album review: 'gag order' by kesha

…I feel like there are a lot of us who have been expecting Kesha to make this album for a long time.

Hell, for those of us who have been long-time fans of Kesha since the early days, this has always been lurking between the lines in the margins, a yawning, haunted darkness that amidst all the glitter and whiskey was always there, albeit never in frame. And it was the sort of darkness that, at least to me, felt weightier, calling back to the nastier edges of psychedelia that Kesha has cited among her influences for a decade, giving her colourful splashes of electro-pop a grimy realism of what wasn’t far away. I’m not sure where it first crept through - I think it might have been on Cannibal - but I remember noticing it most in 2012, first on Deconstructed, an EP where a selection of song were given spare, increasingly downbeat and haunted instrumentals, and then there was her work with the Flaming Lips on their album that year, which led to rumours of a full-length collab named Lip$ha that would never come to light.

And by now we all know why - I’ve talked about the nightmarish situation with Dr. Luke in multiple videos for years now, and I don’t want to recap it again, especially as by Rainbow in 2017 and the advent of the #MeToo movement, even if the court cases had nearly all fallen against Kesha, it felt like there was at least some public outcry and a sense of redemption… And then thanks to Dr. Luke signing Doja Cat in a deal with Kemosabe that looks just about as predatory, and the willingness of plenty of acts to work with him again and the music industry willing to reward them - if you can make more hits, it’s amazing how fast people ignore allegations if more money can be made - it felt like a backslide that left Kesha alone, facing a defamation suit from Dr. Luke, and a court order to not speak on it, hence the title of this album.

This has left Kesha in rough waters - Rainbow did well almost purely on sales and saw Grammy nominations, but no wins. Her next album High Road seemed like an attempt to go back to fun, flashy pop, keep career momentum going, especially as such a positive response to Rainbow guaranteed that Kemosabe couldn’t interfere much as she was one of the few remaining acts on the label’s roster - Doja Cat had released Hot Pink in late 2019 but that album was a slow-burn to get crossover traction. But a few major problems derailed the plans, the first being the label had no interest of pushing any single, the second being that High Road wasn’t exactly at Kesha’s best - I blame her cowriters and producers for that and just a thinner sound overall, although ‘Resentment’ is one of her best ballads ever - and the third being the fact the album dropped in late January of 2020, a few months before the pandemic killed her tour. That left her in a rough place, and while there were bright spots - ‘Cannibal’ would go viral and become a minor hit, she had a reasonably successful podcast, she’d collaborate with Walker Hayes on ‘Fancy Like’ that got him pop crossover attention, and she had a Discovery+ show in 2022 that had a brief run; honestly, Kesha’s been good on TV for years now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of that in the future.

But now it’s 2023, and we have a new album that’s entirely produced by Rick Rubin, albeit with the occasional side producer including Kesha herself. Reportedly this is her last album with Kemosabe, and it was not one that I expected to chart any songs whatsoever - hell, from what I can tell with the physical copies, that rollout has been messy as well. And it left me with very conflicting emotions - on the one hand, Rick Rubin is not cheap to get for production, and Kemosabe and RCA beyond being dogshit at promo would have less than zero interest in promoting this… but hey, if this is Dr. Luke finally cutting his losses to move the hell on, given that Doja Cat and Becky G are stars enough in their own right - assuming he has much direct control of all of this, given how his mismanagement of Kemosabe forced Sony to step in years ago - maybe this is a last favour to clear the books so Kesha can finally be free. Either way, from the early singles and acclaim suggesting that this was Kesha’s darkest, most experimental record to date, I was certainly intrigued to hear more, even if as someone who’s been on this ride for a long time I was setting myself up for a rough listen. So… how is Gag Order?

…I’ve talked before about albums that feel like a culmination, where if you have all of the context from previous years or releases, they’re going to hit harder because you know the roots of all of it, and while Rainbow may have opened the door for it and High Road felt like a feint away from it, Gag Order is diving straight into what some of us have seen or known about around a decade now. Thus from my standpoint, it’s a boundary-pushing and utterly harrowing listen that I can argue may be among the best albums of 2023… but the big qualifier to that is I have all of that context, not just the data but the history as someone who has followed this emotional journey for years now. For pretty much everyone else, you’re heading into a stridently uncommercial, psychedelic nightmare that is deeply rooted in art pop, freak folk and gospel, where you might recognize the influences but like with every Kesha album the fusion is utterly unique. In other words… there’s a part of me that wants to say this is Kesha’s 808s & Heartbreak, but it’s probably closer to her Strange Mercy - and yes, those are big comparison points that this album more than achieves and deserves.

And I want to start with the 808s comparison because it’s so loaded, but also very apt the more thought I gave it, and that begins with Kesha herself. She’s always bent autotune to amplify her presence on record despite being a legit excellent singer who doesn’t need it to clean anything up, but the way Kanye used autotune on 808s was to accentuate his alienation and distance from the world, and against increasingly spare and brittle mixes full of harsh synths and blocky percussion, this is where Kesha taps into that emotional spectrum. But she doesn’t just stay there - in fact, between all the overdubs, multi-tracking, and choral, borderline southern gospel backdrops, this is probably the most expansive showcase of Kesha’s singing to date - she’s described the album as ‘sounding the way my head feels, dipping in and out of depression, gratitude, rage and hope, always moving’. And that plays a major factor in how the vocals are mixed and mastered - binaural pickups where Kesha’s voice will alternate across your ears and pull you further into a dizzying hall of broken mirrors. It’s built to disorient and make you feel uneasy - unless you’ve known all of this is coming and then it’s intended to amplify a sense of dread. Now there are consequences to this - sometimes the songs can feel abortive or jagged in their compositions, where ideas don’t fully coalesce into the punchy pop tracks everyone knows, or they shamble a bit too long without fully hitting a climax like on ‘Living In My Head’; there are more that work than don’t because Kesha always maintains a focus on melody and mantra, and Rick Rubin is a good enough producer to create that haunted, spacious atmosphere where any rough edge left in the mixing is intentional… but if you’re only used to Kesha’s hits, this will sound alien and the last thing you’ll want to hear.

Now even if you’ve accepted that this is closer to the art pop side of the spectrum, the other comparison to 808s & Heartbreak is that this approach to sound and experimental pop can wear its influences pretty starkly - for 808s it was The Postal Service and especially Kid Cudi, where I’d also hear splashes of his rough edges across Gag Order, but the heavy reliance on interweaving choral passages remind me a lot of Bjork, and the shift in time signatures and patter at the end of ‘The Drama’ is pretty much a straight lift from Fiona Apple circa Fetch The Bolt Cutters, along with a nice Ramones interpolation. But the most stark parallel is early 2010s St. Vincent, specifically Strange Mercy in the blockier synth bass, sharper percussion, and waves of vocal layering before she became too alien and stiff on the self-titled album. But it’s still inexact - Kesha’s roots in rougher vintage psychedelia, country, and gospel give whatever guitars that show up a warmer texture, it’s a looser, more ragged album, and while some of the ethereal moments might call to mind those raw flashes of transcendence, Kesha doesn’t hold the audience at arm’s length, she’s dragging you down this spiritual journey with her. The opener ‘Something To Believe In’ is s a great example with its freak folk cyclical progression that almost feels like a nursery rhyme from hell, and any haunted transcendence from ‘Eat The Acid’ evokes as much horror as bliss in how the synths builds. Then there are the ‘bangers’, which I’m cautious to describe as such because they can be just as demented like ‘Only Love Can Save Us Now’, which splits its crushing bass on the verses with choppy acoustic strumming, gospel piano, and organ, inspired by the sort of religious music where ecstasy can be terrifying and thrilling simultaneously, or how ‘The Drama’ literally builds off of a plea for distraction from existential emptiness with a house groove that only seems to set up the coming freakout that feels like you’re living through an overdose.

Now I do think if the album stayed more in this territory on sheer energy folks would find this easier to digest, but the flipside is that this album does get ballad heavy especially on the back half, where the synths are still harsh, the keys are still faded, and while there’s still plenty of weirdness - the old-fashioned backing vocals behind ‘All I Need Is You’, the aching, offkey vibes of ‘Too Far Gone’, the warbling autotuned breakdown of ‘Peace & Quiet’ with that really striking trilling outro against more conventional programmed percussion - co-produced by Hudson Mohawke, I’d put his contributions there and on ‘Living In My Head’ as slight missteps that don’t quite mesh - or just how every song feels a little askew in the fine details in a remarkably organic way. That is one thing for which I’ll unabashedly praise Gag Order in comparison with 808s - despite its swerves, it feels utterly cohesive to Kesha’s voice and presence, uncompromising but impeccably mixed and mastered to capture that atmosphere - none of this feels like a gimmick, and unlike the bricked out loudness war compression, any claustrophobia that comes with this album feels organic… and that much darker.

