Yesterday TMZ reported that pop singer Ke$ha was suing her longtime producer Dr. Luke for sexual, physical, verbal and emotional abuse. The duration of the alleged abuse spanned nearly ten years.

Naturally, it didn’t take long for Dr. Luke to strike back with his own lawsuit, claiming that Ke$ha, along with her mother and new management team, was merely suing him in an effort to get out of her contract—she’s signed to his Kemosabe record label as well his publishing company—something she’s been trying to do for an extended period of time.

Ke$ha says she was abused, and Luke says he’s being extorted. At this point, nobody knows what’s actually true. What is clear, however, is that one of pop music’s most exciting partnerships has officially come to its tragic end.

And that sucks.

Woke up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy.►

It’s said that you only get one chance to make a first impression, and five years ago, with this clever opening line on her debut single, “Tik Tok,” Kesha Rose Sebert made the most of her opportunity. She then held it for three minutes while she white girl-rapped about brushing her teeth with Jack Daniels, boys blowing up her phone, wanting to get tipsy and only being interested in guys who looked like Mick Jagger.

Since pop music is nothing if not a handful of recycled cliches, her shtick didn’t come off as wholly original, but the lyrics were certainly catchy and the production was frenetic and fun. Mostly, it had been some years since such a strong alpha-female had entered the mainstream, and someone embracing everything politically incorrect about the way young women are supposed to act was new and exciting. This was before Rihanna went full badass and before Miley Cyrus discovered that black people existed.

Ke$ha’s second single, “Blah Blah Blah,” put it even more bluntly.

I don’t really care where you live at,
Just turn around, boy, let me hit that,
Don’t be a little bitch with your chit chat,
Just show me where your dick’s at.►

By pop music’s standards, this was edgy stuff. Ke$ha’s bravado and attitude was shaped and influenced by hip-hop, whereby she took the worst parts of its ultra-douchey male chauvinism, and used it as a form of female empowerment. One could suggest she was snatching back the power structure, not unlike the Lil’ Kims and Foxy Browns of yore, except she was obviously devoid of their blackness. Perhaps this made her more marketable to young white teens and tweens, who saw a bit of themselves in her.

Ke$ha made us all—men included—embrace our inner white girl.

It is impossible to sing Ke$ha’s praises without tipping your hat to producer Dr. Luke, who, along with a well-curated list of collaborators—producers like Benny Blanco, Cirkut and Ammo, among dozens of others songwriters, vocalists and musicians—served as her creative visionary, the Svengali who helped make her who she was.

Born Lukasz Sebastian Gottwald, Dr. Luke was raised in New York City and in the late 90s, when he wasn’t producing remixes for rappers like Mos Def and Talib Kweli, he was the guitarist in the Saturday Night Live band. A chance meeting with Swedish music producer/songwriter Max Martin lead to a friendship, and eventually, in 2004, collaborating on Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.”

A year later, Ke$ha, who was then just 18-years-old, signed to Luke’s production company. There, like most artists who sign to vanity imprints run by producers, she remained in development hell, presumably working with dozens of other writers, producers and managers, all in an attempt to get her career off the ground.

But it wasn’t until she was featured on the chorus of Flo Rida’s hit, “Right Round,” his second #1 record, in 2009, that things really started moving. Along with DJ Frank E, Luke produced the track, and it was largely his involvement that netted Ke$ha the appearance. Though she went uncredited on the tune, her industry cred subsequently skyrocketed—giving credence to the whole “you’re only one hit away” thing—and before long there was “Tik Tok” and Animal, a full-length LP, which was released in early 2010. Animal debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200, while “Tik Tok” was simultaneously #1 on the Hot 100.

Ke$ha was blowing up.

At the same time, however, Dr. Luke’s star was rising, too. Maybe even faster than Ke$ha’s. And while it’s not possible to compare the career arcs of producers to artists, simply because producers can work with many different acts, while artists are always going to be singular entities, this much is clear: from 2009 on, no producer in music was bigger or more influential than Dr. Luke.

Whether it was co-producing megastars like Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry, or lesser-known acts like Jessie J and Taio Cruz, Luke’s ability to deliver hits was unmatched. Top 40 radio playlists across the country were peppered with Luke productions, songs that were filled with pulsating four-on-the-floor dance beats, nu-disco rhythm guitars and tremendous stadium rock-style shouted choruses. They were infectious.

But there was something different about Luke’s work with Ke$ha, in particular. Her songs were dance and electronic-influenced, but often felt more playful and in a strange way, more intimate. Her voice was typically plowed with autotune and other assorted effects—not unlike any other pop singer these days—but these effects were used as modifiers, not so much morphing her voice, but rather accentuating it, leaving at its the core the simplicity and unaffected quality that made it unique. It remained playful. In an industry where many pop songs sound the same—more often than not, the songs are even written and produced by the same people—Ke$ha’s rarely sounded like anyone else’s. That’s rare.

