But seriously? You think “Tik Tok” is objectively better than any Lennon/McCartney song? Maybe it’s just me. I find Ke$ha amusing in a club context and I love dancing to it, but it’s not exactly the kind of stuff I want to hear on my iPod or stereo at home. I mean, I’d vote “Norwegian Wood,” “Lady Madonna,” “Girl,” “Michele” …hell, almost any Beatles song over a lot of pop hits, and they’re not even my favorite band of all time! (Long ago, I determined that pursuit to be futile; it changed too much and picking a Top 5 records for a college station’s web site became an exercise in frustration.)
I’m not gonna delve too deep into a “timelessness” argument, but doesn’t it feel dated in a bad way to declare that you wake up feeling like Diddy?
I’ll go back and crawl into my hermit shell now.
Well, Nate had the correct response to my glib reductivism, but apart from that: I don’t think anything in music is objectively better than anything else. As far as whether “Tik Tok” is subjectively better than any Lennon/McCartney song (which is a much better question, because there, the subject is the listener, and when I consider music, the listener is usually me), here’s my Top 10 Beatles songs. Ignoring the futility of comparing such wildly disparate kinds of music for the purpose of establishing either as superior: I reckon “Tik Tok” is roughly as enjoyable as numbers one or two on that list. (“Instant Karma” and “Eleanor Rigby” respectively, and no, number one is not even a Beatles song.)
The Diddy line might end up dated, but does that matter? Sean Combs has been a massive figure in pop culture for at least 15 years, so any dating isn’t particularly precise, and, my epiphany the other day aside, the line’s beauty is that it means almost nothing. How does Diddy wake up? But, more to the point, I don’t think cultural specificity is a bad thing, even if it does contextualize a song more precisely. I don’t think “Fuck the Police” is “dated” by Ice Cube bragging about his pager, except that it dates it to a time when pagers were impressive gadgets. As any creative work that’s ever mentioned a pay phone has proven, being timeless is a futile aim. I’m not persuaded it’s a laudable one.
(tl;dr: I’m far more committed to the idea that Ke$ha can be better than the Beatles than I am to the idea that she is.)
(Source: katherinestasaph)
