Lived Too Long in the Shadows of Sadness
The Ocean of Human Endeavor
I first heard her under her own name in 2009, when I downloaded a loose mp3 of “TiK ToK” and synced it to a playlist on my iPod because the recently-revived Singles Jukebox had reviewed it and I was in one of my intermittent phases of listening to stuff that came up on places like the Jukebox, which had been my keeping-in-vague-touch strategy throughout much of the 2000s.
The following year, I would be invited to join the Singles Jukebox on the strength of the long-winded exegesis of her first album I posted on Tumblr. Several lasting friendships, one failed relationship, an abortive attempt at writing for publication, a move across the country, and several extended depressive periods in which I increasingly failed to engage with music in the present tense would follow. At one point in there I snapped at a friend that I wasn’t a Kesha “fan” — I had always been more interested in the things I could think of to say about her music than in her music, or her.
Last Friday, I pulled up Spotify on the iPad I bring to work every day so I can play music and check Twitter while answering emails and scheduling meetings and formatting data and played Rainbow, her new album, her fourth (or third, depending on how you’re counting) full-length but first after a long, legally-fraught hiatus. Two days earlier I had received a zip file of the leaked album from one of the people I most admire in the world, but as I wrote when thanking her, inertia and my post-2012 inability to be excited about anything would keep me from going to the trouble of transferring the files somewhere I could actually listen to them. The frictionless ease of release-day streaming fits an exhausted age of lowered expectations: the ethos of early-2010s post-financial-crisis pop, full as it was of imagined apocalypses, superheroic posturing, and a determinedly goofy will-to-party, has given way to the tedium of much less imaginary apocalypses, endless yawning superuniverses strip-mined of meaning, and a relationship to the social sphere defined more by app-mediated anxiety disorder than by eager appetite.
The invulnerability has drained from Kesha’s music too, along with the $ scrubbed from her name. She’s still confrontational, funny, and delighted by her ability to subvert expectations, but there’s an earnestness that wasn’t there before (or maybe I didn’t know how to hear it) — and not only in the songs, some maudlin, some jeery, that directly address the abuse inflicted on her for years and her escape from it. Even whoop-’em-ups like “Let ’Em Talk,” “Woman,” or “Boogie Feet,” in which she displays, lyrically and vocally, the same brash, playful ridiculousness that captured the (okay, a) zeitgeist in 2010, hew closely to a roots-rock aesthetic that, from the Mumfords to Elle King, has become the default 21st-century setting for “authenticity” in pop music. Her voice, now almost entirely denuded of the squirrely AutoTune that she used to better and weirder effect than anyone, reaches, at its most sentimental, for the same faux-fragility and contorted phrasing that indie-schlock dullards like Hozier use.
I’m not in fact disappointed (though I may sound it), but I am curious. Signifiers, both overt and symbolic, of growing up are all over this record — which only makes sense. If anything it might be more disappointing if a thirty-year-old woman were still making exactly the same music she was making when she was twenty-three. Although consider how many male musicians do exactly that, and how keeping up with changing fashions is a gendered requirement. Just as an aside.
In 2010, I’d been listening to pop radio pretty regularly for three years, the first time I’d done so since my junior year of high school, in 1995. I understood Ke$ha-With-A-$ as a sort of culmination of late-00s trends, from T-Pain’s AutoTune and the Black-Eyed Peas’ bone-dumb party-rap to the all-consuming paparazzi machine that had broken starlets like Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan, and would devour anyone else who didn’t erect barricades against them. Then-Ke$ha, with her twin motifs of vomit and glitter, did erect those barricades; but maybe they still weren’t enough.
In 2017, I haven’t listened to pop radio regularly for four years, partly by circumstance — I rarely drive anymore — and partly by choice — the pop era, already receding, defined by Macklemore and Iggy Azalea was dispiriting enough to make my retreat into the past and/or the rest of the world seem noble. Maybe that means I’m not really qualified to fully absorb or sit in judgement of Kesha’s new album: maybe I’m missing a lot of crucial context, or where it fits into the present-day pop-cultural landscape. I wouldn’t disagree. The landscape the album keeps fitting into as I swim through it over and over again, is my own interior.
