The Wonderful Bizarreness of Kesha’s “Only Love Can Save Us Now” Video

As Kesha continues on her Gag Order journey, the latest visual she’s provided fans with is one for the non-formulaic dance ditty known as “Only Love Can Save Us Now.” Described by Kesha herself as a single inspired by how “the ludicrosity of life can make you crazy. If anything, IF ANYTHING, can save us, I believe only love can. This song is a desperate and angry prayer. A call to the light when all feels lost.” Indeed, it is this type of rallying battle cry that people need more than ever at this point in time to keep themselves going (because we all know that humans are built to insist on “enduring” even when they know damn well they shouldn’t bother). Commencing the video with a portion of the “Only Love Reprise,” featuring the vocal stylings of Kesha’s niece, Luna, the latter’s little girl voice tells us, “This is reality, can’t you feel it?” Though the following portion of the reprise isn’t included in the video, to give more context for Kesha’s mental state, the rest of Luna’s monologue goes: “I am one with what I am. Everything in color, everything. You have to see the air, you can’t believe it.” The faint harmonization of the chorus, “Only love can save us now” briefly interjects before Luna concludes, “I wish I could talk in Technicolor.”

If anyone has been able to “talk that way” through music, however, it’s been Kesha. With an entire career characterized by a glitter and rainbow aesthetic (shit, she even had album called Rainbow—sorry Mariah), her message has always been one of, let’s say, “peace, love and positivity.” Even through her darkest hours. Which is part of why she was so nervous about releasing Gag Order, her “least fun” album to date because it broaches topics that veer away from the party/“brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack” lifestyle. Instead choosing to explore more existential issues—this being part of why Ram Dass is a fixture on the record (therefore gets his own interlude). But because she is, in fact, Kesha, even her existential ruminations can’t help but have a danceable beat. Case in point, “Only Love Can Save Us Now.”

Directed by Vincent Haycock (who has previously directed videos like Lana Del Rey’s “West Coast,” Florence + the Machine’s “What Kind of Man” and Harry Styles’ “Lights Up”), the video not only starts by playing the “Only Love Reprise,” but also with someone dressed in a “Kesha flesh suit” walking down the street before cutting to a close-up on Kesha’s makeup-free face as she declares, “Tell a bitch I can’t jump this, Evel Knievel/I’m ’bout to run you down the church and the steeple.” Haycock then shows us an image of a body wrapped and bound in a red tarp type of covering while sitting on a chair in the middle of a stark room—this “taut wrapping” speaking to the “gag order” theme of the record that pertains to Kesha being silenced and stifled. Something the singer has had to deal with ever since her Kesha v. Dr. Luke debacle began back in 2014 (though she did recently gain a win in the defamation case Dr. Luke brought against her in the wake of her civil suit). With this video, Kesha seems to be illustrating the nightmarish qualities of what she’s had to go through by tinging it with the surreal and absurd. For what have the past nine years of her life been if not those two things? Besides that, Kesha has never been much of a “literal” person when it comes to creating the accompanying music videos for her singles (see also: “Blow,” during which humans with unicorn heads [that eventually spew out rainbow beams as “blood”] and James Van Der Beek inexplicably appear).

Kesha is joined in the “art gallery” room by a slew of other random people who also seem to want to find salvation of their own…or are they just there to treat Kesha like a one-woman art exhibit? Gawking and circling her as though she’s some kind of spectacle. Which, yes, is precisely what she’s had to be for most of her career, especially the parts of it that had Dr. Luke pulling the strings. Even when Kesha still brought her own unique stamp to the projects she wasn’t quite as passionate about (e.g., the Warrior album).

Appearing in another scene against a red backdrop next to a “being” dressed in some tribalistic attire, Haycock cuts again to Kesha in the white room as she lifts her hands up heavenward, as though genuinely waiting to be saved by “Love” or “God” or whatever name one wants to give to some sort of higher power. Meanwhile, the man in the “Kesha flesh suit” keeps running down the street, a slew of impressionistic street and car lights behind him—going at a pace that indicates some spectral, likely demonic presence is chasing him. And “God” or whoever knows that Kesha has been dealing with her fair share of getting chased down by demons (maybe that’s why she chose to face them head-on in a reality series like Conjuring Kesha). Perhaps whoever starts dragging her through the art gallery/“white space” is trying to help exorcise some of those demons (“maybe I’m possessed, bitch” as she herself sings), one of which could very well be the tribally-dressed being we keep seeing set against a devil-red backdrop. But that particular “creature” is soon topped by another surrealistic entity (straight out of something from a Salvador Dalí or Leonora Carrington-esque painting) also dressed in red (with an ensemble that makes its torso look like a triangle) and rounded out by a red headpiece that features three red squares atop a purple head (with an eyeball stuffed in its mouth). And, again, set against a red backdrop.

As Kesha keeps rocking her body back and forth in the “art gallery” as though a demon is being exorcised, we continue to see scenes of the “Kesha flesh suit” man, doing things like sitting on the sidewalk or, at last, walking instead of running down an L.A. street (L.A. being the site of Kesha’s, and so many others’, trauma). Whether or not that man is meant to be a representation of how Dr. Luke himself wore Kesha like his own “flesh suit” in terms of controlling her and getting inside her head with his verbally abusive rhetoric is at the viewer’s discretion.

But for those trying to find “logic” in the wonderful bizarreness of the video, it would be missing the point. For nothing about what Kesha has gone through in the last decade (or really, since 2005, when the trauma wrought by Dr. Luke was first set in motion) is “logical.” Nor is most individuals’ trauma (and subsequent effects). “Only Love Can Save Us Now” is an unapologetic visual manifestation of that.