What, don’t tell me she’s got another leaked track after this already…

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[6.50]

Mallory O’Donnell: Surprisingly, Kesha sounds just as terrible when she steps away from oblivious self-parody. Perhaps because her idea of an upgrade is Katy Perry.
[1]

Michelle Myers: Who knew that drinking and driving could be so boring? This song sounds like it should be about drinking Smart Water while reading the new Ikea catalog, not throwing down shots while cruising LA. Next time, give us a beat we can dance to and call a damn cab.
[2]

Anthony Easton: Makes me nostalgic for the genius of “Party at a Rich Dude’s House” — undergrad power drinking does not need a soundtrack.
[3]

Jake Cleland: “I buy a bottle of the finest Scotch there ever was.” Suspension of disbelief can only be stretched so thin. It’s quite a sweet ode to the people who you’d want around you come doomsday, though it still falls way short of her best and most underrated track, “Stephen.” I have a thing for sentimental Ke$ha, apparently.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: The title is archetypical Ke$ha, but the tone is uncharacteristically demure. The song has the sad wistfulness of a daydream that will never come true, and that begins even with the introduction: “We’re cruising tonight, we got the roof back/Mulholland Drive” sounds fantastical in context. So this is all shit-talking: What if it all ends right here right now? There’s an unmistakable melancholy intrinsic in the idea that the euphoria of the chorus can only be realized as apocalyptic destruction. Only if after this comes nothing can now be everything, so Ke$ha parks herself at the hilltop and waits for the credits to roll.
[7]

Michaela Drapes: Even though I am far too old and hard to know better, Ke$ha always nearly convinces me that getting wasted and having the best night ever is totally the best idea ever. The best bit of this has to be the sequencer run that sounds like the intro to an educational film from the party dimension. Perhaps she’s up on Mulholland Drive educating Kenny Chesney and Grace Potter on how to do shots … responsibly.
[7]

Alfred Soto: I’m a sucker for songs about how awesome the night looks after a few drinks, and Ke$ha’s the right performer to maneuver between the transcendence evoked by swirly synths and the sudden key shift her talk-singing employs on key verses; she’s watching shooting stars and getting all romantic while never taking her eyes off that bottle of scotch. Between this and “Til The World Ends,” the song she wrote for Britney, Ke$ha’s been nailing the euphoria-through-cacophony mastered by New Order’s “True Faith.” I do wish she’d sung “more Hall & Oates” instead of “Mulholland Drive” though.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: There’s enough continuity to mark “Shots” as a Ke$ha song — she’s sworn she’s been and done things to the Hollywood sign, she references darker singles “Blow” and “Take It Off” and the title’s soaked in booze — but that and the tags are your only indication. Her synths are glossy, not jerry-rigged; they even soar like “Teenage Dream.” Ke$ha’s using autotune as God, not Cher intended: not to quantize teeth into her voice or affect a sound that’d fail a Turing test, but to sound nicer. For most of “Shots,” she resembles either Keri Hilson’s anodyne pretty-girl naught or designated opposite Taylor Swift in her swoonier moments. Her normal voice does brat about a few stickier words and phrases like “Scotch,” “sickest friends” and a hacky “asphalt,” but they’re few and subdued. When she sings about shots, you doubt she’ll even be tipsy before oblivion, let alone smashed. Ke$ha’s already spurred pop to be fearful, cheerful and Gleeful about the apocalypse; it figures she’d now be the one to make it sound relaxing.
[7]

Zach Lyon: You aren’t pop in 2011 unless you chart with a low-self-esteem vaccination AND an apocalypse celebration, so it’s about time Ke$ha releases the latter as a single. And it’s not surprising to me that her entry into that canon is unlike the rest, with its solemn contemplation, or at least the admission that death still might be sort of sad, guys. It actually considers the apocalypse itself rather than using it as a pickup line or an excuse. So I’m enthusiastic about “Shots” on that symbolic level, because of course Ke$ha would do this instead of that and I just need her to keep on with her subtle destructions of pop’s microtrends. But the music doesn’t match the emotion at all, until, fittingly, the few bars of rap that sound vulnerable in their clarity and the vocal robo-breakdown in her voice — she sounds most human here. I’m alright with scrubbing away the friction that defines her bangers, but this deserves better production and some tightening up.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: No wonder she gave “Till the World Ends” to Britney, whose monolithic stature gave its explosiveness the necessary gravitas; Ke$ha’s own shaggy mythology requires something a little more low-key for the apocalypse.
[8]