And that’s where we have to go to the lyrics and themes, where given the current legal situation Kesha couldn’t directly reference anything going on with the case, she had to leave enough plausible deniability, and given that this was recorded throughout years of lockdown, there’s a much sharper focus on how the situation has made her feel, pull you into her emotional journey and attempt to find a way out. A lot of the iconography around this album shows Kesha being trapped or strangled or suffocated, and that’s the language she uses in the poetry, especially as it becomes intermingled with loneliness, exhaustion, depression, and very real trauma along the way - it’s graphic but in the quietly horrifying way where it’s descriptive enough to really imply a stark scene but never fully showcase it, let your imagination fill in the blanks. That’s also how Kesha approaches spirituality - it’s primal, it’s ineffable, it’s the sort of thing you feel more than you can explain, and when you’re faced with that sort of intensity… it leads to ego death and feeling so very small compared to the universe, all the while with the realization that as a public figure caught up in the legal situation from hell that it’s all on display, which leads to its own anxious, crippling paralysis. ‘Fine Line’ is the most utterly stark in that regard, taking many of the old tabloid and critical descriptions of her and her art to grip some form of narrative she can control, made all the worse by the age old question of whether her label making money off the trauma she exposed on Rainbow really helped or was just more exploitation. But when you follow it with the equivalent of a rager with ‘Only Love Can Save Us Now’ that flies so close to the edge in every facet, it’s telling how the following song is a breather where in the face of age and loneliness, feeling like both the soundtrack and punchline to the story, the one thing she’s been able to cling to is her old cat Mr. Peeps, and it’s a real moment of genuine sweetness. And given ‘The Drama’ is borderline nightmare fuel where you can imagine the edge of an OD, it’s telling how at the end she wishes she gets reincarnated as a house cat - that’s very Kesha.

And then the album shifts - the Ram Dass interlude, referring to an old academic and guru who passed away in 2019, it hits two interesting points, both in the question of ‘garbage as art’ which many described her old music, especially contextualized in a plea for acceptance and self-actualization… but then how you can break free of that trauma, not close yourself to the world but recognize that being open to being hurt again is far better than being among the living dead. And even then, it’s not enough - there’s a rage at feeling like time has been wasted or misspent in relationships she was responsible for ending, which reminds me a lot of Miranda Lambert’s The Weight Of These Wings, another lonely, punishing atmospheric project processing pain and angst growing older, or the anxiety that comes with needing passion or chaos in one’s relationship and feeling hemmed in… and then by ‘Hate Me Harder’, it feels like the follow-up to ‘Praying’, but also built to echo at everyone who has persisted in punching down at her… when you’ve gone through the hell she describes on this project, they feel trivial, and if that rage helps them become better by the end, she allows herself to not care so she can keep moving. And by the end… she just wants to be happy, and in the internal arc of this album, she can’t allow herself to be jaded or hurt for them any longer - time is too precious, and I really like how open-ended the album feels because she’s not fully sure how that will all manifest itself, but that there is hope… or at you have to believe there is, right?

…folks, this is one of those projects that I cannot say is for everyone - if you have not bought into the harrowing, alien, deeply unsettling emotional rollercoaster that’s coming, if all you know of Kesha are the shiny pop hits or are hoping for another Rainbow that was able to contextualize trauma in a more accessible package, this is not that. Despite its relatively short length and brisk pace, it’s a lot to process and the territory in which Kesha pulls you is not designed to be comfortable especially if all you’re here is for the fun or just straightforward catharsis, because she gets the reality that a lot of the catharsis is not coming and you need to find a way to keep living on the other side of it. Recommending Lingua Ignota albums is easier than this, because while it’s still catchy and amazingly well-produced and hits many a moment of transcendence, if you’re not emotionally onboard for the culmination, I don’t think this is going to win you over; it’s not accessible, it’s not easy, and if you get past the weirdness of its sound the subject matter assumes you’ve been listening between the lines and very few have. I would only recommend this to the diehard Animals… it’s ragged, it’s uncomfortable, it’s a hard listen, but I’d argue it’s one of the best of 2023. You’ve been warned heavily about what you’re getting into… I just think it’s worth it.

And Kesha… there’s nothing I need to say. You did the work, you’ve found the start of a road on the other side, and I hope the rich bounty of freedom spills forth. You deserve it.