The (Zen) Take No Prisoners Return of Kesha

After the release of High Road in 2020, which happened just before the lockdowns of the pandemic would start to pop off, it’s safe to say that Kesha probably felt pretty defeated—beaten back into submission after hoping to get out on the road and tour the new record. As she explained to Nylon, “…after my last album was released right before the pandemic hit, I went into quarantine feeling very lost. There was no tour, so the album that I had just made kind of felt like it hit a wall as soon as it entered the world. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If an artist creates a piece that no one knows exists, are they still an artist? Or am I just talking to myself? The foot on the gas had been halted. The world seemed to stop spinning. My head hit the dash.”

And yet, like many musicians who whipped into a flurry of artistic productivity as a result of touring and “being a celebrity” getting ripped away from them, Kesha started “receiving” the early seeds of inspiration for what was to become her sixth album, Gag Order (not to be confused with Gaga Order just because she’s mentioned a desire to work with Lady Gaga). The provocative title, needless to say, is a direct hit at the likes of Dr. Luke and the slew of lawyers and judges that have been involved in the Kesha v. Dr. Luke case since it first officially began in 2014. Appropriately, the term “gag order” isn’t found in the glossary of physical torture, but rather, it’s a legal phrase meaning: “a judge’s directive forbidding the public disclosure of information on a particular matter.” That matter obviously being her ongoing legal entanglements with Dr. Luke, who came back at Kesha’s civil suit with a defamation lawsuit that has another court date set for this summer.

For someone like Kesha, known for being outspoken and candid, a gag order is an especial form of cruelty. Nonetheless, she’s found a way to “talk about it” without saying anything truly specific—cloaking her pain in such arcane lyrics as, “Don’t fuckin’ call me a fighter, don’t fuckin’ call me a joke/You have no fuckin’ idea, trust me, you’ll never know.” But we can sense the agony she’s endured in evocative descriptions like, “The years keep on draggin’, I’m at the end of my rope/The noose gets tighter and tighter, I’m tastin’ blood in my throat.” Both of these lyrical sets appear on “Fine Line,” one of the two singles Kesha has opted to unleash in preparation for the May 19th release of Gag Order. Featuring an album cover that shows Kesha being suffocated by the presence of a plastic bag over her head (as Katy Perry—also circuitously involved in Kesha’s case—once asked, “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?” The answer for Kesha is clearly an emphatic yes).

Along with “Fine Line,” Kesha has also provided us with “Eat the Acid,” the first track she started to write for this record. One that she’s forewarned listeners about in terms of it not being the “happy, upbeat” music she’s generally known for (e.g., the legendary “Tik Tok”). This being part of why she’s nervous about the reception of the album, exposing herself emotionally in a way that she never has before. And at least some of the reason she’s long been afraid to is because of a quote she has in her mind that goes, “There’s nothing more unattractive than an angry woman.” Whether she made the quote up in her head thanks to living in a misogynistic society for so long or not, Kesha elaborated to Nylon, “Whenever an ugly emotion would announce itself, I would silence it. Dance it away, drink it away, shop it away, fuck it away, or just shut up and vibrate violently on the inside. Anger, sadness, frustration—whatever it was, that’s not what I was here for. It was a burden to be anything but fun and grateful. Which I am. Thus the internal battle rages.”

But for the first time, we can’t hear that battle so palpably as we did on an album like Rainbow, where Kesha bared her soul for the first time on tracks like “Praying” and “Rainbow,” but also still felt obliged to mitigate her pain with bangers such as “Woman” and “Learn to Let Go.” Gag Order promises to be much more emotionally no holds barred. That much is made clear by the eerie, surreal tones of “Eat the Acid,” a song inspired by Pebe Sebert, Kesha’s mother, warning her daughter at an early age never to take acid, because she would see things that couldn’t be unseen (which is probably why the song should be called “Don’t Eat the Acid,” to be slightly more succinct).

As it turned out, becoming part of the music industry would have a similar effect, but to this day, Kesha has still never actually done acid (she assures). Even so, she repurposes her mother’s warning into the ominous chant that weaves its way in and out of the song: “You don’t wanna be changed like it changed me.” For Kesha’s mother, that phrase might have been about a particular drug, but for Kesha, it’s patently about the abuse she’s endured from her oppressor, who continues to work freely as a producer—getting his songs on the top of the charts like he never did anything wrong (and yes, someone like Kim Petras is complicit in normalizing Dr. Luke’s “inculpability”). Regardless of Gag Order being the last record Kesha is contractually obligated to fulfill for Dr. Luke’s label, Kemosabe, she will unfortunately be forever linked to him. But with this coup de grâce, she’s not going quietly or gently into that good night. She’s speaking up about her pain without any “danceable ditty” veneers or posturing as a “party girl character.”

That much is made evident by the visualizer that accompanies “Eat the Acid.” Opening on a close-up shot of Kesha’s makeup-free face, a barrage of hands proceeds to “attack” her, with fingers entering her mouth as she lies practically frozen in something akin to a state of resigned paralysis. It seems to be an undeniable metaphor for what she’s gone through in the almost decade since her legal battle with Dr. Luke began. And yet, thanks to her “epiphany” moment in the early hours of the morning during the summer of 2020, Kesha has realized, per her lyrics, “I searched for answers all my life/Dead in the dark, I saw a light/I am the one that I’ve been fighting the whole time/Hate has no place in the divine.” In which case, perhaps she’s no longer hoping that Dr. Luke is somewhere “praying,” at last fully absorbing a Kabbalist message that Madonna once summed up by saying, “It’s the hardest thing in the world to do. I mean, can you imagine forgiving people that, you know, fuck you over, for lack of a better word?”

Kesha has been imagining and alluding to that kind of forgiveness since Rainbow, but it appears to have come to its full fruition in “Eat the Acid.” For, despite all she’s been through, Kesha can still declare, “…the universe is magic/Just open up your eyes, the signs are waiting.”