The Tragicomic Kesha Rose

A lesson in martyrdom, utility, and 'realities'.

For whatever reason the universe works things out like that, I have ended up dwelling a lot on the career of Kesha (or Kesha Rose Sebert) all throughout the pandemic. I’d been an appreciator of her upon hearing the anecdote that she’d been arrested for breaking into Prince’s house in the hopes of ambushing him with a demo, which grew into a proper admiration after she not only gave us one of the most inexplicably stacked All-Star rap remixes with “Sleazy 2.0” and fellow TSJ alumni Zach Lyon’s incredible One Week One Band entry on her; the latter gave me so many gifts including experiencing her song “Stephen”, a favorite for the past decade and change now. And of course, naturally, I was deeply saddened and aghast when the world decided we had a ‘valid’ reason to pity her.

Admittedly, I felt a similar pity when I saw that she was touring in Philly, seeing her gig announced close to the Temple University campus where I was taking an aborted semester, stillborn by the same plague that cancelled her gig as well. I’d wanted the third album, Rainbow, her retaliation against her former abuser and colleague Dr. Luke to be a triumph of her artistic merits… and truth be told, I still think it’s my least favorite album she’s ever released. Around that time I’d hear “Woman”, one of my least favorite efforts on that record, utilized in the soundtrack to Birds of Prey along with a Doja Cat song (Doja herself the new Dr. Luke protege) and a Halsey collab with Bring Me The Horizon. Ironic, in many ways, that this film that was meant to provide a cheap and gaudy bit of pro-girl sentiment was rife with the presence of abusers throughout the background noise.

Part of my dismay was that I had admired Sebert for her wit and energy, the spark of personality that dwelt beneath the shambolic presentation and the neon-burn synths. That wasn’t to say that I felt she was trapped by those sounds, but rather they were an echo of the cheek and fire that she herself possessed. Instead, I got an album that was incredibly somber and covered in Real Musicianship that was produced flatly and resulted in her freeing herself to feel dour and almost hollow. Later in the pandemic’s haze, I found the album she would’ve been touring for (High Road) to be a return to the balance I was hoping from her; a sea-saw between her sort of newfound ‘spiritual’ awakened form and the sort of noxious courage that came from her command of pop at it’s most expulsive. It’d replaced the ‘cringe’ of her party girl persona for the ‘cringe’ of a sort of hippy-dippy enlightened soul wielding crystals and sentiments to encourage healing. But that sort of sincerity still reminded me of the Kesha Rose I’d come to learn was so good.

Oddly, that didn’t seem to matter as much as she was one of the many artists I saw getting a second-life on TikTok. Plenty of people have hand-wrung and bemoaned that dreaded algorithm and the Chinese Agenda as to how any of these songs mean anything. It’s a whole lot of horseshit to throw out your browsing with the bathwater though, because fundamentally you can still watch what inspires people to recycle and reinvent with their work; whether its for ventposts, gaudy cosplay skits, or pointless thirst traps. Stuck in my room doing remote work, I’d watch tons of artists get revitalized and unintentionally re-canonized by kids, be it your typical names such as Radiohead or deftones, or the likes of ICP who both predictably and surreally THRIVE in the hands of these zoomers whose Parents might’ve been around for the heights of their mainstream media presence. Plenty of them had a ton of nostalgia for Kesha, and I watched as plenty of her singles and more than a few of the deep cuts from those first 2 albums (because Cannibal doesn’t count, c’mon) just hit paydirt again and again.

That, is a bittersweet sort of victory for her in some ways. Kesha’s right now obviously underpromoted and hampered by her legal issues with Luke & Kemosabe, so I don’t blame anyone for not being constantly aware of whatever she drops. But, likewise I know how out of step she feels with a lot of contemporary trends, and to which her writer persona has been self-involved in a way that doesn’t always make you the most commercial via digestion. Something like that isn’t a fault of audiences, who are trained to seek something nice and fun instead of thought-provoking and demonstrable from their pop music. And those earlier Kesha singles, in spite of the awful conditions they were delivered in, were some of the best at being that satiating kind of disposable. But you get the cruelty of this disconnect, right? That so many of these songs keep her career mired in that bleak period no matter how much she herself wants to be free. Right now, no matter how much work she puts in, she’s perhaps not defined by that earlier existence, but beholden to it by the nature of consumption.

Now look, the 7 or 8 people who bother to read my stupid newsletter no doubt know someone who would’ve actually made a pronounced effort to check her most recent album from back in May. I er, don’t seem to have those people around anymore, or maybe the herd has been thinned out, and thus only learned about it a week or two ago. But given what we’ve been handed, I can also guess why it’s not lovingly discussed. Gag Order’s biggest issue for me is that same energy I mentioned from High Road is now infused with a severity and moroseness that does not display those aforementioned charms of Sebert’s. In some ways, it feels like a clumsy rejoinder to Halsey’s If I Can’t Have Love… that mistakes the gravitas of her own personal context as more worthwhile or inherently compelling subject material (and a lot worse electronic elements). To criticize that work feels rotten, but it ends up feeling like a stoic and impenetrable biding of power to revel in for it’s own sake, which while appreciable and respectable does not spark the same sort of sneers of delight she can provoke in others and seemingly herself. Or maybe that’s me reacting to how awfully Rubin’s & co. mixed her vocals here.

There’s nothing to land here that’ll feel satisfactory. Fundamentally, the truth is both in the hands of those who innocently (or even guiltily) revisit the older material of the Kesha catalog because it was so perfect and sincere, even if it was through a half-mask. After all, sincerity and acerbity are not forces who are inherently oppositional, nor likewise conjoined. Because simultaneously, the venom behind Sebert’s truth on all her confessional material meant to rebound from her agonies is not that same truth she offered so readily. It fucking sucks that I, as a listener and even as a critic, mostly want Kesha to move past her tragedy and be able to move in a realm that can somehow manage to totally displace the anguish and hurt. Especially as I watch as people are justifiably not seeking her current truth that means far more to her in the present. There’s a world in which a fully-recovered Kesha Rose Sebert has all of her weapons back and is able to make art that embodies where she is in the present and perfectly evolves from who she was as a younger woman. But that’s not the world where I or she lives in, as far as I can see.