Ke$ha brings her bratty, trashy pop sounds to A.C.
For a girl who's only been making records since 2009, Ke$ha is preceded by quite a reputation. The 23-year-old sings crudely about going through men old and young, rowdily partying until dawn, brushing her teeth with Jack Daniels, and drowning in martinis. Ke$ha's so trashy she makes Chelsea Handler look like a teetotaling celibate. In her videos, she's a dirty-blonde, mussed-hair mess in a garbage-chic dress.
For a girl who's only been making records since 2009, Ke$ha is preceded by quite a reputation.
The 23-year-old sings crudely about going through men old and young, rowdily partying until dawn, brushing her teeth with Jack Daniels, and drowning in martinis. Ke$ha's so trashy she makes Chelsea Handler look like a teetotaling celibate. In her videos, she's a dirty-blonde, mussed-hair mess in a garbage-chic dress.
Musically, Ke$ha's unapologetically simple pop and bratty Auto-Tuned sneer have been critically damned for coming across as Lady Gaga Lite. And they just happen to be the very same reasons she's got a dollar sign in her name.
Her brash ideas have kept Ke$ha's debut album, Animal, in the Billboard Top 20 since its January 2010 release, made "TiK ToK" the highest digitally downloaded single for a female artist in one week since SoundScan began tracking figures, and led her to pack the Music Box at Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City with a teen-heavy crowd Friday night.
Ke$ha's fans ate her up, even when the singer ended what she called her first-ever headlining show after a barely-40-minute set without an encore.
Backed by a team of musicians and dancers in on the bacchanal (e.g. peeling out of their clothes for the electro-repetition of "Take It Off"), Ke$ha used her catty sing-speak abilities to their fullest.
Whether her outrageously infectious melodies were dressed in layers of vintage '80s synth-pop with tinny drums ("VIP") or '70s-era glam with crunchy guitars ("Blah Blah Blah"), the singer played up her snottily bored routine. Her robo-sensual deadpan might've been off-key at times, but it added a louche quality to the proceedings. And the insistent throb and pitchy background vocals of "Backstabber" truly benefited from her sexed-up cyborg bit.
Though the set was short, Ke$ha managed to sound genuinely bored throughout the cowbell-filled "Dinosaur" and the Celtic-tinged synth-ballad "Stephen." Yet she finished sassily with a petulant take on the party-ball anthem "TiK ToK" and all was right - or fabulously wrong - in the mad, bad world that Ke$ha's built.