The Culture Issue

Kesha was tired; Kesha was in her Saturn return. A Saturn return, she explained to me, happens to people between the ages of 27 and 31. “It’s when [expletive] gets really real and really hard, and you have to face life as an adult,” she said. Her hair was wet, and she wore eyelash extensions and no makeup. Her face, close up, is covered in freckles the color of very light coffee that make her look younger than 29. “It’s just a period in your life where you just kind of go from being more of a kid to a real adult.”

She had been practicing this September day onstage at the Brooklyn club Warsaw, singing high and singing low, readying for her show that night, for which there had to be glam, a word that fits no intuitive part of speech and means that her hair and makeup were getting done. She used to cover those freckles, but she doesn’t anymore. She dressed in one of her two Nudie suits, the white one, the Western wear customized for her with an embroidered eye that matched the tattoo of an eye on the palm of her hand; a heart with a dagger in it; a few flowers; a couple of crosses. The Nudie suit was the same one she wore to the Billboard Music Awards in May. This is what she has taken to performing in since all this went down — fewer leotards, no more general pantslessness.

In 2014, Kesha (née Kesha Rose Sebert) sued Dr. Luke (né Lukasz Gottwald), one of the music industry’s most successful and powerful pop music producers, and his various entities, saying he had drugged and raped her and emotionally abused her, and asked to be released from her contract. He countersued her for breach of contract and defamation hours later. A million briefs and filings and countercomplaints later, in February, a judge in New York denied her request for an injunction on her recording contract (a recording contract can hold you hostage for life, or at least for a majority of your career).

That day, her fans, known as her Animals, threw glitter across the steps of the courthouse, a reminder for her that whatever happened, she was still their queen. They chanted, “Free Kesha now!” It was to no avail: Kesha, in a white suit of far less merriment than the Nudie suit, sat in the gallery, her head on her mother’s shoulder, weeping. That day, #FreeKesha stormed social media, and within weeks, Adele spoke out from the stage in support of her. Taylor Swift, with whom she was only casually acquainted, donated $250,000 to help cover her crippling legal fees. Kelly Clarkson went on the record to say that Dr. Luke was a liar, that he was “kind of demeaning,” that she had been blackmailed into working with him. In April, the same judge said Kesha’s claims weren’t detailed enough to consider and that the statute of limitations had long since passed on her allegations of rape.

Kesha is no longer the artist we met in the late aughts: blazing dollar sign in her name in place of the S, gold Trans Am that she said she wanted to have continuous sex in, 24-7 party girl, dredged in oil and breaded like a schnitzel in glitter. Now she is someone in suspended animation, unable to release new music pending contract litigation, touring small clubs to make some money to help fund her lawsuit and to make sure her fans don’t forget her; now she is someone who wants to work and make music, just without the man she says raped her; now Kesha is a cause.

Outside Warsaw, her fans also had (or did? or committed? It’s still unclear) glam. A myopic young man who held a vial of maroon glitter told me that he lost his mother two months ago and that he came in from out of state for this show. “If Kesha can get through this year,” he said, “so can I.” A young woman in ripped pantyhose and shorts used a blue glitter stick to apply tiger stripes to a friend’s face. “Kesha is such an inspiration to me,” she said. “I’m a survivor, too.” Before I could ask if she was talking about general lifelong survival or if she was a victim of sexual assault, her friend screamed, “She’s here!” and a mass of people in their early 20s rushed around the corner to find Kesha, who had emerged from the club beaming. One of them yelled: “Mom! She’s my mom! I have to go make sure she knows she’s my mom!” As her Animals approached, Kesha opened her arms to one of them.

“Hi! Hi! You were in court!” Kesha said. “You were there!”

“Yes, yes, I was there,” the Animal said. “I’m so happy you’re free now!”

Here Kesha got serious. She looked the Animal in the face and said very carefully: “No, no. I’m not free. Don’t think that, because there’s still a lawsuit. I have new music. I — ” She stopped herself, then hugged the Animal and a few more, took a picture with all of them and left.

Later, she told me that people didn’t really understand the predicament she was in. They think it’s simple, that she’s free or not free, that she must have won her court case because she’s performing. “They were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’re free,’ and I was like, ‘No, sweetheart, I love you, but no, I am not, and I don’t know where you got that information.’ ” Her Animals, the world at large, they didn’t really get that she had written new songs — 22 of them — and recorded them at her own expense and that they were sitting somewhere waiting to be completed and polished and released. She told me that she wanted to get her story out so people really understood what was going on — that right now, she is the opposite of free.

At Warsaw, she threw Christmas lights across the stage and performed in front of a sign lit up in jaunty cowboy letters that said “[Expletive] the World,” because that was how she was feeling. She prowled back and forth in her Nudie suit, which she eventually took off to reveal a fringed black hot-pants onesie that read “FTW” on its rear. There was no more hitting her cue, no more hyperchoreographed pop-star dances, except one done maybe as a joke, in dinosaur masks. At one point she played a guitar with her teeth after pretending to eat her boyfriend’s face. This was just a very strange, very Kesha club show.

She sang some of her biggest hits, often modified with a country lilt. She sang a cover of the song she helped write for Britney Spears, “Till the World Ends,” like a haunted dirge. “I can’t take it, take it, take no more,” she sang, her voice deep and wounded. At one point, she shouted: “Anything outside of these four walls doesn’t matter tonight. I’m talking about rent. I’m talking about homework. I’m talking about your [expletive] ex-boyfriend. I’m talking about my lawsuit.” The crowd went berserk. “[Expletive] that!” she screamed as the Animals cheered and threw glitter.

On the rooftop of her hotel in Brooklyn the day after the show, Kesha was talking about the particular and peculiar predicament she finds herself in — a pop star suspended in a Jell-O mold of paralysis, unable to put out new music until all of this is resolved — when a bee began to circle her with intense interest and finally landed on the knee of her black jeans, within one of their artfully torn holes. “If I don’t freak out, I’ll be fine,” she said, her eyes watching the insect.

It was an intimate discussion, just Kesha and me, a bee and four members of her team, including her lawyer, all leaning in and listening and ready to yank a hood over my head and remove me in the event that our talk broached anything that might seem antagonistic to her continuing litigation. The night before, at her concert, her lawyer stuck by my side as if we were on a date.

How disconcerting all this was: Kesha is someone whose image was built on a decidedly unchaperoned ferality, a spontaneity and a streak of rebellion and a lack of self-consciousness. Once she sang that she brushed her teeth with a bottle of Jack Daniels. She sang about suitors visiting her metaphoric gold Trans Am. A friend of mine interviewed her a few years ago and told me they’d had a hilarious time, sitting outside a loud bar, laughing and drinking. He called her “giddy” and “ready to rumble.” He showed me a piece of paper upon which she had scribbled a sketch of a penis and testicles and signed it “K$.” Her restlessness is still there, but now it bubbles like lava beneath her dormant-volcano facade. She has so much she wants to say, but while she spoke, she paused to figure out how best to word a sentence, or how it would look in print once she said it. The restraint was unnatural; it wore on her.

In February, 16 months after she filed her first suit and 38 months after her last album was released, Kesha asked to have her contract, under which she still owed three albums, absorbed by RCA, the label that is the exclusive distribution arm for Dr. Luke’s label, Kemosabe/Kasz Money, Inc. (KMI). But Sony, which owns RCA, said that it had not been party to the original contract between Kesha and KMI; only Luke, who discovered her and made her famous, had the power to release her.

In April, after the judge dismissed most of Kesha’s civil complaints (which included a request for monetary damages), Kesha’s lawyers filed appeals, which remain in their early stages. The same judge had said that she assumed Sony would provide Kesha with a new producer, just as it said it would. “Why would they take an artist who is popular, who is making them money, and not promote her work when they’ve already invested millions?” she had asked, according to a court transcript. It was a reasonable question. Kesha’s lawyer at the time, whom she has since replaced, argued that Kesha was less valuable to Sony than Luke. “Their business interest is in promoting Dr. Luke, because he’s their hit maker, not Kesha. Kesha’s been on ice for two years.”

Luke’s lawyer, Christine Lepera, said in an email that the allegations of rape and emotional abuse are “horrific” and “simply not true,” that Kesha never intended to actually prove her claims in court, just to use them to get out of her contractual obligations. As part of Dr. Luke’s defamation case, his team cited a deposition from 2011, when Kesha was being sued by her former manager for breach of contract. In it she was asked if Luke had ever given her drugs or if they had ever had sex, insinuating that he had a Svengali hold on her. Kesha said she didn’t remember, she didn’t know, finally she said they had never had sex. Luke’s team uses this to say that after the time she says she was raped, in 2005, she swore under oath that they had never had sex and that she either was lying then or is now.

But Kesha’s supporters would tell you that to take anything in that deposition at its face value is to pretend we know nothing about the pathology of victims of sexual assault, about power dynamics and about human fear, something much discussed in a post-Bill Cosby, post-Roger Ailes, one-more-week-of-Donald Trump world. But also consider that Dr. Luke presumably wouldn’t rush to work with someone who has accused him publicly of rape, no matter what the truth of is.

Consider that until she can release music, Kesha has very limited means of income, with litigation that has gone on since 2014 and that costs at least $100,000 per month, the most conservative estimate I could calculate. Consider that Kesha has no ability to earn money, outside of touring for audiences of a few hundred, paying expenses from her own pocket, and that, as Kesha’s side has suggested, not allowing her to release music is a good way to prevent her from being able to afford continued litigation. But the least rewarding thing you can do is try to guess at any of this. You can read every one of the thousands of pages of filings and come no closer to the truth. Trust me, I tried. “Reading court filings doesn’t get you to the truth,” Dan Stone, an entertainment litigator at Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger, told me. “Even if this case goes to trial, it’s possible that no one will ever know what did or did not happen when the parties were alone in a room.”

On the Brooklyn rooftop, Kesha said that she submitted 22 songs to Sony in early summer. According to her representatives, Sony didn’t provide any meaningful feedback until after a judge intervened in late August. Her representatives told me that recording and releasing “Warrior,” her second album, took only eight months from start to finish. I knew that they were agreeing to let her talk about the case for the first time in part because of what Kesha said: that she wanted people to know what she was going through. I believe they also knew that public understanding of this case had worked for her so far, and that further understanding of the music-making predicament might only help. She wanted to play her new music for me. The bee was now circling her face. “Please go,” she whispered to it, but it lingered.

Kesha was supposed to be fun. That’s what she says she was told when she began preparing songs for “Animal,” her debut album. “Something that was always told to me is: ‘You’re fun. We’re going to capitalize on that.’ ” We were at her house in Los Angeles a few days after the concert. Her team and I had waited downstairs amid the fan art and the psychedelic Moroccan-mod décor — patterned couches and rugs, two full-size velvet sheep with silver heads, dinosaur figurines, wax skulls, crystal stones and various sketches of penises and testicles. Someone on her team mentioned displeasure with The Times’s review of the Warsaw show. I had read it, too, and I said that it seemed that the critic was a Kesha fan — he’d written in praise of her several times — and that if he didn’t like the show, perhaps they should think about how Kesha fans will react to her new genre transitions and experimentation.

She came downstairs in pink leopard leggings and a T-shirt that had a picture of Iggy Pop on all fours and read “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and she started to tell her story. “I was like, ‘I am fun, but I’m a lot of other things.’ But Luke’s like: ‘No, you’re fun. That’s all you are for your first record.’ ”

Kesha moved from Los Angeles to Nashville when she was 4 with her mother, a songwriter who most notably helped write “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You,” which has been covered by Dolly Parton. Dr. Luke told Billboard magazine in 2010 that he was particularly impressed with an improvised rap Kesha did on her demo, that he liked her “bravado” and “chutzpah.” But after she arrived in Los Angeles and signed with Kemosabe, Luke was busy with other artists. Kesha spent her time writing songs, and eventually wrote for or with artists including Miley Cyrus and Alice Cooper. (According to an interview her mother gave Billboard magazine, the purported rape happened somewhere during all this, in 2005, after a party at Paris Hilton’s house.) Then, in 2009, she was the featured vocalist on “Right Round,” by Flo Rida, produced by Dr. Luke. Things changed quickly after that.

“Animal” was released the first week of 2010, going platinum in the United States and multiplatinum in other countries. She was something completely new in a female pop star, something grittier and less polished than we were used to. She sang about getting drunk and partying. She sang openly about sex, without the romance we’d been accustomed to, all in a voice that was half-teasing, half-moaning. The album contains “Party at a Rich Dude’s House,” and of course, “TiK ToK,” the album’s first single, which went multiplatinum, setting a new record for digital downloads in a single week by a female artist.

“TiK ToK,” she told me, was written to be more nuanced and more definitively ironic at first. But her producers and co-writers on the song, Dr. Luke and Benny Blanco, had to keep her image in mind. She says of Dr. Luke: “I remember specifically him saying: ‘Make it more dumb. Make it more stupid. Make it more simple, just dumb.’ ” She tried, joking around with some lyrics she found silly. “I was like, O.K., ‘Boys try to touch my junk. Going to get crunk. Everybody getting drunk,’ or whatever, and he was like, ‘Perfect.’ ”

The problem was, she said, there was no balance. Every song was a song about partying, and yes, that was who she was, Kesha says that was definitely who she was, but she’s a real person having a complete human experience, and she wanted her album to reflect that. “To this day, I’ve never released a single that’s a true ballad, and I feel like those are the songs that balance out the perception of you, because you can be a fun girl. You can go and have a crazy night out, but you also, as a human being, have vulnerable emotions. You have love.”

When the album was released, Kesha says, she was surprised that people criticized her for singing about the same things that her heroes, Bob Dylan and the Beastie Boys and Iggy Pop and Fugazi and Johnny Cash, had always been celebrated for. She thinks of the Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” as the soul sister of “TiK ToK.” “You know, when I first came out, I was saying I want to even the playing field. I’m a superfeminist. I am an ultra-till-the-day-I-die feminist, and I am allowed to do, and say, and participate in all the activities that men can do, and they get celebrated for it. And women get chastised for it.” It soon became clear that people thought she was something she truly wasn’t. They didn’t get that the dollar sign in her name was ironic — that it was not an image, but a kind of comment on image. They didn’t get that her talk-singing wasn’t an attempt at rap; it was its own thing, just a way she made music.

She toured with the album, and she watched as her army of fans solidified and organized and named themselves. Her weirdness and her talk of inclusivity and her ways of distorting her looks with glitter made her the flagpole around which the freaks and rejects began to gather. There was something about her freedom, about how it appeared that she would never brook any discrimination, that called them to her. “I looked at people in the face, and they said: ‘You helped me.’ ‘You helped me come out to my parents.’ ‘You helped save my life.’ And all of a sudden, I, unbeknown to me, am changing the world in a positive way, and now that I’ve gained the knowledge that this is possible through music, that’s the most important part of it.”

In her legal filings, she says that during this time, Luke became verbally abusive to her, that he called her a “fat [expletive] refrigerator” and criticized her weight in front of people. “I was under immense pressure to starve myself,” she told me. “And I tried to and almost killed myself in the process.” She put out an EP called “Cannibal” in late 2010, then “Warrior” in 2012, which had an even edgier sound than “Animal.” It was still dancey and poppy, but it had a hard 1970s-inspired rock roughness. There’s a punk-influenced song called “Dirty Love,” which she recorded with Iggy Pop.

She began to rebel against the lyrics that she says were finding their way into her songs. “Lyrics that would say: ‘Get that heifer out my face. I’m going to pull your ponytail back because you don’t know me, bitch, you phony trick,’ ” she says. “I was like, O.K., not going to sing that. I will not sing those words. Like, no. And then there was this argument about it.” (In statements made through his representatives, Luke denied that he had created an image for Kesha outside the one she originally crafted for herself; that he had pressured her to put only party songs on “Animal”; that he had dictated lyrics to her; or that he had emotionally abused her in any way.)

In 2013, Kesha went on tour to promote “Warrior.” At the end of the year, she found herself exhausted and depressed. It had been eight long years since she’d signed her contract. Her self-consciousness about her body dovetailed with her general sense of helplessness. The only thing she could control was what went in and out of her body. In January 2014, Kesha checked herself into a treatment center that specializes in eating disorders.

At this point in the story, at home in her chair, she stopped for a minute, then leaned toward me and touched my knee. “As you grow up and you grow awareness, some say ignorance is bliss, and in some ways, it is, but once you realize and you gain knowledge, it’s there, and you can’t deny it,” she said. “And now I’m very much aware of things that I wasn’t before, and it keeps me more accountable for my actions.”

While she was at the clinic, she became desperate to write music. Her boyfriend found a toy keyboard for her, and after some negotiation, the staff let her keep it. She wrote songs and she did therapy and she received letters from fans. She did therapeutic coloring, and one day she began writing letters back to those fans on coloring-book pages, writing around pictures of dinosaurs and kittens playing with yarn, “Someone I work with has literally driven me into this disease, tortured me and [expletive] with me and my family,” she wrote in a letter that was posted to social media. “So I’m here taking time and getting my magic back dammit.” This was the first time the public had heard these claims.

She left treatment in March after two months. The first thing she did was remove the dollar sign from her name. “I’m just fun,” she repeated, this time in a sour voice. “That’s all I am. That’s it. ‘That’s all you are. That’s all you are.’ ” She leaned toward me. “I was taking back my strength, and I was taking back my voice, and taking back my power, taking back my body. I’m just taking back my [expletive] life.”

The second thing she did was file her lawsuit.

