the sweet 16

(4) Ke$ha, “Tik tok”
survived
(8) SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR, “MURDER ON THE DANCEFLOOR”
252-213
and will play in the elite 8

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/21/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)

J. Nicholas Geist on ke$ha’s “tik tok”

“Wo-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh,
There’s a party at a rich dude’s house;
Dananana nuh nuh nuh nuh DA NA NA NUH NUH
…
I threw up in the closet.” —Ke$ha, 2009

“If you asked me then where I wanted to be,
It’d look somethin’ like this, livin’ out of my wildest dreams|
…
But if you ask me now, all I’ve wanted to be is happy.” —Kesha, 2023

It is 2010, and Kesha does not exist.
Ke$ha does, of course. In fact, it feels a bit like Ke$ha is all there is. She dropped “TiK ToK” at the end of 2009, and by the end of 2010, it will become the best selling single worldwide. And it is a song about Ke$ha. In her first single, she tells us exactly who she is: a woman who wakes up in a place she has no plans to return to, who brushes her teeth with Jack Daniels, who drifts from party to party and boy to boy with a clearly defined–but also seemingly quite generous–boundary as to exactly how gropey a guy is allowed to get before she takes offense. 
That this is who Ke$ha is seems unquestioned, here in 2010. She sits down for an interview with Billboard, and the interview is called “Ke$ha: The Billboard Cover Story.” Describing the woman he sees on the red carpet at the 2010 Grammys, Bill Werde explains,

Everything in her body language, expression, and posture perfectly conveys one thought: ‘I’m not sure, but I may still be drunk.’ It’s not so different from the look on her face when she climbs out of the bathtub in the video for her breakthrough song ‘TiK ToK.’

The woman on the red carpet, the woman in the bathtub: they are the same; they are Ke$ha. 

*

It is 2024, and I am researching for this essay, and so for the moment, Ke$ha is all there is.
My wife, Megan, and I are getting ready for work. Somewhere in the house our two children are wreaking unknowable havoc, but we allow that to remain undiscovered until we both have pants on. 
“There’s a track on Animal,” I say, “where she rhymes the words ‘pimps,’ ‘Trans Am,’ and ‘handbag.’”
“Those words don’t rhyme,” Megan says. 
“I didn’t think so either, but I’m not from Nashville.”
Megan leans toward the mirror, checking her lipstick. She doesn’t seem as interested in this as I feel she should be.
Because in a way, this is Ke$ha: an entity who would see a need to rhyme “pimps,” “Trans Am,” and “handbag,” and who would even arguably succeed. Animal is fascinating to listen to because it simply cannot be separated from Ke$ha.
On paper, it seems like it should be possible to separate this particular art from this particular artist. Dr. Luke, Ke$ha’s producer, was perhaps the bona fide hitmaker of the late aughts and early teens, and he cultivated a fairly deep roster of female pop stars. One might imagine, with a producer like that, which track goes to which artist might be at least a little bit arbitrary. And when I listen to “Your Love Is My Drug,” the first track on Animal, it is for a moment very easy to swap out Ke$ha for, say, Kelly Clarkson. I can imagine Katy Perry singing “what you’ve got boy / is hard to find / I think about it / all the time.” The same goes for “Kiss N Tell”—I can very easily imagine a circa 2009 Miley Cyrus singing “do I make your heart beat / like an 808 drum.”
But I cannot imagine anyone but Ke$ha singing “my steeze is gonna be affected / if I keep it up like a lovesick crackhead.” I cannot imagine anyone but Ke$ha singing “before I leave, brush my teeth / with a bottle of Jack.” I cannot imagine anyone but Ke$ha singing “I’m down to get faded / I’m not the designated / driver.” In order to explain Ke$ha as an entity, one must be able to define both “faded” and “enjambment.” 
To listen to Animal in 2024, knowing the story of the last ten years, is to ask: what was Ke$ha? Was the entity Ke$ha a role that the woman Kesha was playing? A performance of an exaggerated self? Was Ke$ha a prison from which Kesha had to escape? Or an Animal into which she transformed? If Ke$ha is a construct, who constructed her?
I try again to explain all this to Megan. “Later she rhymes ‘smashed,’ ‘cans,’ and ‘mess,’ but it doesn’t work as well.”
“Hm,” she says, as if the ways in which our performance of our identity can come to consume us from within hold no terrors for her whatsoever.
“The hook for that track is ‘there’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance,’” I tell her.
“There are times,” Megan says, “when the distance between two people—who share a life, and a house, and a bed, and a bathroom, and two children, and most of a career—seems so great as to be almost insurmountable.”
“It’s Henry’s favorite song now, so heads up. I told him not to sing it at school.”

