Ke$ha: the fine art of selling trailers

We’re already halfway through the first month of the next first year of the next decade, which means not a lot except that if you haven’t seen Avatar yet then you’re pretty much screwed for conversation for the rest of your life. It’s also the time when magazine editors get to stroke their egos and spill who they think will be the biggest acts of the year to come. This year, however, while holidaying editors where erecting their lists in preparation, something happened. Something kinda big, really. The world welcomed its first major pop star of the year and, well, while we’re here, of the decade in a 22-year-old Los Angeles singer/rapper named (sorta) Ke$ha.

Keisha Sebert’s debut album, Animal, was released in the US on 5 January and in Australia three days later, but she didn’t even have to wait for her New Year comedown to subside to find herself breaking chart records. In the States, her tech-nerd-cum-tween-cum-ironic-hipster-internet-speak-titled TiK ToK single, which first topped the singles chart in New Zealand and then Australia, entered 2010 at number one and also broke the record for the biggest track sales week by a female artist in history (why the gender distinction has to be made is uncertain – are there questions about vaginas altering sales figures?) when it received 610,069 downloads. For the record, she also features on the record holder for highest track sales week, Flo Rida’s Right Round.

Needless to say, her record company, RCA Records, who signed Ke$ha in February 2009, is viewing her as a high priority act on their roster. It might sound like the usual record label story, but there are some things worthy of noting about Sebert as New Pop Cultural Signifier.

First is her style of highly produced, synth-heavy rap pop, which she’s calling “electro pop” but could actually be seen as the next extension of smoothed over ‘crunk punk’ being made increasingly popular by the new ‘boy bands’ (a different topic) like Cobra Starship and 3OH!3.

Then is her place in the line of recent female singer/rappers, the line that jumped the Atlantic to bound between Lily Allen and Katy Perry and only relates to the pop charts seeing as females were singing and rapping about such ‘controversial’ things as having orgasms and getting drunk long before it became the greatest new change in music. Sebert, who is reportedly friends with Perry, does tote the same (gender non-specific) arrogance in her lyrics as Perry, but her marketed style has far more in common with Allen’s – that of the ‘lower-class’ assault on the wealthy world of celebrity singers and producers. When Allen emerged, she was heralded as the voice of the ‘average’ English slapper, before it was slowly revealed that she came from an upper-middle-class, well-connected family and she altered her image to that of ‘straight-talking’ socialite.

Likewise, much in Ke$ha’s early press has been made of her years living with her struggling songwriter mother in Nashville, even though a lot of it comes from the time before Sebert was four and her mother picked up a publishing deal. (Sebert’s mother also shares writing credits on her album.) As in TiK ToK, Sebert affects ‘hood’ slang, using words in her songs and blogs like “po po” and “fronting”. In 2005, her family was even one of the ‘regular trashy’ families featured on Paris Hilton’s reality show The Simple Life. The Guardian has called her “trailer trashy to the max – only it's so full-on it's almost like some postmodern arthouse joke”.

What isn’t as widely publicised but Sebert has acknowledged in interviews is that, by 2005, when Sebert was 17, she was already dropping out of an International Baccalaureate with intentions to study psychology at Columbia University. The years between 2005 and 2009 are also little documented, though there are the credits to help fill them in – the backup vocals on tracks ‘by’ Britney Spears, the writing credits for The Veronicas (she co-wrote This Love) and Miley Cyrus, the string of tracks synched to television shows, all, assumingly, while trying to land or negotiating a record deal. But if there’s any doubt, there’s always the tour with Mickey Avalon to press the fact that Ke$ha is the new smack-talking voice of the trailer park, which is also currently one of the most popular voices in the western world.

Welcome to the decade.

From January 2010