Don’t say Ke$ha doesn’t know how to party like a warrior (though one with a short lifespan).
The dance-floor animal just released the new single from her upcoming second album Warrior, and it has all the pop swag of a high-school girl sneaking a bottle of Smirnoff Ice into prom. “Lookin’ for some trouble tonight,” Ke$ha warns on the thumping, remix-bound track that encourages listeners to dance their way to their graves.
And you just might. Let the official lyric video below liven up your day:
Image Credit: Christopher Polk/Getty Images
Ke$ha has tweeted the title and release date for her upcoming album.
The “Blow” singer will follow up her debut album Animal and her EP Cannibal with Warrior. The new album will be released on Dec. 4, just in time for Christmas. She also tweeted the release date of the first single “Die Young,” which will be out on Sept. 25.
The album was originally expected to be released at the end of 2011, but was ultimately pushed back so that she could work on it further. Ke$ha told the Calgary Herald last year that she hopes it will “reinvent pop music,” and has said that the album will have more of a rock feel.
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Ke$ha shoots co-star James Van Der Beek and countless unicorns in her ‘Blow’ video
Image Credit: Getty Images
“Ke$ha” and “The Beatles” don’t really belong in the same sentence, unless that sentence is the one I just wrote. But like Miley Cyrus and Biggie or Christina Aguilera and The Strokes, these two vastly different artists can be two great tastes that taste great together — provided an ace mashup artist is pulling the strings.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that yes, someone named doctordude combined “Tik Tok” with “Come Together,” and yes, the result works much better than you thought it would. (At least, until the dollar-signed-one’s vocals come in.) Hear for yourself:
Image Credit: Getty Images
Despite being one of the first people to bring back Andre 3000, spending the bulk of her summer on tour, and unleashing a crazy video that starred unicorns and the Dawson, Ke$ha had a relatively quiet 2011 (or at least in comparison to the year prior, when “Tik Tok” and “Your Love Is My Drug” dominated all charts all the time). Such will not be the case in 2012, as you will have more Ke$ha than you ever knew what to do with.
As noted in EW’s 2012 Forecast issue, Ke$ha is hard at work on a new album, which she promises will focus on more of a rock sound and offer up more “vulnerability” than her previous party-focused work. That should hit some time in the second half of the year, though you won’t have to wait that long to hear her. She has already contributed to the just-released charity tribute album Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan, where she turned in a surprisingly sturdy, stripped-down version of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” As Melissa Maerz noted in her review of the album, “Ke$ha gets the song’s heartbreak right; you can actually hear her sobbing between verses. If there’s ever a reason to believe the girl’s capable of deeper feelings than ‘vaguely hungover,’ this is it.”
You know who else recognizes Ke$ha’s many layers? READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Alexandro Auler/Getty Images
In the next issue of Entertainment Weekly, the writers of the music section will be calling out a notoriously awful and ill-advised cover as one of the worst songs of the year (no spoilers here; you’ll have to read our Best & Worst of 2011 issue to find out what it is).
Covers can deadly, especially when the recording involves a pop star taking on a revered piece of rock history. But leave it up to eternal curveball Ke$ha to make us eat our words.
Amnesty International is celebrating its 50th birthday with a compilation called Chimes of Freedom, a four-disc affair that features a whopping 76 covers of Bob Dylan songs. The entirety of the compilation is currently streaming for free on the organization’s Facebook page, with the proper album hitting stores on January 24.
The lineup is all over the place, with a handful of the usual suspects (Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, Tom Morello, Pete Seeger) and some more unusual choices (Adele, Jack’s Mannequin, Airborn Toxic Event, Bad Religion). But the real head-turners are the people from the pure pop universe, including Miley Cyrus, Maroon 5, Darren Criss, and Ke$ha.
The twist is that Ke$ha’s cover of Dylan’s venerable talking blues “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” is actually pretty good. She slows it way, way down and turns it into a slow-burning and devastating torch song, shifting the tone away from Dylan’s flippant indignation into incredible sadness. Give it a listen below. READ FULL STORY »
A rabble-rouser on Buzzfeed got thousands of people outraged today with this list of 12 Extremely Disappointing Facts About Popular Music. The one below struck me as the most visually disturbing. Why didn’t Photoshop melt down as a drunk and disorderly Muppets extra was placed next to The Beatles? Does the answer lie in the space between Ke$sha’s boobs? So many questions.
I’ve come up with a way to cope, though: Imagine that all of the Beatles are facially reacting to the horror show at their right. Ringo is being so polite and cautious about it, probably because he’s the closest to the danger. John is willfully oblivious, while Paul looks just slightly more dead inside than Ke$ha. George wins this stinkface competition by a long and winding mile. (I feel like he’d also take the most convincing Facebook self-portraits in iPhoto. I hate myself!)
See? It’s easy if you try. Feel better now? [Buzzfeed]
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Image Credit: AP Images
Adele, Miley Cyrus, Darren Criss, Dave Matthews Band, Maroon 5, Elvis Costello, Pete Seeger, Tom Morello, and Ke$ha are among the acts who have contributed new or previously unreleased tracks to the album Chimes of Freedom which pays tribute to both Bob Dylan and Amnesty International.
Adele has gifted Chimes of Freedom a live version of “Make You Feel My Love” and Cyrus sings “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” while folk legend Seeger performs “Forever Young.”
But they’re hardly the only ones on this massive four-disc outing. Find the just-released full tracklisting after the jump:
Britney Spears is suddenly a player in the remix game, first dropping in on Rihanna’s “S&M” (which instantly sent that song back to the top of the Billboard Hot 100) and now hosting both Ke$ha and Nicki Minaj on a reworked version of “Till The World Ends.”
Spears premiered the song at her own site and tweeted the single’s cover art. You can listen to their three-way take here.
Image Credit: Rob Grabowski/Retna Ltd
A line of showgoers—most of them teenagers, and collectively wearing approximately one metric ton of glitter—furled down three city blocks in Midtown Manhattan last night to see Ke$ha perform at the Roseland Ballroom.
The crowd was about what one would expect from a Ke$ha concert: Boys wearing mesh tank tops, girls sprinkling glitter on each other’s bare legs, some put-upon parents who’d rather be anywhere else, some Cool Moms who were all too happy to chaperone, and 20-somethings like myself who were pretending to be there for ironic purposes but were actually pretty stoked.
I was surprised, though, by how unexpectedly awesome the show was. Judging from some less-than-stellar TV performances, my expectations were low, but for what it’s worth, Ke$ha sounded at least as good live as she does on her recorded tracks. And as far as onstage antics go, she packed infinitely more entertainment value and energy into the show by way of pure, unabashed silliness than Britney Spears did in her much more expensive and lavish Circus tour.
I left the concert with an understanding and appreciation for Ke$ha that I hadn’t had before—and having to pick glitter out of my hair for the next three weeks is a small price to pay for enlightenment. READ FULL STORY »
Peruse YouTube and you shouldn’t have a problem finding acoustic covers of clubby, synth-heavy dance hits. And sometimes, when the planets align, we’ll see a mainstream artist have a go themselves, like Chris Daughtry did with Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” This time, Avril Lavigne and her sparkly microphone take a mellower approach to Ke$ha’s pervasive 2010 single, “TiK ToK.”
Check out the video after the jump:
