All parents seem to have one popular musician who they really love, inexplicably yet completely.
I had a friend whose mom’s iPod had one song on it: “Where is the Love,” by the Black Eyed Peas. My mom loves the band Train — specifically, their 2009 song, “Hey, Soul Sister” — with a ferocity that is at once unsettling and sort of touching.
Most confusingly, my dad, a criminal defense attorney and father of four, has always loved Kesha. He heard somewhere that she had a “genius IQ,” and never failed to remind me thereafter of her intelligence whenever one of her songs came on the radio. (As far as I can tell, this fact has no credible support, although she did score a “near-perfect” SAT.)
It always made me laugh — my dad, very serious and very smart, asking me if I knew that Kesha was “a genius,” as Kesha sang in the background about kicking boys to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger.
Personally, I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with Kesha’s music. By that, I mean that I hated myself for loving her early music. “Cannibal,” the EP version of her first album, “Animal,” came out when I was in 8th grade. The degree to which I loved that album made me question, even at 13, myself and my music taste.
Why, I would ask myself, was I listening so often to a song called “Grow a Pear”?
Why did I know all the words to “Cannibal,” including the classic line, “Be too sweet, and you’ll be a goner/Yup, I’ll pull a Jeffrey Dahmer"?
Something about her dark lyrics and aggressively catchy beats sucked me in, though.
Even “The Harold Song,” her strange early attempt at a slow, emotional song, got a decent amount of play on my iPod Touch. To summarize: I was, however reluctantly and apologetically, an early Kesha fan.