"I am tired
I am weary..
I could sleep for a thousand years.
A thousand dreams that would awake me.
Different colors made of tears."

So eventually I just had to stop the Velvet Underground and put on Animal instead. Not because I really wanted to, but I would love to start making my own pasta, and I am an honorable man.

My thoughts:

"Tik Tok," her biggest hit (so far. *shudder*) is the longest running number one debut single by a female artist in the Hot 100 since 1977. It also set the weekly record for digital downloads by a female artist in its second week at number one on the charts. It may have benefited from coming out at a weak time in history for music (as Mr. Czar explained, the Black Eyed Peas were the record holders for some of this recent shit when this came out, and, well, fuck the Black Eyed Peas. Fuck them right up their lack-of-talented asses), but it became a cultural phenomenon of sorts. The Simpsons even did an episode opening to the tune, the first time they'd ever opened with a song other than their normal theme. I may not think much of the song, or the most recent episodes of The Simpsons, but they have some clout with me even still.

The song contains way too much use of autotune. But all music these days has too much autotune. I'm expecting any day to talk to someone on the phone who is using autotune. Anyway, as someone who drinks bourbon more than almost everyone you've ever met--I"m drinking it right now, so please excuse any typos or poorly constructed thoughts--I can say that her "Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack" is not something that has ever occurred to me. If you drink as much as she's pretending to, then you really don't want alcohol next to your gums more than necessary, much less aggressively pressed into them. She comes off like a posturing 19 year old rather than a hardened drunk. Trust me. Ich bin expert.

The song following that ("Take It Off") is built around a parody of "There's a place in France where the naked ladies dance..." That is the closest I can get to a compliment of the song. "Everybody take it off!" is what it keeps repeating. If you liked that ditty when you were in 3rd Grade, and you haven't aged a day since then, you might appreciate this song. There's a moment of daring where she keeps chanting: "I don't give a...I don't give a...I don't give a..." the word she's searching for is "...fuck," but she doesn't dare, since it might keep this masterpiece from making it to radio play.

With the follow up track, "Kiss N Tell," she continues the tactic of self-censoring with a time where she mutes herself saying "Shit." I don't quite know why you'd do that to yourself. You should at least force the fucking radio station to mute you. Or was she cowed by that whole "Let's Get Retarded" / "Let's Get Things Started," bullshit. I guess it's smart, in a certain way, to take marching orders from what happens to The Black Eyed Peas.

"Stephen," on the other hand, starts pretty strong. I know, I'm surprised myself. With some sharp harmonies from the back-up singers, the song itself devolves into a begging song with Ke$ha begging Stephen to call her. It doesn't really go anywhere after that.

"Blah Blah Blah" is her other major single, and it seems to be an attempt to flip the gender on trash talking bullshit, or at least make it more egalitarian. If you can just picture the most tedious people you've ever met talking about sex and the opposite gender, and cut it down to about three minutes, and run autotune on the whole group, you've got the song "Blah Blah Blah."

"Hungover" is not a good description of a hangover. It feels like subpar Shakira, which may sound redundant until you listen to Shakira and then this song, and get disappointed for what you're missing. For the record, the best description of a hangover comes from Kingsley Amis, in his great book Lucky Jim:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

"Party at a Rich Dude House." I don't think it's necessary to do anything more than list the name of this song, and to say it doesn't even live up to the promise of it's title, and move on. There is a moment where the narrator of the town is trying to find her coat and realizes that "I'm still drunk," and the song slows down and blurs to indicate that. That is what qualifies as sophistication here.

"Backstabber." Now I'm just riffing, and not fully listening to this song, but I think part of the appeal of this album is the same thing that got people into The Streets (a geneuinely good British hip hop/grime band that imploded on their third or maybe fourth album but produced two absolutely fantastic albums that everyone should own--Original Pirate Material and A Grand Don't Come For Free). "Backstabber" opens with the lyrics "Bored, stoned, sitting in your basement all alone," and tell the story of someone who is basically isolated by the shit that they've done to other people. But the important thing is those first couple words. "Bored, stoned, sitting in your basement..." Ke$ha more or less talks about a world where people recognize. Where the experience in the lyrics people hear is immediately recognizable at times as the reality of their life, and, at most extreme, as the plans. Because what drinker hasn't said, "I'm going out this week to get totally fucked up!" Ke$ha is the musical equivalent of shouting, "I'm going to get fucked up and laid!" It's not much more complicated than that. That fact can obscure how utterly boring the music is once you strip out a beat or two and the autotune.

I missed an entire song while writing that. It's called "Blind." We didn't miss much.

"Dinosaur" is the type of song you'd expect from bitchy cheerleaders. It makes "Mickey" seem sophisticated. There is some attempts at old people jokes. I don't have anything to say beyond that the "You're an O-L-D M-A-N" crap didn't strike me as anything other than irritating.

"Dancing With Tears in My Eyes" is a mournful dance song. It is also a great example of "Show, don't tell," in the negative sense, of course. The narrator doesn't every explain what happened, just that she's mournful and broken inside. She tells you a bit of what's going on in her head, but nothing why. It's not much, and the chorus is catchy, for portions, but there's no real hook beyond that.

It's clear that the end of this album is where they put tracks they had they didn't really care about. There's nothing put at the end of the album to bring it on home, like, say The Velvet Underground's Loaded, which hits you with "I Found a Reason" and "Oh! Sweet Nothing," in the closing couple tracks. It is unfair completely to compare Animal with Loaded, of course, which is a fantastic album with the greatest one-two punch in music history ("Sweet Jane" and "Rock and Roll" of course) along with the two aforementioned songs to help close out the album, but I've got The Velvet Underground on the brain, and I'd rather talk about them while "Animal," the final song on Animal plays.

There we go.

Now I can finally make some pasta without feeling like I haven't fulfilled my duties.