*

It is 2010, and Kesha does not exist–at least, in the eyes of the media. Ke$ha is trying to tell Bill Werde about Kesha, but Werde doesn’t seem particularly interested. Everyone asks if she’s a party girl, Ke$ha says. Her answer, and Werde’s response, are so disconnected that it is worth reproducing them in full:
“If you mean ‘party girl’ like, at a club with a short skirt on with no underwear,” Ke$ha says,  “then no. I’ve gotten drunk before but never gotten a DUI. I don’t go to clubs. I try not to let my vagina hang out. I don’t do drugs, but I think I’m a walking good time and I talk kind of funny, so people think I’m messed up all the time. I’m not.”
But Werde does not hear this. “You can see where those people might get their ideas,” he says, and barrels into a conclusion he had clearly reached before starting: “the Ke$ha you hear on her songs is the Ke$ha you get in person.”
Except.
Except that two paragraphs previously, Werde told a story about the red carpet at the Grammys, where Ke$ha was worried that her complex designer dress was leaving her a little too exposed, and had to have a handler make sure she was covered to her liking. 
Except that Ke$ha seems to keep trying to bring the conversation back to her intelligence. She tells Werde that she was in an International Baccalaureate program. He puts it in quotation marks as if she made it up. (Twice.) She tells him that she got a 1500 on her SATs. He tells us that she was on The Simple Life. “The point being,” she tells him, “I’m not just a little pop moron.” He tells us what her burps are like. 
Except that despite Werde’s foregone conclusion, this is the interview where I first learned that Ke$ha and Kesha were two different people. It is where I first heard Ke$ha trying to introduce the world to Kesha, where I first heard a media voice actively suggest that there was no line between Kesha the woman and Ke$ha the construct, and most powerfully, where I first heard the story of the unsettling alchemy by which Ke$ha was constructed.
I am coming down hard on Bill Werde here, but as I said, in 2010, Ke$ha seems to be all there is. Scan the references list of her Wikipedia page and look at the titles from that time:

“Ke$ha tells us all kinds of awesome, crazy stuff: ‘Have I made out with chicks? Hell yeah.’” 

“Party Animal: Behind Ke$ha’s Big Debut.”

“Kesha – from Band Geek to Life of the Party.”

“Pop sensation Ke$ha gutsy, fearless.”

“Kesha and the Not-Quite-72 Virgins in Her Own Personal Heaven.”

“Kesha: Crazy, Sexy, & Too Fuckin’ Cool.”

“She’s a walking, talking, living dollar.”

“Make it $top.”

They don’t all include the $, but it’s there even when it’s not. That Kesha is Ke$ha, that the person and the per$ona are coterminous—in 2010, everyone agrees. 
Only Ke$ha seems unsure.

*

It is 2020, and—at least in my car—Ke$ha does not exist. 
My daughter, Violet, is an incredible force of will. When she wants something, she will not be impeded. If, in her toddlerhood, she decides a pair of pants are itchy—which she does on nearly a daily basis—the pants are gone. There will be no compromises about her outfit and no quarter granted to any parent so foolish as to try to reason with her. If she must crack the Earth to its very core and cast us all into the roiling mantle, so be it. 

ITCHY.

But that is later. For now, it is 2020, Violet is six months old, and for her, Ke$ha does not exist. We are in the car, and she does not want to be in the car, and so, in a polyphonic train-whistle scream jazz singers sometimes spend a lifetime learning, she wordlessly bellows her infant misery.
Megan reaches into the backseat and grabs Violet’s hand. Her brother, Henry, has headphones on, but absently pats her on her screaming head. 
“You’re okay, Violey,” I say. It’s strange: we’ve never really called Henry anything but Henry, but Violet became Violey—which looks a lot weirder written out than it sounds when I say it—almost at birth. 
“It’s okay,” I say, but it is not okay. There is only one path to calm for my cacophonic daughter.
We must play “Flik Flok.”
“Flik Flok” is not a toddler’s mispronunciation of “TiK ToK,” but rather a mashup of the beat from “TiK ToK” and the vocals from Dizzee Rascal’s 2007 track “Flex” which, unless you are an aficionado of the mid aughties UK garage scene, you have not heard. 

I have heard it, though. Thousands of times, I would imagine. On the drives across the desperately boring country between my house and my in-laws, Violet wails endlessly and unignorably until the last fiber of our resolve snaps and we put on “Flik Flok,” and she finally settles—only and exactly as long as “Flik Flok” plays, over and over, for hours and miles and an endless eternity of identical highway.
For whatever reason, “TiK ToK” on its own does not work for Violet. We try playing the original, but the instant she hears Ke$ha wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy, Violet makes her disappointment known to us at impossible volumes. Nevertheless, the backbeat of her infancy is the boxy synths and relentless bass of “TiK ToK,” looped and pounding and always. Ke$ha simply does not exist.

