The Descendants #3 and #4: Ke$ha and Fleet Foxes DOUBLE FEATURE!!

The Premise: The first independent record labels were founded by and for first-wave punk bands and really took off when hardcore and post-punk came around in the following years. The 80′s were moving along nicely, and those maturing punk bands were soon identified as “college rock.” By the time the now-divisive abbreviation “indie” crept up in the early 90′s, the bands wearing the label were still plenty punk. As much as folks love to hate the term, “indie” just won’t seem to leave the discussion and is just as present today as it ever was. But does it still have anything to do with its punk roots?

Course not! But as a fun little exercise, I’ll be examining some of the latest, hottest “indie” jams to see if I can’t pick out which bits they might have inherited from their punk ancestors. Since it’s been some time since the last edition, I felt it was high time to do a Descendants DOUBLE FEATURE. First up is Ke$ha’s “Party at a Rich Dude’s House” (not indie, I know, but still fantastic), then we’ll move on to Fleet Foxes’ supercute  sing-along “White Winter Hymnal.” It only gets stupider from here!

Ke$ha – “Party at a Rich Dude’s House”

Okay, so obviously this is not an “indie” artist, but I feel like this song is awesome enough to justify breaking my own rules. Also, I refuse to spell her name without a dollar sign. It’s hilarious. Just roll with me here.

Basically, while working at a trucking brokerage all summer, I had to listen to Top 40 radio (er, Top 8 depending on the station) pretty much the whole time, and the only sources of relief from the standard electro/rap/pop trash heap was Ke$ha’s “Your Love is My Drug” and anything by Lady Gaga. Both of these artists fall within a recent development (resurgence?) in pop music I like to call “novelty personalities,” or the increasing emphasis on an artist’s offbeat personality (fabricated or not) as a major selling point. Some are more gimmicky than others, but the trend is pretty effective in helping these artists stand out against the many unknowable, indistinguishable singers one is subjected to while asking truckers to move undisclosed military materials from San Diego to Charleston.

Anyhoozits, this is the idea I had in my head while at a house party over the summer. Motherfucking “I Love College” was playing out of a practice bass amp, and I pretty much wanted to die, as I do whenever I hear first-wave novelty personality Asher Roth. Immediately after the song ended, someone made a move for the iPod Mini and cranked “Party at a Rich Dude’s House.” This was the first time I had heard the song, and its timing couldn’t have been better. “Hell yeah!” I thought. “Fuck you Asher Roth! It’s about time!” You see, while it’s highly unlikely this was planned by Ke$ha or anyone else, in that moment it became clear to me that she’s basically Asher Roth’s antithesis. He’s a slack motherfucker touting an obnoxiously privileged background, flaunting the trickle piss he’s taking on his higher education, and opting for the smooth stoner party jam shtick. She’s “young and broke,” unable to find her coat, and bloodthirsty for party nihilism/terrorism to the tune of violent electronic war drums. Sure, they both “don’t care,” but Ke$ha’s apathy wreaks havoc while Roth’s sits on a couch and does bong hits.

Right, so this column is supposed to be about punk or something. Again, while I’m sure these things aren’t planned or anything, this rise of the novelty personality in pop music opens up the possibility for artists to converse through song (since the standard substance-less pop idols aren’t able talk to each other if they aren’t saying anything in the first place). In my fantasy world, “Party at a Rich Dude’s House” was written in response to “I Love College.” As far as I’m concerned, these songs are about the same exact party, and Roth is that rich dude. While the music itself is as punk as you’ll get from a Top 40 pop album, what with the pummeling insistence of the percussion and that totally killer guitar riff (there’s even a touch of feedback at the end!), the real punk is Ke$ha herself. As she ruins furniture, begs drunk kids to undress, and pukes all over the place, I can’t help but think, “Yeah, fuck that guy! I can’t wait for that stoned jackass to wake up and find all the expensive shit his parents bought totally destroyed!” As we all know, the celebration of destruction and debauchery is one of the great pillars upon which punk rock was founded. Sure, Ke$ha is no Sid Vicious, but nothing flies in the face of today’s well-mannered boys and girls quite like her debut Animal. She fucking sings along to her own guitar riff in this song for chrissakes! How brilliantly punk rock is that? I’ll answer that question for you: very brilliantly punk rock.

Fleet Foxes – “White Winter Hymnal”

Golly this song is polite. Even the simile about some dude bleeding to death is goddamn adorable. Aren’t these guys labelmates with Pissed Jeans? Didn’t Sub Pop used to only release heavy shit? Oh! That reminds me of a funny quote from a Myspace post the lead Fleetman wrote. “Fleet Foxes will never, ever, under no circumstances, from now until the world chokes on gas fumes, sign to a major label. This includes all subsidiaries or permutations thereunder. Till we die.” PUNX AS FUCX.

Really though, there’s not much to work with here. There’s a pretty prominent acoustic guitar, so maybe this is, uh, folk punk? There’s some pretty cute vocal harmonies, kinda like, uh, Dillinger 4′s three singers. Right? The same few lines of lyrics keep getting repeated, sorta like how every verse in that one Wipers song goes, “It’s got to be up front/ Got to be so close to trust/ It’s got to be up front/ Got to be so close to touch.” God knows the first wave of Sub Pop bands stole all their ideas from those dudes; surely Fleet Foxes must have, too. No? I suppose the beginning reminds me a bit of the similarly a cappella intro to Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ song “No Action” (“I don’t want to kiss you I don’t want to touch”). ‘Cept the Attractions waste no time in going to town on their respective instruments, whereas these Fox dudes totally dawdle for a few more bars before the drums kick in.

Okay, let’s step back for a second. Structurally, this so-called hymnal starts pretty sparsely, more instruments gradually pile on, and finally the song seems to hit its stride and finishes off from there. Oh, and there are only a few lyrics that keep getting repeated. That’s pretty basic stuff; surely there’s a punk song that follows a similar template. OH BOY! OF COURSE! The Exploited! Fleet Foxes probably love the shit out of The Exploited! “Sex and Violence” basically starts as an a cappella tune, with only bits of floppy drum work accompanying the few whispered lyrics.  After a few more bars a rumbly bass peeks its head in, the same exact way that acoustic guitar creeps in in that Foxes tune, to goad The Exploited’s two singers (“harmonizers”) into raising their voices. Then, exactly like in “White Winter Hymnal,” the song gradually snaps into place, and by the midway point all musicians and instruments are present and accounted for. Oh, and did I mention that the same few lyrics keep getting repeated? “Sex/ and violence/ sex/ and violence/ sex and violence/ sex and violence.”

Case closed. Eat dirt.

-m

Stay tuned for The Descendants #5, in which I’ll get back to the electro-pop grindstone with MGMT’s “Kids.”