Release Date: Nov 22, 2010
Genre(s): Pop, Electronic, Rap, R&B, Pop/Rock, Dance-Pop
Record label: RCA
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Lest fans worry that current self-acceptance smash ”We R Who We R” has turned her soft, Cannibal, the swift follow-up to her massive debut, Animal, is no retreat. Her herky-jerky rhymes still sound like they came from the bathroom wall of a reform-school kindergarten, and the beats are as el cheapo electro as ever. Indeed, when she starts rhyming ”famous” with a back-end body part (on the title track) and mocking a sensitive dude?s ”mangina” (on the taunting ”Grow a Pear”), Cannibal does have a sulfurous end-of-days whiff about it.
Taking a cue from Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster, Kesha's Cannibal is a mini-LP released on its own and also tacked onto her debut Animal, which has been squeezed dry of hits. Cannibal is expressly designed to rectify that situation, amplifying every annoying element of Kesha’s persona -- the sing-song hooks, the relentless Dr. Luke loops, the squeaked sleazy rhymes, the defiantly transparent Auto-Tune slathered on every track, the cheerful bragging about the dingy film left behind after hookups with douche bags.
The killjoys who dismissed Ke$ha’s debut Animal as one-dimensional party-girl trash will make hay with her new EP Cannibal, assuming they’re still paying attention. Over the course of eight new songs—in the ‘80s, this would’ve been called an “album”—Ke$ha details the precise order in which she’ll devour an unfortunate male’s body parts, at one point comparing herself to Jeffrey Dahmer. (Too soon!) She threatens, “You don’t wanna mess with us / Got Jesus on my neck-a-lace,” a glittery Crusader.
When I read the jokey title of “Grow a Pear,” one of the songs on Ke$ha's new EP, Cannibal, I laughed out loud—and then instantly felt like a hypocrite. After all, I'd admonished Katy Perry for similar swipes at would-be suitors' masculinity. Then, after hearing the song's utterly ridiculous lyrics, I realized the difference: Perry sheepishly, some might say cynically, skirts outright offensiveness by thinly veiling her homophobia and misogyny in more palatable, PG-rated portions, serving them with a vapid pout and her tits pushed up to her chin.
In the most widely quoted lyric from her Cannibal EP, Ke$ha name-checks serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. (Meanwhile, rappers have been shouting him out for years.) The nü-electroclash pop-rapper with 'tude must be thanking her lucky glitter that the press has picked this up as a talking point; there's little else to say about her new release. It's nine new songs her label can tack onto her first album, Animal, to get double-dip action right around the time Santa goes Christmas shopping for the world.
And continuing with the “Hey, it’s the holidays, here’s a half-baked album, now give us your money, sucker” theme for this week’s new releases, we have the latest EP from America’s glitter-barf princess, Ke$ha. Oh joy! Odds are you’ve already formed an opinion about the Nashville-raised dance-pop hit-maker -– she tends be pretty polarizing what with her whole blacked-out-Barbie-doll aesthetic -– but you can’t argue with the fact that she is the Dylan of college girls having drunken, unprotected sex with absolute strangers. Yes, all of her songs tend to be about wanton sexuality, drugs, alcohol, and reveling in the tacky end of the cultural swimming pool, but ya know, there’s something truly poetic in a line like “I just can’t date a dude with a vag” from “Grow A Pear”.
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