*

“Flik Flok” was created by the Kleptones, also known as DJ Erik Kleptone, the mad scientist (and singular plural) of the illegal music scene. Their special genius is their ability to put things in conversation with one another, and “Flik Flok” is, to my mind, among the greatest of their dialectics. We know, I hope, what “TiK ToK” is, but Dizzee Rascal’s “Flex” is its own fascinating contradiction.
“Flex” is a sort of horny ekphrasis: Rascal spends three and a half minutes celebrating the details of a woman dancing. He praises her timing, the way she controls her body. “Pure skill,” he says. He pauses to appreciate the movement of a drop of sweat. He catalogs her moves: the bogle, the butterfly. Drop it like it’s hot. Dip. Rock. Grind. Flex. “Your figure,” he says, “is so pleasing to the eye.”
And yet, woven in among the aesthete’s paean, Rascal makes sure to tell us he has a boner. “Got my tings rising,” he says, with only minor abashment. “What do you expect, that ain’t surprising.” Rascal’s appreciation is artistic, but it is also clearly visceral. It is about bodies. The wiggling. The jiggling. My heartbeat. My temperature. My blood pressure. “You could kill like that,” he tells her.
“Gosh,” he says, “you make a rude boy so shy.” 
It is this dualism that makes “Flex” such a good fit for “TiK ToK.” Rascal and Kesha are both attempting to live out the same superposition of states. They both are club kids and are not club kids. They are both animalistic and academic. They both are and are not themselves. Even the names—Dizzee Rascal, as you might imagine, is not the name on his library card, and in “Flex” he briefly refers to himself as “Dills,” a portmanteau of his “real” name, Dylan Mills. They create a space in the sweaty melee of the dance floor where they unquestionably belong, and yet keep themselves distant. It is easy, listening to “Flik Flok,” to imagine a sort of astral Dylan Mills and Kesha Sebert standing in the steamy haze above the crowd, watching Dizzee and Ke$ha dance.
This is why “Flik Flok” is so good: the braiding of these two artists, each of whom are already twinning with themselves, creates a helix of connection that is as meaningful thematically as it is musically.
Also, it fucking slaps.

*

It is 2005, and Ke$ha does not exist.
There is a 17 year old girl in Nashville with a single mom who knows some folks in the music industry. Her name is Kesha, but be careful: most of what we know about her—about how she snuck into Prince’s house to give him a demo, for instance—comes from stories Ke$ha will tell later. She thinks she might go to Barnard. She is studying the Cold War. Sometimes, her mom brings her along to the studio, and she records something, not really expecting anything to come of it.
One of those demos winds its way into the hands of Łukasz Gottwald, better known as Dr. Luke, who is well on his way to becoming a god of pop music production. (The power of Dr. Luke: when the time comes, and she writes the line “Wake up in the mornin feelin like P. Diddy,” Dr. Luke will get on the phone, and Diddy himself will that same day come to the studio to record a couple of voice lines for the debut single of an absolute unknown.)
On that demo, Dr. Luke hears two different people. Years later, he will play these two tracks for Bill Werde, who will write about it for Billboard, and I will learn about the utter fragility of identity. Werde: 

At Conway Studio where Luke works in Hollywood, he plays me two songs from the Ke$ha demo, each striking for different reasons. The first is a gorgeously sung, self-penned country ballad that hints at what could’ve been had Ke$ha pursued a different path. The other is a gobsmackingly awful trip-hop track. But at one point toward the end, Ke$ha runs out of lyrics and starts rapping, for a full minute or so: “I’m a white girl/From the ‘Ville/Nashville, bitch. Uhh. Uhhhhh.”

Luke and his producer friends were smitten by this bit of screwball-gangsta improv. His face lights up even now as he remembers. “That’s when I was like, ‘OK, I like this girl’s personality. When you’re listening to 100 CDs, that kind of bravado and chutzpah stand out.”

This is how I remember the story—how I think about Kesha, and about Ke$ha: a girl gave a man two versions of herself and asked him, “who do you want me to be?”

*

It is 2023, and Violet is 3 years old. 
She has started giving us concerts at bedtime. Once she has her pajamas on, she will go into the playroom and fish out an old toy guitar that I have had for 25 years, and she will bring it to the living room. She will ask us to put on Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” and she will stand in the center of the room, strumming the guitar, and singing the lyrics, which she almost knows. It is always “Drops of Jupiter.” There are other songs that she loves—“Flik Flok” still among them, and now that she has the more developed palate of a toddler, “TiK ToK” as well—but for the concerts, it is always “Drops of Jupiter.”
I watch her dance, graceful and proud, and I think about “Drops of Jupiter,” and Violet, and Kesha. “Drops of Jupiter” is a song about a woman who leaves, drifting unmoored from earthbound stability, to try to find herself. (The song is best if you imagine it is about Elizabeth Gilbert circa Eat, Pray, Love.) The speaker asks this woman about her travels: whether she found what she sought, whether she escaped being scarred, whether she flew, Icarine, too close to the sun, and what it cost her to do so. And because it is a song that is written and sung by a man, the speaker of the song feels that the woman owes him answers to all these questions, and that the most important question among them is did you miss me, despite the fact that he estimates his own value as a human being as approximately equivalent to that of a really good soy latte.
Her little voice sings out an approximation of this story, this man who feels he has a right to tell a woman who to be, and then we say prayers, brush teeth, and settle in the rocker in her bedroom. 
This week, she has been playing with nicknames–among other peculiar experiments, she is trying to get Megan to call me “Mump,” for reasons nobody really understands–and so today, she has had an argument with her brother, who insists always and only on being called Henry. She wants to call him Hens. Personally, I think that is the cutest thing in the whole damn world, but Henry is insistent: his name is Henry. 
I sing to her as I rock her. Her favorite lullaby since time out of mind is an old hymn, “Down in the River to Pray,” only with the names of our family swapped in for the fathers and sisters and brothers of the original. 
Before I can complete the first verse, though, she interrupts me. “Oh, Violey, let’s go down—”
“I don’t want to be called Violey any more,” she says.
“You don’t? I’ve called you that your whole life,” I say.
“No. Just Violet.”
This makes me instantly sad. It feels as if I am losing something, a connection with her I have had since she was born. But, like, what am I, the guy from Train? Should it be up to me to decide who she is? Of course not. 
I don’t want to let go of “Violey,” because Violey is my daughter. But she will spend the rest of her life deciding who she wants to be, and I never want that to be contingent on what anyone else thinks—least of all a man worth little more than a cup of coffee. 
So sitting here, holding this tiny blonde dynamo who is already so many women when she is still only barely a big girl, I say, “Okay, Violet,” and I let her take one of the million tiny steps she will take in her life away from the image of her I hold in my mind, and toward the person that she wants to be. It is a baptism song, after all. Let her christen herself.
“Oh, Violet, let’s go down, down in the river to pray.”

