14 DAY TRIAL // She started off in the industry as Kesha but, as if to show the world that appearances can be extremely deceiving, she changed her name to Ke$ha because she was a recording artist who still lived in extreme poverty. With her first single off the “Animal” album, “TiK ToK,” which immediately ascended in all international charts, Ke$ha has set out to conquer the world – and change the face and sound of rap music in the process, the New York Times believes.
Never before has the music industry seen such a fine blend of rap and contemporary pop music as this 22-year-old female performer, the aforementioned publication says in a lengthy piece that also takes a look at other representative white female rappers in history. She might not even realize she’s rapping but, with “TiK ToK,” Ke$ha has taken the work of other pioneer acts like the Black Eyed Peas one step further, bringing rap fully into mainstream pop and making of it something truly unique and new.
“Along with ‘Rapture,’ the 1981 hit by Blondie, it’s one of the most successful white-girl rap songs of all time. […] ‘TiK ToK’ is sung in the chorus and rapped in the verses, enhanced by Auto-Tune in a few places, in keeping with its electro-pop production. There are even a couple of ad-libs by Diddy, and a line that appears to be borrowed from Jermaine Dupri,” the NY Times says of the “zippy and salacious” track that is already getting massive airplay.
The cultural signification of the track goes beyond it, being the latest pop track to go up in the charts, the piece goes on to say. “TiK ToK” is not just a single that is here today and gone tomorrow – even if that were to happen, it has already opened many doors for other performers, by setting a precedent in terms of taking rap and pop music to a whole new level. Given the kind of praises Ke$ha gets to reap for the first single off the album alone, one may easily imagine the future holds nothing but great things for her.
“A burgeoning pop star who is primarily a singer, Ke$ha is nevertheless a pioneer. ‘TiK ToK’ and the handful of other rap-influenced songs on her debut album, ‘Animal’ (Kemosabe / RCA), to be released Jan. 5, are the product of a world in which hip-hop is such lingua franca, so embedded in the pop slipstream that it’s possible to make songs that are primarily rapped but are not widely considered to be rap songs. It’s all part of the continuing deracination of the act of rapping, which used to be inscribed as a specifically black act, but which has been appropriated so frequently and with such ease that it’s been, in some cases, re-racinated. The very existence of the casually rapping white girl reflects decreasingly stringent ideas about race and gender,” the NY Times goes on to say.