Celebrity News & Gossip

Yesterday, my esteemed colleague Kate $pencer wrote a passionate Defen$e of Ke$ha. Her basic thesis was that Twitter Nation shouldn’t have gotten so up in arms over Ke$ha’s performance on this weekend’s Saturday Night Live because she’s little more than a living, breathing embodiment of today’s disappointing pop music scene. In other words, she’s exactly the kind of pop star that America deserves in the year 2010. While there is certainly a discussion to be had about the overall quality of the music that makes up Casey’s Top 40 the iTunes Top 10 these days, we’ll table that discussion for another time. Instead, I’m going to attempt to help explain why people reacted so viscerally to the day-glo nightmare that was Ke$ha’s SNL performance.

As I see it, there are three main components as to why this performance irritated so many of us and did the same thing to my eyes and ears that Ipecac does to one’s stomach:

1) Her Warbly Pipes: When Jay-Z declared the “Death of Auto-Tune” on The Blueprint 3 last year, most of America initially rejoiced. Sure, if his wish came true, it would mean a swift end to T-Pain’s career, but we looked at it this way: In order to make an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs, right? But from the opening a cappella moments of Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok”, we immediately began regretting throwing our support behind Sean Carter’s musical movement, for if anyone ever needed saving from this particular ProTools effect, it was Ke$ha and her irritating Valley Girl affect (ugh, the way she enunciated her vowels!). Just how ear-splitting were her vocals, exactly? Well, if Randy Jackson were to describe them as being “pitchy,” he’d actually be giving her a compliment. Even Taylor Swift at the Grammys mistook Ke$ha’s off-key warbling for a cat howling in an alleyway.

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Let me start this rant with a disclaimer or two: I loathe Ke$ha (proof here and here). I find her party girl shtick tired and played and her music as unique and intriguing as a bucket of KFC chicken. That being said, I have downloaded two of her songs off of iTunes - “Tik Tok” and “Your Love Is My Drug” - and find them to be quite pleasurable to listen to while jogging in my local park. Cool? Cool.

Now, rarely would I ever put myself in the position of defending someone who celebrates brushing one’s teeth with Jack Daniels. For one thing, using alcohol in place of toothpaste is only going to lead to tooth decay and does little to cover up the stench of Camel Lights that surely embraces Ke$ha’s gums. Second, if I were to use booze as mouthwash, I’d go with something classy like a 50-year-old Macallan. Anyhoots, we all know Ke$ha is a warbling troll in a vintage T-shirt, but I was completely shocked at the meltdown the interwebs had over her Saturday Night Live performance this weekend. My Twitter exploded in Ke$ha-induced rage after her first song, with 140 character rants about her allegedly disastrous performance accusing her of everything from being drunk to sounding like a bad karaoke singer to ripping off Lady Gaga. I dropped what I was doing and ran home to my TiVo, fast-forwarding through the LOLs to experience what was surely Ke$ha stealing the crown for Biggest SNL Embarrassment from Ashlee Simpson’s head.

And then…it wasn’t that bad. In fact, it was so not bad that I couldn’t figure out what people were so upset about. Sure, she made her band dress up like astronauts and fingered some lasers and rattled on about aliens before coming out in glow in the dark body paint. But so what? She sang live and on-key (actually, she has a pretty strong voice compared to other pop stars like the aforementioned Simpson, Britney Spears and the artist formerly known as Destiny Hope Cyrus), and while her two performances may never find a home at Lincoln Center, they held our attention and kept us entertained. So why is everyone falling all over each other to out-snark Ke$ha’s SNL stint?

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