“The whole world is inside you. To find peace, you must first be at peace with yourself.” This is the missive featured at the end of Sam Feldt featuring Kesha’s video for “Stronger” (don’t they know that title belongs exclusively to Britney?). Instead of making any allusions to the infamous versatile chair in Spears’ Joseph Kahn-directed video, Kesha seems to prefer a subtler pop culture reference: Madonna’s “Die Another Day”–with a dash of her Hardy Candy era thrown in.
Released in 2008, Hard Candy saw Madonna branding her new persona as one of a boxer (which was foreshadowed in a 2005 bonus track from Confessions on a Dance Floor called “Super Pop,” during which she touted, “If I was a fighter I’d be Cassius Clay”). Also concerning the music video’s pastiche, it wouldn’t be until 2017, with Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch’s GLOW, that wrestling would hit such a mainstream stride for women–that is, until Kesha saw fit to resuscitate it once again for “Stronger.” Collaborating with Dutch DJ, Feldt, it was Kesha who approached him with the idea for the song.
As Feldt tells it, “Back in the day, I listened to all Kesha’s tracks, so when she approached me with the idea for ‘Stronger,’ I was very excited. The message Kesha sends with the track is really inspiring and super relevant in these turbulent times. That’s why I knew I had to be part of this message. I started on the production right away and tried to create the right balance between the emotional but so inspiring message and the uplifting and hopeful beat.”
Talking of balance, there is clearly one between “good” and “evil”–ultimately amounting to the message that those who we assume to be our enemy are the very people we can’t survive without… even if it’s just referencing our nefarious “id” of an alter ego. Speaking of Sigmund Freud, let’s get back to the “Die Another Day” storyline very overtly present in this visual rendering of what it means to have a fighting spirit. With Feldt serving as the announcer throughout the fight, he introduces the “angelic” Kesha and the “devilish” one (Liberty Belle versus Stoya the Destroya, if you will). The former is dressed in white and silver, with long blonde hair put up in a ponytail, while the latter has short black hair and is dressed in black with leopard print flourishes.
These color distinctions, of course, are precisely what is used in 2002’s “Die Another Day” video, directed by Traktor. Centered on the small cameo role Madonna had as a fencing instructor in the Bond movie of the same name (as well as extrapolating various key torture scenes from it), “Heroine” Madonna is dressed in white as she battles “Villain” Madonna in black. At first, neither one is aware that the other is actually… her (it’s a moment that kind of echoes the fencing scene Lindsay Lohan does in The Parent Trap as well). When “Heroine” Madonna removes her helmet, “Villain” Madonna is simultaneously stunned and irritated by the reveal.
And this after they’ve been battling it out on a red-carpeted platform in a stark white room. In contrast, Kesha’s foils are aware of one another from the beginning. As the two proceed to have more of a dance-off than a real fight, Feldt concludes of Round One that it “ends with an amazing simultaneous knockout.” As Round Two commences, “Angelic” Kesha briefly seems to have the upper hand, but ultimately to no avail. Feldt now determines, “The opponents have managed to completely exhaust each other.” Round Three incorporates “medieval weapons” that quickly get tossed out in favor of more classic hand-to-hand combat as they persist in being too equitably matched for either one to triumph over the other. As for the Madonnas of “Die Another Day,” they, too, battle it out for quite some time, with “Villain” Madonna taking the lead for a large bulk of the fight as “Heroine” Madonna ends up shutting down all her efforts simply by piercing her with an arrow in the end. Fight over.
As for the Keshas, in Round Four they pull out “the big” guns (always a bold move nowadays with the “trigger warning” [pun intended] firearms usually require). Naturally, just as before, they only end up falling at the exact same time as they take aim, somehow not dying from a bullet wound, but instead, falling in just such a way on the record-shaped platform so as to form the yin and yang permutation. How symbolic indeed. “You gotta take it day by day, if you wanna get stronger,” Kesha sings as a giant banner descends from the ceiling with, “AND THE WINNER IS…” written on it to indicate that they both are… as one. Feeling the spot where the bullet should have penetrated their flesh, they seem to realize that they can only heal their wounds through each other. This represents the “enemies” we “other” every day, as well as ourselves, constantly playing the tape in our heads that we aren’t strong enough or good enough to keep forging ahead.
And so we go back to the title card mentioned before: “The whole world is inside you. To find peace, you must first be at peace with yourself.” With Feldt and Kesha’s message advocating for self-acceptance, it is here that the video’s concept veers completely away from the one contained in “Die Another Day.” For it is in this James Bond-themed video that the message of the early twenty-first century continued to uphold that there were tangible and definitive sources of evil that needed to be conquered. As the century wears on, a new, more peacenik message is attempting to take hold. One that posits when we stand against one another (and, by extension, against ourselves), we can never really win at anything.
