“Eat the Acid” by Kesha, Friday, October 20, 2023

Earlier this year, Kesha released her fifth studio album, Gag Order. The album was intentionally written and produced for a less commercial appeal compared to the mega hits from the singer’s early career. Gag Order was released a month before the out-of-court settlement to the 2014 case Kesha v. Dr. Luke; the counter lawsuit had paused the singer’s career for five years. Kesha claimed that the hit-maker Łukas’s Sebastian Gottwald, better known as Dr. Luke, had sexually and emotionally abused the singer as well as held her in an exploitative recording contract. Dr. Luke claimed that Kesha had violated her contract. The allegations against Dr. Luke have caused some polarization in pop music as many artists, particularly female artists, have refused to work with the writer/producer, while he continues work producing artists who either evade the questions, defend the producer, or even claim that they are unaware of the accusations.  

LAST NIGHT I TALKED TO GOD. Kesha’s fifth album Gag Order fulfills her recording contract with Dr. Luke’s Kemosabe Records and RCA Records. The record is the first time Kesha has foregone electro-dance pop in favor of more experimental styles. The dark lyrical content of the album deals with the singer’s trauma and legal issues the singer has faced both before and during the proceedings. On a recent episode of Song Exploder, she also talked about how being alone with her thoughts during the pandemic caused the singer to change her writing tone on the album. For those of us who tuned out on the singer post 2010’s Animal or 2012’s Warrior,  today’s song “Eat the Acid” sounds like it comes from another artist. The Kesha of 2010 who used a dollar sign for the s in her name was all about hedonistic parties and numbing any pain with “a bottle of Jack.” Kesha’s epicurean lyrics and kitschy collaborations made fans and music critics to greatly underestimate the singer’s artistic vision and even her intelligence. Who knew the “TiK ToK” singer had a near-perfect SAT score? 

HATE HAS NO PLACE IN THE DIVINE.  In the recent Song Exploder episode, Kesha reveals the lead single for Gag Order’s title “Eat the Acid” comes from advice that her mother gave her. Kesha was raised by a single mother, a Los Angeles turned Nashville songwriter Pebe Serbert, who came to fame after writing a song that was made famous by Dolly Parton. Kesha grew up going to church, though she could never accept messages of hate toward the LGBTQ+ community as she herself identified within the community. But with all of Kesha’s recreational uses of alcohol and drugs, her mom advised her, “Don’t never eat the acid.” Kesha’s mother talked about how she had taken it as a teen and “everything [she] saw then c[ould]n’t be unseen.” In other words, it was a bad trip. Kesha says that she has never done acid. But in today’s song, Kesha had a dream in the midst of some of her lockdown anxieties. The dream was so vivid and so bizarre that she felt that it was the acid trip her mother had warned her about. In the dream her fears were assuaged in a conversation with God or the universe. Today’s song is certainly not a theology unless Kesha forms a cult. Kesha’s answer feels like a Jungian reaction to the New Age Los Angeles and the evangelical Nashville  in which she was raised. But I don’t say that to reduce the validity of the answer she found in a dream. But it does show how sometimes dreams, sleep, and maybe sometimes substances, can give us answers to questions we can never find in a conscious state.

Read the lyrics on Genius.