I bought the new Kesha album

Keeping the "high note" an octave or two lower when covering the song or singing it live is smart, and it still sounds pretty good:



My favorite Ke$ha performance is probably this one, where the audience didn't react as expected to the American flag cape and she keeps going with the performance and actually kind of recovers some energy from the room.  As much as you can recover during a song about being out all night partying with astronauts as your back-up dancers.  A lot of people hypothesize that this is evidence of a record company making an artist be weird on purpose, trying to imitate Lady Gaga.  But I think the weirdness may actually be Kesha's thing, and it's the partying in the club persona that was put on for fame.  *Deep thoughts.*



Either way, I like her new album's weirdness with songs like this one:

Politics

This article came out shortly before 9/11, and I kept a paper copy of it around because it seemed ironic that soon after it was written we were in land wars in Asia.  To be fair, the point was not that we would never wage war in literally the part of the world affected by the Medieval crusades*, but that American politics proceeds peacefully within the country, which was and is still true.  This article makes me nostalgic for a time when politics did really seem low stakes, while also reminding me to be grateful that things are not much, much worse.  

Politics seems to get more and more divisive, but this video also helps to remind me of what's really important.  (There's lots of cussing.)





*Well, technically a little further east.  Or a lot further east, if you consider hundreds or thousands of miles to be "a lot."