Go On, Read About Us in the News
It’s impossible to hear Rainbow with any distance from the way that Kesha’s name has most often been in the music press over the past four years: as the plaintiff in an ongoing sexual-assault case against her former producer and manager, Dr. Luke. On rereading the agency and pop wizardry I attributed to Luke rather than to her seven years ago, I’ve cringed.
But further immersion in the new record suggests that even if I wasn’t right, I wasn’t wrong: the electro-blurt which sounded so woozily of the zeitgeist in 2010 was not Kesha’s preferred musical mode. (And I’m reminded that Britney Spears, in 1999, wanted to sing Sheryl Crow material rather than the hyperfuturistic pomp-pop Max Martin, Dr. Luke’s mentor, gave her.) The music Kesha loves, T. Rex and the Stones and Iggy Pop and outlaw country, gave her the cock-rock attitude that made her unique among the late-oughts, early-teens wave of pop starlets: Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato were all much more willing to play princess. Of her mini-generation, only Lady Gaga has approached bending gender to Kesha’s degree, and only Nicki Minaj has matched her, from the direction of an even more intensely masculinized pop tradition: both of them have demanded in song that their enemies suck their dicks.
Given the traumatic news cycles surrounding Kesha, Dr. Luke’s absence from the production credits of Rainbow isn’t surprising (if anything is surprising, it is the album’s emergence at all) — but a look at who does feature on those credits is still useful, as a gauge of where Kesha is positioning herself in the (sonic) marketplace. The two most frequent names listed as producers, Ricky Reed and Drew Pearson, are best known for shepherding acts like Twenty One Pilots and Phillip Phillips to the Top 40; Ryan Lewis (of “Macklemore and” fame) helms the first single and most overtly Luke-addressing anthem “Praying,” the title track is produced with syrupy lavishness by Ben Folds, and Lana Del Rey collaborator Rick Nowels is responsible for the gauzy Americana of “Hunt You Down.”
Perhaps in opposition, or perhaps in complement, to all these middle-of-the-roaders, the most raucous uptempo tracks feature acts also marked by trauma and news cycles: the Dap-Kings (best known for backing the late Sharon Jones and Amy Winehouse) and the Eagles of Death Metal, famously headlining at the Bataclan during the November 2015 Paris terrorist attack.
And then there’s Dolly. We’ll get to that.
Walking on Air, Kicking My Blues
To a certain degree, the record sounds like it might be a collection of songs Kesha wrote for other acts, under the assumption that she might never get to record again, or not for a long time. “Hymn,” with its flat melody and minor-key dancehall vibes, sounds tailor-made for Rihanna, and “Learn to Let Go,” with tribal drumming and bluegrass picking, could be an Imagine Dragons singalong; even the album’s deep-cut highlight, murder threat “Hunt You Down,” as satisfying as it is to hear it in Kesha’s thin sneer, could well have been snarled with more teflon charisma by Miranda Lambert.
But although Kesha’s origins are in songwriting, so much so that at the height of what we now must consider her imperial phase she wrote Britney’s best hit of the 2010s, her personality as a performer is so strong that her voice leaves its stamp on every line of Rainbow. For the first time entirely unmediated by vocal processing software (at least to the brilliantly obnoxious degree of her first albums), her voice emerges as rangy and powerful if relatively thin and throaty, an idiosyncratic instrument that makes up for in expressiveness what it lacks in conventional purity or force — like, say, Mick Jagger’s.
Although they’re still full of the sneers, spoken-word breaks, and gurgling ad-libs she always used to keep the listener off-balance, many of the songs tend towards sentiment, whether steely or mawkish. Her lyrics are cast more frequently in an imperative mood — “don’t let the bastards get you down,” “don’t touch my weave don’t call me honey,” “learn to let go” — than in the descriptive of classics like “We R Who We R” or “Party at a Rich Dude’s House.” Which may have more to do with Kesha being thirty than anything else: the temptation to dole out advice, to share the wisdom you think you’ve earned with your younger interlocutors, comes to most of us in our third decade.