*

I do not think we can know each other.
I don’t just mean that I cannot know Kesha, or Ke$ha, that two people as distant as a pop star and a listener a decade and a half later cannot know each other. I don’t just mean that I cannot know Violet, or that the churning storm of mystery at the heart of a three year old is beyond the comprehension of my meager dad brain. I do mean those things, but that is not all I mean. I mean you and me: I do not think that any two people can know each other.
Here: can you tell me who you are?
Not “can you tell me things about you.” Can you communicate your completeness? Put your entire self into words that I can understand? Can you put your entire self into words that you can understand?
A friend has read this essay, and she keeps saying: Violet will tell you who she is, you just have to listen. Kesha, after all, tried so hard to tell us who she was, but we could not—or at very least did not—listen to her. But if Bill Werde had listened, had struck the $ from the title of “Kesha: The Billboard Cover Story” and told us without ambiguity that this woman was not the character she was playing, would we have known her? 
I am afraid that Ke$ha was born because a man named Łukasz heard a woman sing two songs on a demo, and thought “I can understand this person.” And “I can understand her” led to “I understand her,” which led to “I know her better than she knows herself,” which led to “I know what’s best for you,” and this is how Ke$ha was made. 
I do not know this with certainty. But I do know that Ke$ha was born because Kesha trusted that Dr. Luke knew what was best for her, and Dr. Luke did not deserve that trust.
Listen.

*

It is 2008, and Ke$ha does not exist, but be patient: she is about to be born.
Kesha has signed with Dr. Luke, and he has already told her which of the girls from the demo he wants to sign. He wants the party girl. Flo Rida is in the studio recording “Right Round” with Dr. Luke. Luke tells Flo that he thinks a female vocalist would round out the mix, and he has just the person.
Kesha comes into the studio, lays down a vocal track, and Flo likes it. Likes it enough, in fact, that he’ll use Kesha again on “Touch Me” in 2009. 
Here’s Dr. Luke, moving his artists like chess pieces. Here’s Flo Rida, who’s already been in the Top 40 several times. And here’s Kesha, young and broke and nameless.
“Right Round” spends six weeks at #1. 
Kesha doesn’t get a credit. Kesha doesn’t get a dime.
“I was so broke and on the No. 1 song and it was being played everywhere all the time,” she tells Vibe. I imagine her working a register somewhere, hearing her own voice over the store sound system, and watching someone use her tip jar to break a $5.  Kesha changes her name to Ke$ha. “Just kinda making fun of myself,” she says.

*

Here is my question, the question of the father of a daughter who is so strong, so sure of herself, so unstoppable, but who is nevertheless only three, and who will someday be 17, and 21, and 27 and will enter a world where women do not always get to decide who they are, or who they will be, the question of a father who has never been a woman, and who somehow has to help this small fireball decide who she is going to be when she is 17, and 21, and 27, and being pushed against by men who have their own ideas about who she should be, the question of a father who will, inescapably, be one of those men, here is my question:

how do I help her decide who she is?

