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VOTD: Kesha - “Praying” - Good for Her, Good for Us, Good for Music

On July 6, Kesha released her first solo original song since her 2012 album, Warrior. The new song, “Praying,” is a powerful, emotional catharsis piece in response to years of alleged psychological and physical abuse from her Kemosabe Records producer and mentor, Dr. Luke.

Kesha pressed charges against Dr. Luke in 2014 for a swath of alleged exploitations. In a nearly two-year court battle against him, and eventually Sony, she asked to be released from her record contract, which was initially signed with Kasz Money and then licensed to Sony subsidiaries RCA/Jive and Kemosabe Records, professionally binding her to Dr. Luke, who she says was, in addition to everything else, stifling her creativity with overly controlling artistic counsel. Sony claimed that it was “legally unable to terminate a contract to which it was not a party,” so she did not release any music the entire time of the proceedings. Ultimately, the court dismissed her lawsuit.

This is her first solo release without the direct involvement of Dr. Luke, but it was still released on Kemosabe Records (of which Dr. Luke is no longer CEO). After going through some seemingly profound traumatic mental, physical, and legal turmoil, Kesha is resurrecting herself—resurfacing from that dark time into a new, triumphant, more adult young woman and artist.

In that sense, this song is a triumph—for her, for us, and for music. She seems to finally be free from her contractual, artistic, and mental captivity, and moving past what she describes as “hands down the hardest time of [her] entire life.” She is empowering herself in the face of what was, at the very least, an oppressive artistic environment and a painful, multi-year, unsuccessful legal battle. She is taking the creative reins of her own artistic career and moving above and beyond her alleged abuse and exploitation to something seemingly bigger, brighter, clearer, and more honest. She is putting art, emotional honesty, and spiritual healing first, and it makes this song powerful. Lines like “the best is yet to come,” “when I’m finished they won’t even know your name,” and the powerfully succinct “I’m proud of who I am” have me fist bumping in teary-eyed, emboldened excitement whenever I hear them. The chorus refrain, “I hope you’re somewhere praying, praying, I hope your soul is changing, changing, I hope you find your peace falling on your knees, praying,” speaks a truth of acceptance and clarity in the face of pain—forgiveness in the face of a bitter injustice. And that high F at the end has me squirming in empathetic awe every time, even though I know it’s coming.

And thank goodness for all that. I was scared when I saw her July 5 video announcement on Twitter regarding her upcoming release. It seemed… sexual in presentation, which struck me as patently dissonant with the nature of the announcement and the subject matter of the song. To put it bluntly, I was afraid she was going to commoditize her own alleged abuse, which would have been a defeat for her, for us, and for music. My opinion of Kesha’s music pre-2015 was dominated by frustration—less with her and more with the world as well as with my millennial peers for consuming it and turning it into anthems of apathy, addiction, vacuous connection, and, once the drug-induced denial fades, loneliness. Her older music epitomizes some of the more upsetting aspects of modern popular music and the sentiments it sells to my generation. Most of her top songs (“Tik Tok,” “Die Young,” “We R Who We R,” “Take It Off,” “Blow,” “C’Mon,” “Supernatural,” “Crazy Kids”) and even “Your Love is My Drug,” which I considered excluding from this list for the potential interpretation of her lyrics as rooted in a genuine excitement about emotional intimacy, convey the exact same regurgitated themes of a drug-induced, cynical, sexual apathy and recklessness, and perhaps above all else, of addiction—to drugs, to sex, to status, to the self, and to its destruction. “Your Love is My Drug” may actually champion themes of addiction most directly with lines like, “The rush is worth the price I pay, I get so high when you're with me, But crash and crave you when you leave,” and nonchalantly promotes self-obsessed status preoccupations with lines like, “My steeze [status/swag] is gonna be affected if I keep it up like a love sick crackhead,” which shamelessly equates emotional detachedness with coolness. After one thorough listen to the song, it’s clear that the love she speaks of is some combination of sexual excitement and infatuated dependence.

Her music is sold, I think, as some kind of rebellion against… something… maybe responsibility for mental health… maybe the patriarchy and similarly sexualized and emotionally detached lyrics from her male counterparts… but it of course conforms with ham-fisted vulgarity to the performed sexual expectations of that same patriarchy. So, who knows? To me as a high schooler, it was boring, stupid, and so sad that that’s what sells—status-driven hedonism, sex and apathy, and apathetic sex. So, yeah, to a high school me, Kesha’s music was cringe-worthy and depressing. Then, a friend sent me her cover of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright,” which is also sad, but for all the right reasons. It made me cry and introduced me to her struggles with Dr. Luke. I began wondering how much control she previously had over the aesthetic she was portraying and if she’d have preferred something different. According to her MTV show, My Crazy Beautiful Life, she had miniscule creative control over Warrior. Allegedly, most of the 70-something songs she wrote for that album, including her favorite "Machine Gun Love," were excluded against her wishes.