The narrative surrounding the album has been carefully designed to make this Kesha’s grown-up record: three of the four songs released in advance of the album, each with its accompanying video, are self-consciously “inspirational” to one degree or another, in a familiar pattern which Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and lesser lights have plowed more or less to exhaustion in recent years. Which isn’t to say that “Praying” (that note!), “Learn to Let Go” (the drunken swagger of “been through hell and back”), and “Rainbow” (the buzzy drone note cutting the schmaltz) don’t have their merits: she takes her popcraft very seriously, and is very good at it.
There’s only one song on the album in which she adopts the self-mocking L’Trimm flow that made “TiK ToK” stand out towards the end of a crowded 2009 — apart from the rapped verses, “Boogie Feet” is a self-consciously minor glitter-rock tribute, the Eagles of Death Metal doing their best approximation of the Sweet, Kesha’s chorus delivered in a delighted new-wave squeal and the last section sounding like a pop-punk cover of “I Feel Love.” That it’s probably my favorite song on the album may have more to do with my own nostalgia for 2010 Ke$ha (and for the period, ten years earlier, when I really got into glam) than with its aesthetic qualities; but after the pre-album campaign had me fearing an album of wall-to-wall empowerment pop, its glorious ridiculousness is so satisfying.
Let’s Be Serious, This Is a Real — Okay, Shut Up!
I shouldn’t have worried. Seven years ago I identified Kesha’s secret weapon as neither the AutoTune that made her music widely loathed nor the embrace of “bad” gendered stereotypes that made her a hero to a minority (neither were a secret), but comedy.
Not in the commercial sense — the comedy industry, centered around television deals, narcissism, and ahistorical mythologizing, is largely a wasteland where human feeling and aesthetic meaning go to die — but in the broader cultural sense. The Greek kōmōidíā, the dramatic tradition paired in antiquity with its antithesis tragōidíā, is derived from the root words kômos, revelry or carousing, and oidé, song. Which isn’t a bad description of Ke$ha’s art — but Kesha without the $, though still essentially comic, is less interested in Partying as embodiment of meaning, as the source of power. To Party requires community; and when community fails you, you are thrown back on whatever power inheres in yourself.
The Dionysian abandon of Kesha’s persona will not be channeled into anything so mundanely structured as “jokes” — the old vaudeville saw about a comic saying funny things but a comedian saying things funny applies here, as does the much more modern concept of “shitposting.” (I owe this realization to Isabel Cole; I’ve been away from Tumblr too long.) Shitposting, or brief, often absurdist reflections that may or may not be entirely serious (but are funniest when someone takes issue and they get doubled down on; a benign form of trolling), relies on a shared presumption of intimacy that industrial comedy, with its masculinized displays of dominance — winning, killing, slaying — finds entirely foreign.
Kesha’s shitposting, from the mocking “I like your beard” that ends “Your Love Is My Drug” to the feral-seductive single entendre at the climax of “Boots,” is nearly always cast entirely in an implicit conditional mood: wouldn’t it be funny if I acted like this? The butt of the joke is the straight man (in the vaudevillian rather than the identarian sense, but honestly that works too) she’s exasperating, the man who takes himself too seriously and can’t understand why she won’t.
Which is one reason it’s been particularly enraging that a lot of the discourse around this album has been straight men acknowledging with beard-stroking self-seriousness that oh, after all, Kesha is a talented musician. Now that the primary sound of her music is guitars and unprocessed vocals. Now that she’s unlikely to be played on the radio.
Now that she’s no longer a threat.
Try to Explain That He’s Mostly Tame
Late in the album, she covers two songs written by her mother. The second, “Godzilla,” is a sweet, brief and hilarious waltz-time domestication of monstrosity, a song that might have been intended for a children’s album but can also, if you let it, function as a potent metaphor for the emotional labor women perform for abusive (or even just regular thoughtless) men.
