When I was up early in the morning, I rediscovered what it was like to be a “Crazy Kid.” Even if I was only rocking in the dark and to Iggy Pop’s echoey asides on the Warrior album.
It all started when I was brainstorming ideas for writing and planning out life choices. But Kesha’s early music is not exactly the right kind of music to listen to if you want to train “thinking about consequences.” But if you want to feel your body move with 2000s-2010s sensations, you probably picked the right artist.
At least for the time.
I grew up enamored with that kind of beat. Yeah, I jammed out because it “had a good sound”; it flowed. But, being me, I felt that music. It wasn’t the type that I easily dismissed as easy-listening fodder.
Hearing more songs from the Warrior album this morning, I began to understand several things in different, integrated arcs. Let me explain them to you.
What surprised me wasn’t the nostalgia—it was what the present-day context revealed about it.
I use Amazon Music, and they give a “popularity” metric for each song on the platform, represented currently by a meter that fills up the more listens it has—presumably. Most of the songs on this album don’t even have one bar. The ones that do are the obvious engineered-to-be-singles hits.
As I listened more, I began to realize why I enjoyed Kesha’s music so much as a tween. She has emotionally precise and real delivery, but also vocal range, and a sense of time. Even when given material below her caliber, she still gives it direction.
Despite coming out with an album like this, which I’ll call “defining,” or a “transition point,” where you have a mix of styles that don’t seem to cohere but all the same give off a definite “party girl” vibe, you get the sense that yeah, that SAT score of hers meant something.
However, skill didn’t protect her from being misread, and that misreading is the real story here. You might know that Kesha had a bad record deal, and that she basically—according to wider “cultured” society— emerged from it ex nihilo. I say this because everyone thought she was a shallow idiot, even with status and strategy to back her up. This was a very advantageous vantage point for her, even if painful, as I imagine it was for her at the time.
It meant that she now gets to sing songs like “FREEDOM.”—her rebirth equals embrace, and that’s what she sings about, but it goes levels deeper than merely, “I love myself, so now the work is done” or “The past is gone,” harkening back shallowly to the frames we see in franchises like Frozen from Disney. It’s more akin to, “I accept myself; I was that person, I am that person, and I always will be this person.” That’s deeper.
She even, somewhat jokingly, though not irreverently toward sufferers, references “narcissism,” which reflects, in my view, a broader cultural parallel: narcissistic tendencies as evil. What most people collectively and colloquially refer to as inflated villainous self-obsession (an incorrect read in many forms) is really moral wounding.
Once it’s healed, if it ever is, it resembles what Kesha embodies in her growth.
In several articles I read in doing fact-checking for this piece, I came to another realization. Kesha’s story isn’t unique—it echoes a broader cultural confusion about agency, identity, and power. What American conservativism calls “narcissism” in choosing pronouns and virtue signaling cause allegiance is similar here, but not something Kesha does. It’s a case study in treating oneself with compassion and empathy.
Take her name change. She was once known as “Ke$ha”. And that little dollar symbol is important. From one angle—a less mature one—that could be interpreted as wild, untamed energy, and precisely the kind that got preyed on by her record execs and her listeners early in her career. Taken from a liberal perspective, it’s choosing identity, reclaiming power, and slamming capitalism down where it “belongs.”
Yup, all from one little sign.
Neither of these viewpoints are wrong, per se, but they misread Kesha’s personhood, and the cultural cues embedded throughout her evolution, including her current era.
The reason it boomerangs so strongly is the height of her status, the timing of her debut, and her “fall.”
We all live through journeys of growth; most of ours just aren’t public or as socially loaded. Kesha is a celebrity, yes, but what makes her unique is her voice. Even when singing “brain-dead” (a paraphrase from a recent interview of hers on the song “Tik Tok”) lyrics, she conveys authority through vulnerability and presence. It’s not about intelligence, or wealth. And even when not meaning to, she possesses a room.
That’s what made songs like “Your Love is My Drug” so earwormy, and the album Warrior a quiet masterwork.
Each song rings with tiny, relatable, compressed observations about daily life that paint a picture, one the artist’s image vividly matched at the time. One minute she was glittery, the next she was being ferried around in an Illuminati-aligned adobe. But she was always in motion with the audience, and never left them stranded even if they had no idea where she’d go next.
That consistency is candy for brand-building. But it’s not just about marketability. And I don’t want to just discuss that, because in fact, it reflects a larger point.
Knowing what to expect from yourself is where the seed of self-growth plants itself. Her overwhelming belief in and positive regard for herself, even if sometimes shaken, built a person that inspires today by creating newly-atmospheric music and sticking a tongue out at her past self, but with playfulness instead of derision.
The “brat energy” other blog articles claim she missed out on due to the timing of her album release, and apparent lack of self-acknowledgement, was not a miscue. She simply wasn’t a “brat.” She was being more herself. And being yourself, without a label—or “free”—is often likened to a crime in this world, even in America where individuality is heavily prized. To reduce her to “bratness” is the real crime, because it excuses the responsibility of the person using the term and makes it all too easy to mix soul-level uniqueness with social identity.
This is where her story widens into something cultural.
To go one level deeper, changing a name is a power move in many communities, for different reasons. The reason I mentioned “deadnames” in the title is not to “grab” trans readers, but to underscore the importance of yet another cultural shift happening right now, on perhaps a more foundational level. With a contentious presidency in the US, divisions from political affiliation have risen, but seem to be leveling out into an unsteady truce.
For conservatives, globalism is a key enemy; for left-leaners, one strain point is blanket hatred.
But even when both of these groups “agree to disagree” as violence heightens, they borrow from one another in different ways, resulting in primary arguments becoming more nuanced and hard to tease apart. It’s no longer about name-calling on a podium or preaching ideals; it’s about shifting identity strategically, shape-shifter-like, to gain leverage where there hadn’t been any—and adopting that identity hollowly to execute a campaign.
None of this is bad on the surface level. It’s a refinement of human nature.
But it’s a darker flip of Kesha’s personal philosophy, which could be called ideology if reflected right. Whereas Kesha uses her story to serve as a model for self-reinforcing, do-good individualism, politicians (and some everyday people) use their narrative to become The Narrative.
One heals. One obscures.
At that point, the question is no longer who you are, but what your story is doing. There are no true right sides to be on, though the one truth is that the lines you tell yourself don’t just define you.
They cartograph your world.
Understanding that is what moves a person out of being written off as one of the “crazy kids”—or even one of the “crazy people”—and into something quieter and harder-won. Not coolness as a role, or a rebellion, but the kind that comes from knowing who you are well enough to keep moving with yourself. That’s becoming a cool kid for real.
Images by Tangerine Newt + Vino Li.
The Self-Styled Scholar 