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THE DROP – Sky Ferreira has an "Obsession" with pop stardom.

7 Oct
Ke$ha feels entirely inauthentic as a hipster pop idol. Her glitter draped electro rave pop is a terrifically forced act that due to the studio magic of Dr. Luke and Max Martin is palatable to the mainstream. Ke$ha’s G rated fembot pop interpretation on Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls is insipid and stupid, two key phrases that inspire a great preponderance of mainstream pop concepts in 2010. Whereas something like Waka Flocka going “Hard in the Paint” is inoffensive club rap, there’s something very annoying about Ke$ha completely jacking the style of Amanda Blank and the vapid, yet fun wannabe outsider status of Uffie and riding it to the top.
If you want a response to this travesty, I wouldn’t go back and watch the video for Blank’s “I Might Like You Better (If We Slept Together)” and Uffie’s “Pop the Glock” and cry. However, I would advocate looking forward and taking some time to acquaint yourself with US born Brit star Sky Ferreira. We’ve discussed her on the site before as our own Chris Kelly covered the awesome pop melancholy of her indie chops. Her love of classic and cold down tempo ballads and punk bad girls informs the unrepentant pop of her latest “Obsession,” a perfect jam for teen girls who don’t see whoring and puking with dirty punk boys and DJs as the answer. These girls are content in thinking those dirty thoughts and writing poems about them in math class, making portraits of their ideal sex partners in art, spending the entirety of seventh period drawing the logo of The Runaways on the toe of their Chuck Taylors, and wishing that they could spend a weekend wandering around Greenwich Village trying to be as cool as Edie Sedgwick and possibly being swept away by that man of their dreams. All of that idyllic wanderlust gets filtered into the pen of pop genius and One Republic lead singer Ryan Tedder, who crafts exactly the single the winsome LA slacker with UK credibility needs to break through stateside.
This excellent Marc Klasfeld video clip is the harbinger of her January 2011 album release. Literally one year after Ke$ha’s beautiful disaster debut, pop finally gets the chance to get it right.

THE VERGE: Sky Ferreira

18 Aug


Meet LA’s dirty little secret, singer-songwriter Sky Ferreira. On her resume? Her singing made Michael Jackson tear up, she’s worked with Linda Perry and Dallas Austin, and she corresponds with ch-ch-ch-cherrybomb / ex-Runaway Cherie Currie. Oh, and she turned 18 last month.

The Los Angeles lolita has been making Internet waves for a few years now, and it looks like she’s finally catching up with the hype. Her grandmother was a hair dresser for the King of Pop, who encouraged her to develop her voice; she sang gospel and opera from an early age. At 15, she reached out to the producers behind Miike Snow (and Britney Spears’ “Toxic”), Swedish duo Bloodshy & Avant. With no money but a promise of being “better than Britney,” the producers agreed to work with her. One of their first collaborations is her single “One,” a slice of futurist, robotic pop. (The song was given the luvstep treatment by BAR9.)

Her closest comparison is to Lily Allen, as she precociously mixes innocent pop melodies with dark and dirty lyrics. Unlike her frenemy Katy Perry, though, this isn’t focus-group tested, “good girl gone bad” bullshit. There is an honesty and maturity absent from most of her stateside peers, with a better sense of pop and celebrity than UK counterparts like Ellie Goulding and Marina and the Diamonds.

Speaking of Marina, Ferreira’s “17” hits the mark better than Ms. Diamandis’ “Seventeen;” the video does Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” better and more realistically, as well. The chorus is very glam, and the verses reveal her lyrical talent, painting an accurate picture of teen girls living beyond their years: “We don’t know what to do with her / shes from a different world / and its apparent now this girl is hiding / something in the way she gives a confident excuse.”

While she was born in 1992 (!), she has a reverence for musical icons of the past. She names David Bowie, the Runaways, Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot among her influences, and her cover of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is superb (especially when mixed with “Still DRE” by Skeet Skeet).

For American pop stars, it seems as if the dialectic is between Ke$has and non-Ke$has, Gagas and non-Gagas. Sky Ferreira is proof that you can do both.