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Late last month, I wrote an essay about Miley Cyrus's "Party in the USA," a song produced and co-written by Lukasz Gottwald. Gottwald, who also goes by Dr. Luke, has had his Swedish fingerprints all over pop radio for several years, and around the same time the Cyrus piece ran, the video for another of his creations hit the Web: a single called "TiK ToK," performed by the 22-year-old rapper-singer Ke$ha. The song sets up shop on the fault line between charmingly daft and deeply irritating. The rapped verses are sub-Fergie-grade, proudly stuffed with groaners and to-hell-with-the-expiration-date slang ("Errbody getting crunk/ Boys tryina touch my junk"). The plotline plays like a sequel to Lady Gaga's "Just Dance": girl wakes up drunk, stays drunk, finds a dance floor and (spoiler alert) gets even drunker. (There are several YouTube videos of girls who look to be seventh graders goofily acting out the words.)
Some listeners probably noticed a more-than-passing similarity between the song and "Pop the Glock," a minor 2006 club hit by the French-American sorta-rapper Uffie, who records for the small Parisian dance label Ed Banger. "TiK ToK" rides a minimalist, 8-bit-video-game beat; "Pop the Glock" is built around a spare drum machine pattern. Ke$ha's faux-bad-girl rhymes are tweaked by AutoTune; Uffie's faux-bad-girl rhymes are run through a vocoder effect, which supplies the song with its only hint of melody.
This isn't the first time Gottwald seems to have hit the indie bins for inspiration—the breakdown on Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" (cued up here), which Gottwald co-produced, echoes the breakdown from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps" (cued up here). Nor is Gottwald the only pop producer to have done so. Compare the razored synthesizer riff, four-on-the-floor pulse, and syncopated pops of Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" (cued up here) with the razored guitars, disco beat, and syncopated cowbell clatter of The Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers" (cued up here)—an influence Timberlake and the producer Timbaland have freely admitted. (A few years earlier, Timberlake's former girlfriend Britney Spears worked with The Rapture's former production duo, The DFA, on this never-released demo).
The pop mainstream's interest in the sounds of the hipster mainstream shows no sign of flagging. Last week, bedroom mewler Owl City scored the No. 1 song in the country with "Fireflies," a song that could not exist without The Postal Service's 2003 excursions into sighingly romantic, precisely enunciated synth-pop. I'm sure there are other examples of pop indie-jacking I'm forgetting (and vice versa, as recent experiments with AutoTune by Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend help to illustrate). Jot down any that occur to you in the comments section.
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To anyone who ever bought into the Michael Jackson mythos—for a decade, for an album, for the opening bars of "Billie Jean"—it's something of a cruel and cognitively dissonant indignity that TMZ.com was the coroner at his bedside, scribbling his death certificate. On one hand, we have the "king of pop"—a quaint, archaic title by 21st-century standards. On the other, we have the fiercely irreverent figurehead of the 21st-century gossip-industrial complex, for which there is no such thing as royalty, for which the emperor isn't just naked but naked in a bunch of pictures he was foolish enough to keep on his Sidekick. Michael Jackson famously erected a 30-foot statue of himself in 1995, and the tabloids speeded it along on its way to Ozymandias-style ruin. (At least Ozymandias never had to deal with rumors that his nose was falling off.)
But as tempting as it is to describe a parasitic, inverse relationship between Jackson and the tabloids—as his power and prominence waned, theirs grew exponentially—the coupling was more complex. Jackson didn't go so far as, say, Britney Spears and date a paparazzo, but he paved the way for her brand of tabloid symbiosis in other ways: developing a persecution complex and making antagonists real and imagined the subject of many of his songs; submitting to a Faustian arrangement in which the paparazzi would keep the flashbulbs popping as long as he kept the crazy coming. Jackson's vanity fed into and fed on the vicious news cycle. He never put out for the cameras as much as Spears did at her barefoot, panty-free best, but he never quite slipped the noose the way she seems to have done today, either, cleaning up her act and asserting a degree of control over the situation by turning it into postmodern theater. In part, Jackson's inability to handle the paps comes down to the fact that he was a much, much weirder person than Spears (and, for that matter, Elvis). The only way for him to clean up his act was to haul it to a remote island in the Middle East and do his best to go dark (no pun intended). But in part it's also because of the era he came up in, one that left him ill prepared for the one that followed and that was well on its way out by the time Spears hit the scene: an era in which all meaningful distinction between intense adulation and intense scorn hadn't yet collapsed, in which it wasn't yet written into the standard-issue pop-star contract that, in the end, however it plays out, TMZ gets the last word.
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