Children are fair game for the Sleaze Divas. What's a Sleaze Diva, you may ask? See the Sleaze Nation, I've Got to Boogy clip, coming soon to this site. You can post your own definition of a Sleaze Diva here [hint, they're not babysitters], or maybe you don't think today's Divas are sleazy, let us know.
The Sleazy Diva catching our attention at the start of the new decade is Ke$ha, a coulda-been Barnard College student (on a scholarship, even), at least that's what the magazine profiling her said. She was interviewed recently by the magazine, Entertainment Weekly (1-29-10). And she talked about young girls being fans of her music (and Ke$ha the entertainer herself, we assume, maybe she'll elaborate if she interviews with us). The Entertainment Weekly writer wrote, "Not surprisingly, she's gotten some grief over her liquor-fueled lyrics, especially since many of her fans are years from the legal drinking age. [Ke$ha:] 'I have to think about that when I see the little girls who are buying my records. But I'm not a babysitter. It's their parents' responsibility to take care of them. I'm not saying that every girl should brush their teeth with Jack Daniels,' she says, referencing a line in TiK ToK. 'I hope my record is saying that you can be confident and sexy and you don't have to wear a push-up bra and look like a whore and spend seven grand on a bag.'"
She's wants little girls to be confident and sexy. We'll run that by her or her handlers for clarification.
Yes, we think she's Sleazy with a capital $ (who, we wonder, came up with the idea for divas and other entertainment celebrties to define themselves by the raw greed of making lots of money through being Sleazy?) This is a particularly disturbing form of Sleaze because it's targeted to children and the purveyors (the Sleaze Diva herself and those who made her one) know it's messing with children, influencing them in a way that can damage them, kill them of course, unless you feel hard drinking is not harmful to children or anyone else, can be controlled--maybe you feel it's a good release for a stressful people in a hyper-competitive country?
Ke$ha's one in a long line of Sleazy Divas, going back decades, starting with, for our purposes here of trying to understand how American popular entertainment became so, yes, Sleazy--and Coarse and Vulgar and Misogynistic and Obscenely Violent--KeSha's lineage for our discussion goes back to the the Queen of the Crotch Grab, the eternally sexy pre-geezer who still draws millions in global concert tours, none other than Madonna herself. (Her crotch grabbing didn't actually surface until maybe four or five years after she burst upon the scene in 1980? T, can you research that one for us?)
We'll end this first Sleaze Nation blog by inviting everyone to join the dialogue as we set out to interview the Sleaze Divas (assuming we can get any of them to sit down and talk with us), their handlers, the people behind their record/management/concert deals, their fans, of course, some parents of girls listening to the let's-get-drunk lyrics...Sleaze Nation continues to ask the question: How did Sleaze become embedded into the fabric of America's culture via our ubiquitous pop entertainment?
We look forward to your comments and thank you for your patience as we start work on I've Got to Boogy with the clip expected to be ready for viewing by the end of this summer..
Best, X Cronin
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