Kesha’s persona has often flirted with claiming monstrosity for herself — songs like “Stephen,” “Cannibal,” and “Dirty Love” range the horror spectrum from Stephen King to George Romero to William Burroughs — but this is a new note, seizing on both the silliness of rubber-suit kaiju and the helpless (though, because she is Kesha, never terrified) sensation of standing by while a monster of a boyfriend does what it is his nature to do. This is probably already more thought than anyone involved with the song put into it, but it’s notable that the litanies of destruction she attributes to the monster only amounts to property damage and eating too many fries. If all romance fiction is to some extent a fantasy of domestication, why not go all the way?
But the song that precedes it, written by Pebe Sebert a decade before her daughter Kesha was born, is, if not the thematic centerpiece of the album (that would be “Praying”), the emotional core. Opening with a pounding rise that recalls “She’s So Heavy,” it’s a sprawling, emotionally lavish reconstruction of Dolly Parton’s 1980 hit “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You,” sung as a duet with the 71-year-old Parton herself. A song about new love set entirely in reference to old love, it’s fitting for an album about growing past the trauma — and perhaps even the self — of the past. And the appropriateness of Dolly Parton as duet partner isn’t just the nostalgia of an old hit record: one of many recording industry legends forced to cut ties with the man who thought he made her and refused to let her go, Parton’s example of self-directed success after Porter Wagoner is as inspirational (if less well-publicized) as Tina Turner’s or Ronnie Spector’s.
Both Kesha and Dolly wail in thrilling crescendos as the song crashes again and again, sounding delighted in their own and each other’s resources. Although not overtly a song about the aftermath of trauma, it’s one of the most healing moments on the record, and a deserved victory lap.
I’ll Bring Thunder, I’ll Bring Rain
But I said that “Praying” was the thematically central song on the album. (Again, here I am following Isabel’s lead. Sorry you don’t have an ongoing email chain with her.) And not just because it’s the first single, and the only song that overtly addresses Dr. Luke — or can be assumed to; like all pop, its first obligation is to be generalizable. “Praying” picks up several of the thematic strands that have always been present in Kesha’s (and Ke$ha’s) music, and complicates them.
From her first appearance she’s conceived of herself as a warrior — “tonight Imma fight till we reach the sunlight” remains the key lyric in “TiK ToK” — and she even literalized the image, giving herself cyborg battle armor, on the cover of her 2012 album, but in the chorus of “Praying,” she confesses “I had to learn how to fight for myself.” So who was all that other fighting for? Similarly, from “Backstabber” to “Crazy Kids,” she’s put a premium on truth-telling and not giving a fuck — but now she mentions all the truth she could tell, and then proceeds not to tell it. Again, evidence of maturity: and not perhaps so much being the bigger person as a machiavellian embrace of the power of blackmail.
Indeed the whole song is an extended “Bless your heart,” in the specifically Southern sense of “Fuck you.” Hoping you find your peace while also promising that they won’t even know your name, Nashville-raised Kesha Sebert has rediscovered the vengeful pleasures of public Christian forgiveness. She has always known it — “We R Who We R” shouts out “Jesus on my neck-a-lace” — and if she identifies with the “kids with no religion” in “Hymn,” she’s still heir to a Christian cultural tradition which attributes power to the laying down of arms, to the beating of swords into plowshares.
But metaphors get slippery in pop (and indeed in religion): it’s not that far a jump from forgiving your oppressor in Jesus’ name to speaking in the person of Christ. The metaphorical language of flames and hell that she uses to refer to her trauma is countered by her own promise of thunder and rain, a gleefully pagan confluence of YHWH with Zeus, of Christ with Thor.
Which brings us back to superheroes. (Isabel again.) The hero who must learn how to fight for himself, after having spent so long fighting altrustically (if The Party isn’t exactly truth justice and the [garbled] way, it’s near enough) is a frequent theme in superhero stories that aim for ambition. The Daredevil Born Again storyline by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli (which also piles up the religious metaphors) is perhaps the prototypical example here — at the climax of which the hero is forced to kill a man to save a large urban population. This moral ambiguity resonates with the have-it-both-ways attitude of “Praying” — as she screams toward the end, “some things only God can forgive,” followed by a banshee wail.
