The We in “We R Who We R” allows people to identify with a new norm: glitter, identified with a femme agency that reaches the point of excess. This excess is demonstrated in Ke$ha’s frequent use of huge glitter guns and cannons that she rides (which are remarkably phallic in their shape, size and ejaculations), as well as the video for “Take if Off” which shows dancers exploding into glitter (“Ke$ha’s Confetti Cannon). The We that is instantiated through Ke$ha’s address is continually reinforced by the collectivity on which the song focuses: If you’re one of us, then roll with us/ I’ve got that glitter on my eyes/ Stockings ripped all up the side/ Looking sick and sexyfied/ … Tonight we’re going har har-har ha-ha-hard/ Just like the world is our our-our our-our-ours/ We’re tearin’ it apart part-part pa-pa-part/ You know we’re superstars, We R Who We R! This collectivity is also repeated in songs such as “Sleazy,” in which she states “I don’t wanna go places where all my ladies can’t get in.” In “Raise Your Glass If U R A Firework Who Was Born This Way” Lauren Elmore points to the collectivity expressed in Ke$ha’s music videos in which she dances in crowds, not above them, saying “‘Dumb’ as it is, Ke$ha’s indiscriminate will to party can subsume any listener in an escape to the embodied, seemingly endless present of sweating together on the dance floor.” While the drive towards collectivity and solidarity may be the content of Ke$ha’s work, her participation in the financial structures of the music industry, such as her contract with a major record label, which has made her incredibly wealthy, render these gestures (at best) a slight modulation from the norm, or a masking of her participation in norms of hierarchical economic systems, not an opposition to them.

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