*

Not long after “Right Round” topped the charts, Ke$ha would release “TiK ToK,” which would spend nine weeks at number one, under her own name. Ke$ha would become what Ke$ha became, and Kesha would fade, and Dr. Luke would help her launch not one but three #1 singles—which, incidentally, is the same number Flo Rida has. The version of Kesha Rose Sebert that Dr. Luke chose was incredibly successful, even if he kinda ripped her off with “Right Round.”
Except.
Except the thing I have not yet said: ripping her off is not the worst thing Dr. Luke ever did to Kesha. 
In 2014, she filed a series of lawsuits against Dr. Luke, accusing him of “sexual assault and battery, sexual harassment, gender violence, civil harassment, violation of California's unfair business laws, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and negligent retention and supervision.” She said he drugged her, raped her, and caused her eating disorder, among other things. 
The lawsuits were not settled until 2023, but they were settled—nine years after they were filed, but only a month after Kesha released Gag Order, her last contractually mandated album on Dr. Luke’s label, Kemosabe.  Somehow, despite two English degrees and having spent much of my life being extremely pretentious, I only recently encountered Camus’s famous observation that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” When I did, it was Kesha that I thought of, releasing album after album after album knowing who would be sharing in the profits of her labor. I want to imagine Kesha happy.
I do not and cannot know what happened—about Kesha’s allegations, about the settlement, or about any of this. I am just another man trying to say who Kesha is, and was, and speculating about the shape of her authentic self, and how well it fit the container that was Ke$ha, and who built that container, and if she chose to get into it or if she was put into it by Dr. Luke, and I do not and cannot know any of that.
But I have listened to “Praying,” and it seems obvious to me that it was written by a woman who was deeply, profoundly hurt, who is healing, and who is trying to forgive someone who has done her incredible harm. And, while this is perhaps an unusual standard of evidence, I know that the Wikipedia page for “Praying” features a picture of Dr. Luke next to the words “fuck you.”

I do not know Kesha, and I do not know Ke$ha. I do not know Łukasz Gottwald, and I do not know Dr. Luke. I do not know Dylan Mills, and I do not know Dizzee Rascal. I do not know Eric Kleptone, and I do not know the person who bears the name on Eric Kleptone’s birth certificate (although I do have a pretty high degree of confidence that that name is not “Eric Kleptone”).
What I know are the stories that are told about them, the stories that they tell about themselves, and the story I piece together from those stories.

*

It is 2024, and Kesha/Ke$ha superposition fills my car. She hasn’t used the $ for nearly a decade now, and Apple Music knows this. They have dutifully removed it from the artist name in her metadata. But the album art cannot be so easily changed, and so it is that Kesha and Ke$ha both ride with us as I take the kids to school.

We pull into Henry’s school, listening to “Take It Off” for the third time. We both get out, and I sign him in, give him a kiss and send him on his way. When I turn back to the car, Violet is gesturing frantically at me from the backseat.
“Henry,” I holler, “did you forget to kiss your sister?” One of Violet’s many insistences: if she does not get the affection she believes she is due, there will be problems. He runs back to the car, climbs into the backseat, and is instantly rebuffed. 
“She doesn’t want a kiss,” Henry says. “She wants you to pick her a flower.”
So, of course, I do. The school garden butts up to the parking lot, and some of the marigolds they have planted to keep bugs away have grown through the fence. I pluck the prettiest bloom from among those scraggly stems, and I hand it to Violet as I get back in the car.
“You got me an orange one?!” she says, and it is unclear to me if this is surprise, delight, or disapproval. By now, “Take It Off” has given way to “Kiss N Tell,” which is not Violet’s favorite.
“Not this,” she says. “Something else.” I push the previous track button twice.
“Wake up in the mornin,” Ke$ha says, “feelin’ like P. Diddy.”
In the backseat, Violet slowly, deliberately, raises her hands in triumph. “TiK ToK,” she says quietly.
She has grown and changed in the last three years, and has come to love “TiK ToK” as much as, if not more than, “Flik Flok.” Because she is a person, she is new and different every day; tomorrow, she will respond to the same song with “NOT TIK TOK, I DON’T WANT TIK TOK.” Today, though, “TiK ToK” merits this small celebration.
We arrive at her school, and I unbuckle her seatbelt, and she takes her flower and tucks it into the cupholder in the backseat. “I don’t want to tell anyone about my flower,” she says. “I’m going to leave it in the car.”

