In all honesty, how does one “Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy?” To what extent can a 22-year-old Californian suburbanite empathize with Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, a 40-year-old record executive worth the GNP of a half-dozen countries, who grew up in the Harlem projects pushing drugs? What does feeling like P. Diddy entail? Ke$ha opts not to answer, only asserting, “Grab my glasses. I’m out the door. I’m gonna hit the city.” She’s a go-getter. But then she does something only a pop starlet can do — “Before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack.” What does that achieve? Certainly nothing hygienic, and seemingly no other biological goal. Unless we’re missing something brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack Daniels only gives her the opportunity to brag about brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack Daniels. But who cares, “because when I leave for the night I ain’t coming back.” Wouldn’t you want to rest at home for a while until you figured out why you felt like a ’90s hip-hop sensation? You just scrubbed your teeth with whiskey, wouldn’t you want to think for a moment before you decided to flee town for good? Who holds the answer to such contradictions?
The overwhelming majority of the American public, apparently. For the sixth week in a row, emerging trash-pop firecracker Ke$ha’s single, “TiK ToK,” has hailed atop the Billboard charts as the most popular song in America. It’s a song about, among other things, getting pedicures (on your toes), law enforcement, and men who resemble Mick Jagger. Since Halloween, this synth-soaked party jam has buzzed incessantly through the airwaves and sold millions of digital downloads. Most of the people in the country either leave the whirlwind lyrics unquestioned or they automatically understand the answers.
So if everyone embraces and comprehends Ke$ha’s inane logic, there’s no use digging into it. What remains then, is how such rationale captured the zeitgeist of 2010. How did “TiK ToK” come to channel the heart of the nation? What caused lines like, “Ain’t got a care in the world / But got plenty of beer,” to mark the anthem of the new decade, allegedly the most literate, technologically advanced, and accelerated time of human history so far? The technology itself.
Since Ned Ludd and his cronies set flame to mechanized looms in 1811, humanity has cast roughly just as many arguments against technology as it has in its support for Thoreau’s Walden, William Wordsworth, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of The American Mind, The Joy of Painting, and so on. But thanks to the cotton gin, N.A.S.A., the Push Pop, griddles, the Internet, iTunes, the Kindle, and Stephen Hawking, history has ultimately sided with technology. History has rendered the Luddite into a lowly and laughable oaf of society, residing in the realm of NASCAR fanatics and World of Warcraft drones. Most schools will teach multiple arguments against technology, and most people will even agree with their rationales, but only an unregistered fraction do anything about it. Since the Luddite movement, critics have said that technology belittles God or society as a whole or in our minds. But there are also more subtle things at stake. As seen in the otherwise inexplicable rise of Ke$ha, technology withers art.
In 2000, when N’Sync released No Strings Attached, the public bought 2.4 million copies of the CD in the first week. In one week in June last year, the combined sales of every album in the Billboard Top 200 totaled less than 2.4 million. In a decade, the music industry flattened from an all-time high to a record low. Who can we blame? iTunes (along with Napster, Kazaa, Pitchfork, YouTube, and all that follows). Just as the record industry crumbled, digital companies began erecting an empire that seemed to invade a new country each week. For the majority of the decade, iTunes and iPod sales rose on exponential curves. Still, according to a 2008 Reuters report, 95 percent of digital downloads (over 40 billion files) are gained illegally. So, on a base level, the advancement of technology in music has cheapened the patron of music. Thanks to digital media, many listeners no longer support artists. They support themselves by stealing music for free.
But on a medium as expansive and easy as the Internet, that’s inevitable. And as immoral as pirating music is, if it weren’t for its availability, dozens of struggling bands would never alight on the radar. Without free downloads, artists like Vampire Weekend, Band of Horses, Fall Out Boy, and Justin Bieber would remain in their hometowns striving to scrape by. The digital onslaught has expanded our tastes, at least.
But beyond the cheapening of the listener, digital music has cheapened the listening experience. Mp3’s compress sound into the smallest format possible, shrinking the range of highs and lows and zapping certain sounds altogether. When you buy Kanye West’s Graduation in the convenience of your living room on iTunes, you sacrifice hearing the skeleton-shaking bass on tracks like “Stronger” and “The Good Life.” When you download the songs of American Idol contestants or the Glee soundtrack, the quivering vibrato and the soul-stirring high notes become lost in translation. Even on Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK,” the crisp fuzz of the synthesizer cannot fit into the compact file. On digital downloads, all the work the artist and the producer spent on illuminating their music dims. All the creative spirit and will artists take to make their work distinguished and awe-inspiring gets tarnished on digital transfer. All music enters an equal and limited wall of sound. iTunes is communist.
Filmmakers have been shooting in digital for years, but now technology has seeped into the film’s engine: the projector. Watching 3D movies used to be a pastime of this generation, recalling elementary school trips to IMAX and Omni theaters to watch National Geographic flicks. Today the 3D projector has produced the best selling motion picture of all time, Avatar. And the Na’vi are just the frontrunners in an impending stampede of 3D movies. In the next two years the film industry will release an onslaught of sequels in 3D: Friday the 13th, Jackass 3, Ghostbusters III, Tron, and even Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 3D is novel and exciting (in the way that Pop Rocks are novel and exciting), but it’s a tried and true trick. When producers begin rendering classics into pop-up versions of themselves, they damage the films themselves, the original films they’re remaking, and they insult the art form as a whole.
And now, for the first time since Johannes Guttenberg pressed a Bible, technology has finally clenched its bulging hands around the throat of books. Just two weeks ago The Heights published an article praising the merits of the Kindle. Digital readers are pretty awe-inspiring; a library of books stuffed into a plastic-lined, quarter-inch thick frame — it’s an environmentalist’s dream. But as eco-friendly, mobile, and seductive as these eReaders are, their capabilities deride the reading experience. On top of the catalog capacities, most eReaders include the Internet. With a book, the reader’s only stimulus is the written word. But with the e-Reader, infinite stimuli blare out for a moment’s attention. The promotional video for Apple’s new iPad even features a user surfing Facebook. It’s as if the makers of the eReader want you to do things other than read.
Joyce Carol Oates once said, “The effort of art is to slow the rapid motion, to bring it to a halt so that it can be seen, known.” In our intoxicatingly accelerated culture, much of art does the exact opposite: digital music and 3D movies and eReaders only make life more rapid.
Between pixilated aliens encompassing us, stolen music flooding us, and a free-for-all bloodbath of stimuli competing for a moment’s attention (and all of it stored in our pockets), we begin to feel a little bit like P. Diddy. But maybe Ke$ha herself can help us out. In an interview with Rolling Stone in February 2010, Ke$ha said, “Society had taught us to suppress certain things, but if I want to do something, I let the animal inside take over. Who cares? Crazy people are what keeps life interesting.” What Kesha Sebert means by crazy people, by animal insides, is returning to nature. And that includes enjoying art in their original forms. Let’s heed Ke$ha’s advice, so that she may never have a single again.
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