All of which is to say: maybe what we’re seeing now is the real Kesha—or, rather, something real from a Kesha that’s been trapped in certain performance paradigms for her entire early career. The beginning of the video for “Praying” reignited the fears I initially had as she talked in a theatrically despondent voice about her desire to just give up, asking God, “Why?” When the song came in, though, my concern was immediately quelled and I saw the beginning monologue of despair and surrender as the other option… the regretful path of pain she could have taken, but that she is superseding—and I appreciated it for what it was. What I hear in the new song feels honest—a strong base to the acidity of the social media-themed songs she released when I was a kid. As she indicates in rainbow letters at the end the music video for “Praying,” this is The Beginning. I hope she’s telling the truth because that would be a rare good in popular music—and for everyone.

-Ryan Savage

#VOTD #Music Video #Kesha #Praying #Ryan Savage

NEW TRACKS: Radiohead - “Man of War” - If not then, why now?

For years, Radiohead has been considered by many (notably Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and my parents) to be one of the best and most creative bands of all time. While The Bends and other such early albums are beloved, well-made, and respected parts of the band’s rich legacy—and of the trajectory of rock music in general—I think what has really earned Radiohead their status as a super-band is their growth and maturation since their early days. One of the biggest areas of growth is the granularity of their attention to detail and the painstaking subtlety of their second-to-second decision-making. Radiohead has for twenty-plus years treated every second of music they’ve released like a gold mine—some are excavated; some are left alone, the gold twinkling from the river bed – but every moment is intentional and plush with the gold they saw.

Radiohead’s new video for “Man of War” unfortunately seems to be lacking in this regard musically, visually, and conceptually. This wouldn’t be an issue if this were almost any other band. But for Radiohead—the innovative frontiersmen that brought us In Rainbows ten years ago (and OK COMPUTER ten years before that)—I find it both disappointing and confusing.

“Man of War” is Radiohead’s most recent release from OKNOTOK—“the original twelve track album [OK COMPUTER], [with] three unreleased tracks and eight B-sides, all newly remastered from the original analogue tapes.” When I listen to this new song from a purely musical perspective, I am tickled to hear some classic Jonny Greenwood noisy, string-crushing, overdriven guitar tracks, but am generally left empathizing with the initial decision to leave it off the original 1997 release of OK COMPUTER. It seems beneath the aesthetic granularity of that acclaimed album, and musically/compositionally, not even to the standard set by The Bends in 1995. It’s not simply that they’ve taken a step back from their more detail-oriented approach of the last twenty years; it’s that every aspect of the piece feels fundamentally derivative of things that they had already superseded with OK COMPUTER. A friend of mine describes it as sounding like “a James Bond theme song that would perhaps be in the top five or ten best of that category of song.” I could see “Man of War” potentially being one of the more uninteresting tracks on Pablo Honey, but in this sense, it fundamentally does not fit all that well into the creative arc of the band.

The video depicts a man walking through city streets and alleyways and alternates between two portrayals of this scene: one during the day and one at night. The man is pursued by an increasing number of people, and shows heightened, visible anxiety at night. Perhaps the video is meant to highlight the performed self as opposed to the unperformed self; or the calm self as opposed to the anxious self; or the wild/free self as opposed to the contained self; or the self that seeks connection as opposed to the self that desires solitude. At the end, it seems that the people who had been chasing him are following him, in a cultish fashion, rather than pursuing him with harmful intent—a groupthink-y theme we’ve seen time and again in Radiohead pieces. Whatever the message, it seems played out and derivative of their own and others’ work since – and before – OK COMPUTER. All of which is to say: if not then (in 1997), why now?

My vast respect for the band, and for the microscopic intentionality that has defined their work for years, has led me to wonder if this is somehow a sarcastic or Tim and Eric-like cynical statement on their fan base’s willingness to consume their product, regardless of its worth in their own eyes. Or perhaps it’s just a nostalgic remark on where they’ve been. And I hope it is. At least that would be honest, and not a reflection of an aesthetic apathy they may perceive themselves to have earned after proving themselves with their work over the past twenty years. I had worried this apathy might be developing when I first heard “Burn the Witch,” the catchy but somewhat ordinary single off their 2016 release, A Moon Shaped Pool—but, again, I’m only judging their music with the high standards they’ve set for themselves, and I have to confess that “Burn the Witch” eventually grew on me.

Whatever the motivation for this release, I hope Radiohead continues making music on par with the boundless creativity and curatorial scrutiny of their previous work. Rather, if they continue releasing music, I hope that they will keep pushing themselves and persevere in their now quarter-century enduring pursuit of excellence, if not for their fans, then out of respect for their own body of work. Nostalgia is legit, and cynicism is, at least, understandable, but neither is the gold they chase, and neither is the gold they sold me on. Oddly, I think Radiohead, even after the three-decade musical marathon they’ve run, has more potential to make something truly innovative and powerful than most of the fresh, passionately exploding new groups I see in the genre (generally speaking) today. As always, I will eagerly await their next release, and hope to lose myself in the world they create with it, as I have with almost all their other music. I know if they’re 100% in it, the gold will be there, too.

-Ryan Savage