*

It is 2041, and Violet is 21 years old. She is in college in Montana, and she texts me during her boring night classes to make fun of her professors, but I do not know her. 
Or it is 2041, and Violet is 21 years old. She calls me on her commute from San Francisco to Manteca, to tell me about how Galinda is leaving the production of Wicked she’s been understudying, and how she’s pretty sure she’s going to get to move up, and she’s so excited and I am so excited for her, but I do not know her. 
Or it is 2041, and Violet is 21 years old. She collapses onto my bed in tears because of a fight she had with her partner about something her partner’s cousin said about her brother, and I have no idea what she is talking about, but she is so upset, and so with one hand I rub her back while she cries, and with the other I text Megan to see if she can make sense out of any of this, and she says she cannot, so we agree to sit down later and make a flowchart or something, and I ask Violet if she wants to get some air, and we sit on the front porch in the dark and the fog and the cold and she leans against my chest and I remember when she was three and she would sit on my lap and play with my earlobe until she fell asleep, and she says “Dad can we go inside? It’s fucking freezing,” and I start to say something but don’t because I know that she’s old enough to use grown-up words now, and we go in and she goes to bed, and when I come to check on her later she is asleep with a book in her hand, and I remember all the nights before she could even read when she couldn’t fall asleep unless there were at least a dozen books in her bed, and I love her every bit as much as I did then, but I do not know her.
It is 2024, and Violet is 3 years old, and I know Violet as well as it is possible to know a three year old, but I suspect that is not very well. She is miserably sick, and she is hungry, and she is so, so mad, because her mother and I have made her peanut butter sandwich, but she wants us to cut it like a clock, and I have tried to cut it like a clock but it is wrong, no, that is not like a clock, NOT A CLOCK, I want it like a clock, so Megan tries, no, Josh, it’s not a circle, a clock is a circle, and she cuts a circle, and Violet becomes incensed, NO NO NO NOT LIKE A CIRCLE LIKE A CLOCK CUT IT LIKE A CLOCK, and she shoves the sandwich across the table, and Megan asks ok, honey, i’m sorry, we’re trying, would you like daddy to make you a new sandwich and cut it like a clock? and Violet sniffles, pitiful, exhausted, feverish, and says uh huh, and so I make a second sandwich, and I take it to the table with the knife, and I let her direct me cut by cut, do you want me to cut it like this? and then here? like this? okay? and step by step I cut the sandwich, first vertical, then horizontal, across the diagonals, until it is divided into eighths like pie slices, and she sniffs and says see, daddy, like a clock, and I say I see, honey, because this is exactly how I cut the first sandwich twenty minutes ago, but she is 3 years old, and I do not know her.
 All of these Violets exist in my imagination. Even the one I dropped off at school this morning, who made me sit in the parking lot until we got to the end of “TiK ToK.” I have been with her since the instant she entered this world, and I will share with her every moment she will let me (although for transparency I must disclose that at this particular moment she has been sent to bed early because she threw a book at me for unclear reasons). But still, I cannot hold her completeness in my mind–even now, when her completeness is not quite tall enough to ride Jumping Jellyfish at Disneyland.
I can hold her in my heart, though. Not perfectly, but completely. There’s room in there for all the people she might ever decide to be.

*

“Bring it back,” Dizzee Rascal says at the end of “Flik Flok.” “Bring it back.”

*

It is 2014, and Ke$ha does not exist. Kesha is 27 years old. She has just left rehab for her eating disorder, and she decides that is done with the front. “I let go of my facade about being a girl who didn’t care,” she’ll explain at SXSW next week. “My facade was to be strong,” she’ll say, “and I realized it was total bullshit. I took out the $ because I realized that was part of the facade.”
But that is next week. Today, she is getting off a plane at LAX.

She is wearing a sweatshirt that says “IMA SURVIVOR,” and she looks so unfathomably young. If you told me she was 17 and not 27 in this picture I would believe it without question. There is something about this young woman, who is deciding so intentionally who she wants to be, who is deciding to leave Ke$ha behind and to become again the person she was ten years ago, someone I do not know and someone she might not know that well any more either, that I cannot help but love a little tiny distant bit.
I do not know her, and I have no right to feel any kind of way about her, and she is not 17 or 27 but almost my own age, but none of that matters to my dad heart. I cannot help it. I am so, so proud of her.

*

It is 2024 and Kesha is waiting for you. (Link is mildly NSFW; leave it to Kesha to tease new music with her bare ass.)
She has been waiting for some time, in fact. Gag Order dropped in May of 2023. That release meant that she had produced the number of albums required by her contract with Kemosabe, but it seems that was not the end of her contract’s exclusivity clause. From an interview with V Magazine this February:

I’ll say…to all my fans, all my animals, this has been a ride. I’ll say that there is a day—although I won’t say the day—but there is a day marked on my calendar when I am free to release music. So just know that she is out here in the woods writing and singing till four in the morning, ferociously. I am being a feral wild woman out here. So just know that.

To say it another way: she has been there the whole time. Kesha is waiting for us. 
And while she waits, she has retreated into the wilderness like the Animal she has always been. She has taken an Artist in Residence position at the Esalen Institute, where she is teaching a class called “The Alchemy of Pop Music,” and it seems somehow very on brand that she is doing this work somewhere the FAQ page includes entries for “How do I tip my massage therapist?” and “Must I get naked?” The interview calls her Professor Kesha, without even a hint of Bill Werde’s scare quotes. 
And I was wrong. We need not imagine Kesha happy. She is happy. Listen:

I’ll say this: I’ve never felt happier, more excited, more at peace and had such a purpose in my entire life. And I feel like I have earned the right to be this happy for sure. So letting that be…I am loving every minute of what feels like a brand-new and very exciting chapter.

This month, in the middle of the first round of this tournament, the unnamed date arrived. “First day I’ve owned my voice in 19 years,” she tweeted. “Welcome.”
That same day, on Instagram Live, she shared new music, and it is hard to imagine a purer joy. We need not imagine Kesha happy. Just look at her. 

Kesha is free. And she is waiting for us.