Which casts all the rest of the song not as a forgiveness text, but as a threat. “I hope you’re somewhere praying,” because you’re not long for this world.
Damn If It Ain’t True
Every Kesha album to date has ended with a hippieish cosmic can’t-we-love-each-other sentiment, from Animal’s title track to Warrior’s “Love into the Light” (or on the deluxe edition, the Flaming Lips duet “Past Lives”). Rainbow’s closer, “Spaceship,” is similarly designed, although its hootenanny texture (Kesha, for one, does not scorn the Lumineers) and Parliament-Funkadelic mythologizing make it even more eccentric than her unpredictable track record would predict. If her stoned, philosophical country-fried Hendrix spoken-word outro is any indicator, she may be heading in a Gram Parsons direction; which I’m just as excited about as any of her other swerves.
At the end of the last paragraph, I emailed Isabel, unsure what else to say, and she reminded me of the most widely-diffused way that Parliament-Funkadelic Mothership mythologizing had made its way into popular culture: the goggle-eyed, blue-beaked Gonzo, in The Muppet Movie, staring at the stars and singing about going back there someday.
And of course Kesha — the persona, if not the person — has always been gonzo, in both lower- and uppercase: too much, too intense, too weird, too much of a freak, talking in a private language that only other freaks (or chickens) can understand, unconcerned with whether the next stunt she’s going to perform is going to kill her or make her immortal. From somewhere else, not of this planet, waiting to return to stardust. Afrofuturism is just one more thing she’s borrowed from Black culture throughout her career, including the dusty countrified stomp she’s circling around on Rainbow. Which, notes Isabel, is another way the heady pop-cultural myth that is The Muppet Movie hangs over the album.
Today, in part because of Jim Henson, only the most retrograde among us still asks why there are there so many songs about rainbows — and Kesha, whose music has always revolved around a fraught but unquestioned heterosexuality, adopting the rainbow both as a personal emblem (the sign after the Biblical storm, the vulgar femininity of 80s childhood) and as an utterly-sincere championing of her queer fandom, is not unproblematic, but that’s not my quarrel to have. The childhood fantasy of discovering that your parents are not your parents, that what you’ve thought was your home was only an illusion, that your real home, where you are really understood, is somewhere stranger and more wonderful than you could have believed, resonates in Christian eschatology, in It Gets Better sloganeering, and in the incomplete vaudeville joke (which only makes it funnier) that is the Muppet Gonzo.
Of course I sometimes fell prey to that fantasy as a child, just as I sometimes identified with Gonzo. But I more frequently and fervently identified with Kermit (as an oldest child, in both the sense of responsibility and the sense of panic that I would never be able to live up to it) and, as I grew older, Fozzie (in the unhappy awareness that I was always going to be a failure at the only thing I cared about doing). So why have I spent seven years and, now, some 15,000 words thinking in public about Kesha, so unlike me and so much, on the surface, exactly what I, a sedate, even timid straight man who mostly thinks about old music, old books, and radical politics, should not care for?
Maybe it’s just the old radical phrase: A better world is possible. She dares to imagine a better world than the one controlled by the orders of capital, patriarchy, and whiteness, and she also dares in her songs, even if only briefly, to embody it. In “Spaceship,” she imagines that such a world must be external to, or somehow cosmically beyond, this one; but even if that politics of despair turns out to be the truth, her ability, shared with millions, to conceive of an ethic of connection, of joy, of exultation, of fearlessness, of laughter, and (not incidentally) of stomping all over property relations, gives me — and others, including some of my best and most beloved friends — hope.
Lord knows we could use it.
Thanks of course to Isabel, and also to Maura, Erika, Katherine, LJ, and Lindsay for helping me organize my thoughts here, whether or not they meant to. Which is a poor way of saying that little of my thinking is original: if you share this and don’t share womens’ writing about Kesha, what the hell dude.
