Music review – Kay: My Name is Kay EP

My Name is Kay EP
Kay
Dumptruck Unicorn/Universal

Imagine every female pop star you have ever been exposed to. And now extract everything that you ever hated or found just uninspiring about them. Mash that together in an industrial blender, sprinkle in some “attitude,” and you have Kay.

The My Name is Kay EP – the result of some ill-begotten marriage of Katy Perry, Gwen Stefani, and Nicki Minaj – is such a mess from start to finish that it makes Madonna’s “Give Me All Your Luvin’” look like a Pulitzer Prize winner. The Canadian singer’s debut has all of horribly heterosexist lyrics of Katy Perry’s music, has borrowed some of Nicki Minaj’s most uninspired raps, thrown in some Sweet Escape-era Gwen Stefani and the Ting Tings, and then has let it all ferment in one horribly infected womb of bubblegum and Lana Del Ray-esque style.

The whole album is baffling to me: the title track is just an update of the Ting Tings’ Toni Basil update, “That’s Not My Name.” “M.A.J.O.R.” is obviously trying to be M.I.A.’s “U.R.A.Q.T.” And “Going Diamond” sounds like Stefani’s “Cool.” While on another record this pulling from various sources might mean something, My Name is Kay manages to strip what little emotional gravitas these songs had, leaving an uninspired mess of drum machine beats and sing-rapping. Lines like “Let’s get crazy, yo / Let the rhymes and the drinks flow” seem like something Rebecca Black would attempt a decade from now, just after getting out of rehab.

It’s messy, it’s bland, and it’s offensive in its inoffensiveness. Its only redeeming factor is that it’s not a Lindsay Lohan album.

Jonathan Petrychyn
A&C Editor