*

It is 2023, and Ke$ha does not exist. Kesha still performs “TiK ToK,” though, because why wouldn’t she? It is today what it has always been: an absolute banger. Two days ago, though, singer Cassie Ventura filed suit against Diddy alleging that their musical partnership was fraught with years of abuse, emotional manipulation, controlling behavior, and even rape. It is not hard to understand why Kesha would take this very seriously.
The Ke$ha of “TiK ToK” is eternally 21, one boot on the floor of a stranger’s bathroom, emerging half drunk from the tub like a scrungly Venus, cheap jewelry on her wrists and a cockeyed trucker hat on her soul. The first thing the Ke$ha of “TiK ToK” tells us about herself is that she wakes up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy. And why not? The Ke$ha of “TiK ToK,” after all, doesn’t mind a little light groping. But it is 2023, and Ke$ha does not exist. She has been gone for a long time now.
Kesha must have decided the instant she heard: tonight, she will not say his name. 
The synths haven’t changed, boxy and wobbly at the same time. The bass is no different, round and rough and boneshaking. But this is not the same woman.
“Wake up in the morning,” she sings, “feeling just like me.”

*

It is 2024, and Kesha is a professor now, and so I am asking myself: has she made a palindrome of herself?
Her time with Kemosabe began, in a sense, with the video for “TiK ToK.” If one has enough English degrees, or has spent enough time being pretentious, one might say that Ke$ha was born in that tub. She arises from it, Botticellian, and gathers her effects. She puts on her boots. She finds her bag. She walks out the door. Who it was that climbed into the bathtub, we cannot say, but it was Ke$ha who climbed out of that porcelain font and blinked hungover onto the Hot 100.
Her time at Kemosabe is over, well and truly. She owns her own voice again, for the first time in nineteen years. And the first thing she did was return to the water.

Garment by garment, she divests herself of all affectations. She walks barefoot on the gravel shore toward the water. (Sing with me: oh, Kesha, let’s go down, down in the river to pray.) She does not submerge herself—at least, not yet. For now, she stands, ankle deep, in the water of rebirth. She awaits a new baptism. 
It is coming. Whatever is next, it is coming. And she is there.
Kesha is waiting for us.

J. Nicholas Geist is an essayist. Josh’s print essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, Creative Nonfiction, and the much-mourned videogame journal Kill Screen. His extracurricular essay for March Fadness 2023, “The Essential Whiteness of One-Hit Wonders,” was included in Sight and Sound Magazine’s list of the Best Video Essays of 2023. If you are reading this on Day 1 of the tournament, he hopes that you will wish Kesha a happy birthday on Twitter, where she has recently begun cataloging her experiences playing Fortnite.

