The Singles Jukebox

Annoying people on mass transit since 2009…

[Video][Website]
[5.42]

Josh Langhoff: Pablo Neruda, (former?) Ke$ha fan: “Cold flower heads are raining over my heart. / Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked… / You swallowed everything, like distance. / Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!… / You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire, / sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!… / How terrible and brief was my desire of you! / How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid… / It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour / which the night fastens to all the timetables… / Deserted like the wharves at dawn. / Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands… / Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything. / It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one.” (From “A Song of Despair.” Sigh.)
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: It began with a Flo Rida song; so it shall return to a Flo Rida song. Ke$ha is not special, probably never was; that cock-rock Iggy Pop fuckery nobody could shut up about for a year is evidently album filler, shelved or personal branding.
[3]

Zach Lyon: Given the huge delays this record has suffered, I guess it’s both surprising and not that Luke and Cirkut’s production sounds so uninspired; surprising because they had time on their side, not surprising because they probably finished it before even they began working on “Good Feeling.” I’m disappointed to learn that Cirkut, a pretty decent remixer before he entered the pop sphere, has essentially become Luke’s new Benny Blanco, and they’ve spent the past two years constructing fare so fluffy it’s hard to imagine a DJ talented enough to remix it into something hard or sexual. But I’ll have to file “Die Young” in the same folder as their “Domino,” “You Da One,” “Brokenhearted” and “Part of Me” — cruddy sonic jobs made easy to ignore thanks to an irresistible vocal melody. It’s still an obvious downgrade to relegate Ke$ha (and Rihanna, most days) to Karmin/Jessie J territory — or to go this long without actually mentioning K$’s performance — but I’m not one to value production over songwriting, and, hey, maybe that’s what Cirkut brings to the table. Lyrically it’s little, filled with some of the less obvious pratfalls that can break out on a sophomore record (she is so dearly in love with the heart-drum metaphor, isn’t she?) and the repetition of “we’re gonna die young” dips a toe into annoying waters. But hell if the Patrick Stumpiness of “Oh what a shame” isn’t worth it, along with her vocal vivaciousness which shows no sign of dulling.
[7]

Michelle Myers: The pre-chorus is straight from Patrick Stump’s pop-punk playbook but the verses recall the back half of Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, especially the way Ke$ha dulls her consonant sounds on phrases like “tearing it up.” Ke$ha’s matured as a songwriter — experimenting with more complex structures and a wider variety of sounds. The real treat rests with the lyric “we’re gonna die young.” At first, it is an innocent simile communicating how hard Ke$ha intends to party. But with each repetition it becomes darker, more fatalistic. By the last one, it feels like she’s inviting us to make a dancefloor suicide pact.
[8]

Anthony Easton: HANDCLAPS! That correspond to drums! Handclappy drumness as carpe diem theme, but with sexy times! Genius! (The verses are terrible, and the introduction is worse, but the chorus makes me so fucking happy, and is so fucking perfect, that I can forgive almost anything)
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: I have little doubt that it will grow on me. But for now, I entertain myself with the fact that the rolled marching-band drum figures on the chorus are a lot like those in “We Are Young,” which is the only inkling of Nate Ruess’ influence I can find.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The chorus is great, almost devotional. Everything else is genial, hanging the already-damp “die young” concept out to dry. I’m guessing Nate Ruess contributed the weird bit about the taken dude; he probably offered a vote of confidence on the young thing, too. I didn’t think “Good Feeling” was that great; same here.
[5]

Andy Hutchins: She’s back, and she and Dr. Luke are borrowing a little too much from “Good Feeling,” but Ke$ha does this party-in-the-face-of-a-world-in-flames “apopcalyptic” stuff better than anyone, and the delivery of “Look-in’ for some trouble tonight” is worth at least two points.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Squelching her personality beneath Dr. Luke/Taio Cruz–style butt-dance (analogous to butt-rock, not dancing for butts) shouldn’t work for an artist as singular as Ke$ha, but the generic qualities of “Die Young” are to her advantage. On a song that could have been written for anyone, her idiosyncrasies still worm their way to the surface: the hedonism, her slightly crass sexual aggression, and her conviction that the emancipatory qualities of the club aren’t just primal; they’re vital.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: When “TiK ToK” started attracting attention back in 2009, my friends and I would watch the video multiple times on lazy Friday nights despite not enjoying anything we were seeing or hearing.  We were pulled in by just how extravagant Ke$ha — or, more accurately, the character she plays in her music — was, what with her whiskey-assisted approach to dental hygiene and love of dudes who looked like Mick Jagger. The 32,000-plus dislikes accompanying “Tik Tok” hint that we weren’t the only ones drawn in by something we didn’t like, but that ability to polarize but still command attention is Ke$ha’s greatest strength.  Despite pop radio being flooded with songs about going to the club, she sounded like someone who never left, making her a new generation’s Andrew W.K. “Die Young” keeps the huge arms-in-the-air chorus that has marked her previous singles — and that itself guarantees this a decent score — but downplays Ke$ha’s personality.  If it weren’t for the post-pregame slither of her voice, these lyrics could be by any pop star. The closest the verses come to sounding like Ke$ha is a line about “that magic in your pants,” and even that sounds like a tween trying to sound edgy. “Die Young” tries to scrub away some of that dislike red, but just turns a confrontational-but-interesting artist into a middling one.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Until now Ke$ha’s believed in showing instead of telling us how to die young, and she didn’t need acoustic guitars either.
[3]

Will Adams: This is what we’ve been waiting for? More YOLO-pop with half-hearted promises of hedonism? Barring the disappointment of the expectation, this is still rather poor. The jumpy melody is ill-suited to Ke$ha’s abrasive yelps, the the breakdown-buildup template has little payoff, and the wide synth chords are oppressive rather than liberating. At this point, she’s more than acknowledged the limited time we have on earth. Now I’m waiting for her to say something else.
[4]