken vocalizations. After exploring a few of her tried and true themes like sneaking into the club, killing the lights and making a scene, Ke$ha drops what sounds suspiciously like a mission statement for her party-obsessed persona: “Dirt and glitter cover the floor/ We’re pretty and sick/ We’re young and we’re bored.”
Still, Cannibal is enormously catchy and danceable. Beats like the one on “Blow” and the currently inescapable “We R Who We R” will easily kick-start a party with their reverberating bass-lines and extended electronic bridges. And a few more of the songs, like the title track “Cannibal” and the irreverent “Grow a Pear” accomplish the rare trick of taking such an amazingly blas? stance toward conventional decency that they come all the way back to being amusing and almost uplifting.
All of which is to say, Ke$ha’s not the type of girl you’d want to hang with every weekend. But everyone knows that sometimes those reliable old friends Katy, Britney, Stacy and Stefani Joanne Angelina can get a little staid, a little played out after a couple months of heavy rotation. If you’ve seen too much of them recently, well, Ke$ha will do in a pinch. Just make sure someone cuts her off before she starts touching people’s beards.
3 out of 5