In late 2011, the New York Times broke the news that Sony Chairman and CEO Doug Morris had shelled out $60 million to bring Dr. Luke into the historic label’s fold; both to produce for it, exclusively, and to officially launch Luke’s Kemosabe Records imprint, which until then had been operating as a glorified production company.

A deal of that magnitude affects everyone who is even tangentially connected to it, and it is here where things come unhinged. In the leadup to Warrior, Ke$ha’s full-length studio LP, the singer told numerous media outlets that she was looking to dial back the electro pop party girl image she’d cultivated and embrace a more generalist, rock-influenced approach. Things didn’t go as planned.

“I really wanted to bring as much rock ’n’ roll as I could to this record,” she explained to the Financial Times. “But after a from-the-business-standpoint conversation with my producer [her mentor Lukasz “Dr Luke” Gottwald], he was like, if you want to have a successful record you can’t just abandon that sound.”

Warrior was released in November of 2012, and while its first single, “Die Young,” was initially well-received, it was temporarily banned from the radio after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings that took place that December. In a tweet, eventually deleted, she looked to distance herself from the song altogether. She wrote:

“i understand. I had my very own issue with ‘die young’ for this reason. I did NOT want to sing those lyrics and I was FORCED TO.”

Right then, Dr. Luke—the presumed puppet master, who forced Ke$ha to sing the song against her will—began being looked at, perhaps unfairly, almost as a Phil Spector figure, a heavy-handed music business impresario too controlling for his artist’s own good. After a few weeks, “Die Young” returned to the radio; it reached #1 on Billboard’s Top 40 chart and #2 on the Hot 100, respectively. Not bad for something Ke$ha was forced to do.

Still, that song’s success wasn’t enough to get Warrior over the hump. The second and third singles, “C’Mon,” and “Crazy Kids,” failed to make an impact, and subsequently, the hype for the LP—in an era where full-length albums are a largely an afterthought—died quickly. Ke$ha fell off the radar and dropped out of the pop music conversation altogether.

“I haven’t heard from her in a while,” Luke told the New Yorker last year. And so the producer had moved on to other things. Namely, he tried to get his label off the ground. Unfortunately, the results had been mixed. He spent some time prepping frequent Katy Perry collaborator Bonnie McKee for stardom, but after one single, “American Girl,” in 2013, and a few scattershot music videos, things peetered out.

And he also tried breaking teenage Mexican-American rapper/singer Becky G, which has been an ongoing process since signing her in 2011. This year brought Becky’s song, “Shower,” which you may have heard in a commercial or two, or maybe even on the radio. But though there’s been much ink spilled about Becky G, and she certainly has a fan base—what emerging artist doesn’t have a fan base these days?—you really get the sense that things aren’t moving quite as planned for her. Turns out, it’s hard to make a pop star. You can’t just add water.

If Luke’s had any real success with Kemosabe— and you’d be hard-pressed to really give him credit for it— it’s been with rapper Juicy J. Unlike a new artist who needs to earn their fans one by one, the Three 6 Mafia rapper is already twenty years deep into his career. Buoyed by an association with Wiz Khalifa’s Taylor Gang, plus tons of music he released independently, he inked a deal with Kemosabe in 2012; last year, his profile received a boost when he appeared on Katy Perry’s uber-successful single “Dark Horse.” But more speaking to his core audience, hip-hop fans, “Bandz a Make Her Dance,” a Mike Will Made It production, became an urban smash for Juicy last year. Years after winning an Oscar for Best Original Song with Three 6 Mafia for “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp,” Juicy J is suddenly a star again.

In January, Ke$ha checked into a rehab facility for an eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, which she said she developed after Dr. Luke had pressured her to lose weight. In the lawsuit, she alleges that he called her “a fat fucking refrigerator,” and that she was also sexually assaulted. Overall, the suit portrays Luke as a comprehensively-abusive person, with a multitude of infractions against him. If a settlement isn’t reached, we’ll ultimately see how this plays out in court.

These are certainly serious allegations, and if their working relationship is officially over, our last real memory of Ke$ha and Dr. Luke—as a pair, that is—may be one of the less critically-celebrated songs of our time, “Timber.” It is not a proper Ke$ha song, but rather a Pitbull cut that she sings the chorus on. Nevertheless it was the singer’s 10th appearance in the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it eventually peaked at #1 for three weeks earlier this year. It also went to number one in dozens of other countries. More importantly, “Timber” was Ke$ha’s third, and maybe last song ever, to reach that the top slot on the Hot 100. All three were produced by Dr. Luke.

If “Timber” is, in fact, what we will remember Ke$ha and Dr. Luke to have sounded like, it is not an especially bad memory. With its generic EDM-like drum track and square dance-inspired harmonica melody, the song is cheesy, fun and practically ridiculous. It’s everything commercial pop music is supposed to be, and in a way, it’s not all that different from what Ke$ha and Dr. Luke had been doing all along, before the Kemosabe/Sony deal, before the artists who failed to launch, before Ke$ha’s second LP tanked.

Maybe Dr. Luke and Ke$ha need each other more than they both realize. Or, maybe they really don’t.

Follow Paul Cantor on Twitter @PaulCantor.
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