Dan Weiss: Except for Brad Paisley or maybe Nicki Minaj, she’s the most melodic pop star in the world; loves her ah-ahs, heys and laser-precise harmonies. This doesn’t kick like “We R Who We R,” but it isn’t for the party, or even the afterparty. It’s for the after-afterparty she describes, not just doing said shots on said car, but sitting on the hood at 5 a.m. with your BFF of choice and comparing last call to the end of the world. You genuinely believe her when she raps “not for the money, not for the fame.” She says “stars” a lot and has that dollar sign in her name, but they’re only signifiers of her specialty: using modest means to craft the perfect party, which is usually at someone else’s house (preferably a rich dude), because cleaning up vomit isn’t in the cards. Get it right, haters (and she has plenty): not all shallow people need your money to fuel their hedonism.
[8]

Brad Shoup: I suspect the word “amoral” gets tossed around when discussing Ke$ha because critics really want to say “immoral,” but what’s lamer than detailing your ethical code? And has Ke$ha really committed any crimes greater than ducking the doorman? One more question: how am I supposed to dislike a burbling synthpop track that takes two separate breaks to consider the apocalypse? Here again are the details: the light martial undertones, the stirring “hey”s, the vocal fuckery that indicates that she takes not even this seriously. I further suspect that we had it half-right re: Lady Gaga. She may be the heir to the High Madonna era, but Ke$ha’s a worthy incarnation of Club Kid Madonna, erasing the rules one bubbly track at a time. She got one thing wrong, though: last call is the very definition of going out with a whimper. Of all people, you’d think she’d know better.
[9]

Alex Ostroff: Is a Ke$ha song that sparkles and glows so shiny and pretty still a Ke$ha song? Can it be any good? Cannibal so expertly distilled the sleaze, glitter and vomit that spattered Animal that it was easy to forget that there was more to Ke$ha than a gloriously trashy, dizzy dance commander. Nonetheless, the best clue to “Shots On The Hood Of My Car” and “Whither next, Ke$ha?” is the gently apocalyptic title track that closed out both her previous releases. After the party is over, but before she wakes up in your bathtub, front lawn or closet, Ke$ha looks out with wonder over what she has wrought — people letting their inside animals out just for tonight, dancing the last dance like it’s the end of time. (Remember, she penned Britney’s latest world-ender.) It’s her MO. If every night is the end of everything, drink until last call, until it feels like it; fuck like you mean it; party like it’s your last chance; and abandon your shame, because you won’t need it where you’re going. “Shots On The Hood Of My Car” is confusing at first, because we’ve heard this story from her a thousand times before, streaked with grime and detuned vocal processing. The Animal/Cannibal party was visceral, and the desperation and spirituality remained implicit until the DJ stopped blowing our speakers up. Here, Ke$ha looks back through the haze and spells it out for us, laying bare the ephemerality that drives her. We go down like shooting stars — bright and hot, but quickly gone. Most nights Ke$ha sees the sun rise, but parties through “the nighttime while the world’s still ours.” By the time she wakes up, the world isn’t hers anymore — not until the next evening. For now, she’s stuck in a world where shots on the hood of your car no longer code as living in the moment, but as irresponsible and immature. She’s told us all of this before; “Tik Tok” made it clear that the DJ built her up and broke her down. It’s the reason she needs to party hard, but also the only reason she can party as hard as she does. The party don’t start till she walks in, but her heart beats with the music. She pleads, “Don’t Stop!” because once the party’s over, Ke$ha is too.
[9]

Josh Langhoff: This starts as standard-issue, if pretty, transgre$$ion — K goes joyriding with her friends and jumps the fence to the Hollywood sign, just like when she snuck into the Stones concert with Harold. Only this time — what else? — she’s consumed with a vision of Garveyite apocalypse. She’s 10 miles (or wherever) from the city, watching (Hollywood) Babylon burn, just like Louie Culture and Capleton and U-Roy before her, only with no hint of judgment; she’ll be blown into oblivion with everybody else. All the burbling polyphonic euphoria at the end sounds so communitarian, it’s easy to forget all those suffocating suckers downtown who aren’t blessed with friends and Scotch. But that’s OK — this is the apocalypse from inside the Scotch-haze, and as such, it chokes me up. And here’s the other me-choker: How long can she keep this up? Where “this” equals “exploring wildly different facets and implications of a coherent persona”? I suppose the end-times imagery might be a portent that she’s running out of ideas, because where can you go from there, but at this point point I’m holding my breath with every new Ke$ha song, and “Shots” makes it feel really good to exhale.
[10]