LUUK SCHOKKER ON SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR’S MURDER ON THE DANCEFLOOR  

It feels foolish to write about Murder on the Dancefloor in the year of our Lord 2024 and expect to get away with ignoring its resurgence in popularity. (If you think you’re getting away, I will prove you wrong—right?) Then again, I don’t really know who Barry Keoghan is, I haven’t seen Saltburn, and I don’t feel much for haphazardly interweaving cultural criticism in a piece that’s mostly about me (as it should be, considering the song at hand). But hey, I’ll play along. I should at least point out the obvious and mention that the song reached #51 on the Billboard Hot 100 earlier this year, a list it never managed to make upon its initial release, courtesy of the Irish actor dancing around naked to it in the 2023 Emerald Fennell movie, introducing the song to a whole new audience in the process.
Here’s what I can do. I can imagine being back on the ship. Being driven up to this industrial beast of a machine, rectangular and off-white, bluntly blocking the view of the horizon over the North Sea. The steam rising from its chimneys. I can re-imagine its interior, a non-space if there ever was one, a plug-and-play commercial area that might just as well have been anything else, anywhere else. A German airport, a mall in the Balkans, whatever. What counts is not the ship itself, but the fact that we’re about to come aboard. We have a school exchange trip to England ahead of us and this journey across the Channel is our gateway to testing our shiny new vocabulary on actual native speakers, our chance to finally see if our extra hours in class mean something in the real world. The two buses that park deep inside the belly of the beast hold three freshman classes and just as many teachers. Upon leaving school grounds, it feels as if we’ve taken a sizeable chunk out of the student population, but by the time the buses unload, there’s an even bigger crowd to dissolve into. We’re kids, young and clueless. And yet we walk around boastfully, act as if we board these giant cruise liners on the daily, pretend we know what we’re doing. There’s some seventy of us, the boat is as big as our school—there’s no way the three teachers can keep track of us all, much less oversee what we will do for the next couple of hours, but we take their lackluster chaperoning for a vote of confidence and strut around the ship as if it is, indeed, the local mall. Watch us go.
 The change in atmosphere is almost palpable. It happens in every group of teens doing something exciting for the first time, and our entrance on this giant ship is no different. We summon more confident versions of ourselves to mask our prepubescent insecurities; we collectively hide how impressed we are by these otherworldly surroundings, how much the second-rate casinos wow us, look at us adulting here, no big deal. We hope it all comes true if we continue to play the part, going at it with the same frantic eagerness us little nerds tend to reserve for our schoolwork. It’s not all an act, though. It doesn’t take much to believe it. As we take the first candid shots with our disposable cameras, we really do start to feel as if we’re evolving from secondary school freshmen to citizens of the world. There’s something about this journey that sets free actual confidence in even the shiest among us. We intuit that this five-day trip marks a shift in how we move through life. Only a year ago, we were kids, rehearsing songs for our primary school farewell musicals[1]. Now, we embark on an international adventure. (Recalling this experience more than twenty years later, I can obviously see how this trip barely qualified as life-changing—I mean, we were twelve and thirteen years old, we practically still had to discover there even was such a thing as an individual self to shape at all. Still, a feeling often makes a more lasting impression than the actual experience, and the ship undoubtedly stirred up our feelings.)
In anticipation of a new audience, the English, the soon-to-be exchange buddies we have yet to discover as real people, real-life versions of the headshots on photocopied sign-up sheets, being on the ship nudges us into re-shuffling our freshly established social hierarchies. We restlessly wander around in unaccustomed groups of five or six, gauging what cruise life has to offer. We line up for off-brand fast-food, burn through our pocket money in the tax-free stores. We find the right form for talking about girls and boys we may or may not like by coarsely ranking our classmates in ever-shifting top-5’s. The year is 2002, and when we pass any of the giant screens that seem to appear everywhere on the passenger decks, we are ambushed by music videos, Top 40 songs blasting on a volume that we never hear during daytime. These are the songs that will soon turn up on the quarterly Hitzone CDs, records we copy religiously so we can listen to these same tracks on our discmen over and over. For the coming weeks, it will be one song in particular. Wherever we walk, wherever we huddle to share our fries and chicken nuggets, re-iterate our top-5’s, munch on overpriced yet undertaxed candy, we can hear the same song—an anthem of showing yourself to the world that fits the moment like a glove. It’s Murder on the Dancefloor by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
There’s something remarkable about Ellis-Bextor’s breakout hit that hits right from the get-go, when the singer’s distinct Queen’s English first joins in with the snappy instrumentals, singing—almost whispering—murder in a way that demands the listener’s immediate attention. Of course no one is actually murdered on the dancefloor, but still, the very concept of murder instantly clashes with the Ellis-Bextor’s quirky tone and the song’s upbeat instrumentals. She comes out swinging with what I suppose I can best describe as a performance of self-confidence—the accent that doesn’t directly match the bluntness of the lyrics, the posh voice that you wouldn’t expect to insist on burning the goddamn house right down. Here’s someone who is stretching the limits of how she wants people to perceive her, acting tougher than she is so that doing so can make her tougher in return. (A comparison to Britney Spears’ I’m a Slave 4 U comes to mind—if you want people to think of you differently, showing a more explicit side of yourself in your lyrics may help seal the deal.)
There’s a reason why Murder on the Dancefloor has remained Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s biggest hit in a career that now spans more than two decades, why she still loves to sing it and why audiences keep requesting her to do so. It’s the same reason why it suits a movie about desire so well and why, back in the pre-summer of 2002, it feels so fitting to constantly hear it on the boat to England, to have it become an inescapable anthem for our inaugural trip as a herd of individuals. When Sophie Ellis-Bextor demands her audience to hear me when I say, hey, she sounds a little shrill, slightly hoarse, but somehow in control. This, I’ve come to think, is the essence of the song, perfectly echoed by the line “If you think you’re getting away, I will prove you wrong”. There it is again, the desire that comes true because you speak it out loud. Ellis-Bextor is breaking out of her mold, egged on by the playfulness of the strings—an element you could easily miss if you don’t pay close attention to it, but which is essential to propelling the song forward over its repetitive beat, giving the arrangement just that little bit of chutzpah. Yes, it’s murder on the dancefloor, but just as much, it’s us twelve-year-olds testing the waters of our stunted individual voices. It’s the perfect nu-disco translation of what this trip will come to mean for us.
The song keeps reappearing for the full six hours it takes to cross the Channel, blaring its message from every giant screen the ship has on display. I am a person in my own right and if I have something to say, you better damn well pay attention. The fact that I connect it to what we’re experiencing is a performance in itself, to be honest. I mean, what do we know? We’re cubs. When we roar, actual grown-ups will only want to pet us. But we recognize the song for the truth it carries in its package regardless, instantly understanding the universal message that will keep ringing true until and beyond Murder on the Dancefloor’s chart re-appearance in 2024. A surprise revival, you might say, but is it really, though? Sure, a naked Irishman going wild over the beat is bound to tickle the unpredictable whims of the TikTok generation, but I’d say this song was always destined for a comeback. As far as hyping up self-confidence goes (and don’t we all need that every once in a while?), Murder on the Dancefloor is up there with the very best. The magic is there. It’s always been there. And it always will be. Sophie Ellis-Bextor will continue to blow us all away. (Hey.)

[1] Yes, this is an actual Dutch tradition.

Luuk Schokker writes short stories and the occasional essay. His work has been featured on Catapult, as well as on Papieren Helden, De Optimist and Hard//hoofd in his native Netherlands. In addition, every once in a while, he makes an appearance as an unexceptional but crowd-pleasing DJ, heavily (and joyfully) relying on 00’s bangers.