Kesha is “the devil in a dress” on her latest song, ‘What Baby Wants,’ a collaboration with classic rocker Alice Cooper, one of her favorite rock singers.
‘What Baby Wants’ features an outdated pop-rock sound reminiscent of Cooper’s 1989 album ‘Trash,’ which provided his last big hits, ‘Poison’ and ‘House of Fire.’ We’ll give Cooper the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s going for a throwback vibe rather than being 20 years behind the times, although we’re honestly not so sure.
As we noted in our preview of the song, Kesha plays a demonic entity who has come to take his soul. That role isn’t a huge stretch for the dance-pop singer, who frequently pretends to drink blood from a beating heart during live performances of her song ‘Cannibal,’ a song in which she promises to “pull a Jeffrey Dahmer.”
Kesha appears during the second verse and alternates lines with Cooper, who tries to stand up to her: “I got a pretty face / Yeah, but I’ve seen what’s hiding underneath / You like my pretty mouth / But you got razor blades instead of teeth / And now it’s too, too late for you / Oh yeah? Tell me what you’re gonna do / I’m gonna drain your veins and bathe in your blood / Honey, I’ve seen worse than you.”
The novelty aspect of seeing Kesha pair up with the man she refers to as “Dad” is intriguing, but that’s all the track ends up being, a novelty. ‘What Baby Wants’ will appear on Cooper’s album ‘Welcome 2 My Nightmare,’ a sequel to his similarly-titled classic record from 1975.
Kesha is just the co-star here, but the song could be a preview of the type of music we can expect to hear on her next album, which she promises will be ’70s-influenced, “balls-out, irreverent rock and roll.”