In 2009, Kesha was introduced to Ben Folds, the singer-songwriter, musician and producer. It was right around when she was breaking out, and she found herself wounded by the things people say on the internet, including, as Folds recalled, “Eat [expletive] and die, you [expletive] slut.” Folds reassured her. It seemed clear to him that she was strong enough to survive it. Later, he did a string arrangement for her on “Past Lives,” the last song on the deluxe edition of “Warrior.” The thing he loves about her, something both he and another producer told me, is that she is unselfconscious about being wild and imperfect. She understands the value in her voice sounding off for a minute. She understands why a note should sound crazy.

While she was in rehab, Kesha wrote a song called “Rainbow” on her tiny toy keyboard. Her mother had always told her that you could tell that a song was great if it could be sung against just one note and still sound good. As she sat singing it against one note, on the floor of the rehab facility, she knew she had something. She imagined “Rainbow” like a great orchestral production, something that Brian Wilson would have done on “Pet Sounds.” She wanted this song to be produced by Ben Folds, who just happened to have friends who could play cellos and violas and kettle drums and the oboe and the flute and the French horn. He called in all his favors, and they rented out the big room at Capitol Records and tried to do the song fast and cheap. He wanted her to stand where Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra had stood, to understand her importance in the line of musicians that people remember.

He had her play with the bridge a little, sending ideas into his voice mail over a couple of days until they got it exactly right for recording. The process was revelatory for her. “He just really helped pull out of me exactly what I wanted to be, but I’ve always kind of been scared to try,” she recalls. “And he’s like: ‘Try to sing that high C. Try to go higher. Try to do this weird thing with your voice.’ Instead of getting shamed, it was like I was being encouraged and validated, and it was so magical and so beautiful.” Folds produced the final version using just two takes.

Kesha was invited to sing at the Billboard Music Awards on May 22. On May 17, the show’s producers issued a statement saying that KMI had rescinded its approval of her performance. KMI suspected she would use the platform to make her case against Dr. Luke. Ultimately, it relented and allowed her to sing a cover, after she signed a statement saying she would not talk about Luke or give interviews at the awards. Folds asked her if she thought she could do a stripped-down version of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and she said she thought she could. So he called his friend the violin player, and Kesha put on her white Nudie suit and got up there with just a piano playing a sparse two-note line and some spare violin, and with tears in her eyes she sang a version of the song that was more poignant and beautiful and stirring than any of her pointed and literal covers at her club shows. Her pauses were extraordinary; her voice, which was her new voice, was revelatory — had we ever heard that voice before?

“That’s what kills me, is the almost parable of her being held down for a little while,” Folds says. “She’s the only performer I can think of that has gone from being packaged to real. Most of the time people start off, and it’s like their rawness is what breaks through, and then they have to continue to build that into a more polished commercial thing. What she’s actually doing is the opposite, where she’s now showing that actually, there is something really huge beneath the whole thing.”

Kesha was tired; Kesha was right in the middle of her Saturn return. A recording contract acts as embalming fluid to the person you were when you first signed it. Kesha can create a new sound. She can use her new voice. She can sing her pop hits as country songs. But there’s no guarantee anyone will release those new songs: There’s a clause in her original contract that insists she remain “reasonably consistent in concept and style to the artistic concept and style” of the original recordings; there’s a clause that says she’s not even allowed to change her name without approval.

The rape claim bubbles beneath every proceeding and every filing and every motion in this case. It shades every word of every page of every version of these suits. Our legal system isn’t set up to deal with a case like Lukasz Gottwald p/k/a Dr. Luke, Kasz Money, Inc. and Prescriptions Songs, L.L.C. v. Kesha Rose Sebert p/k/a Kesha: a rape claim that’s past its sell-by date, which has turned into a banal contract dispute. Kesha will not relent on her accusations, and Dr. Luke won’t relent on his defamation suit. How could they settle? Settling will only make either of them look as if they lied. The story of Luke v. Kesha is a story of reputational murder-suicide; it’s a grenade whose pin has been pulled; it’s a story of scorched earth.

Over the last two months, I was given information that you are given when you work at a major magazine whose story stands to influence the situation. Kesha was provided with outside producers, Sony told me just days before this went to press, and Kesha and Kemosabe had agreed to work with about a dozen of them. Sony said it “has made it possible for Kesha to record without any connection, involvement or interaction with Luke whatsoever.” But a day later, representatives for Kesha told me that wasn’t the case, saying, “Dr. Luke has insisted Sony’s participation is just an ‘accommodation’ and has not denied that all decisions regarding the album are still being made by Dr. Luke.” Luke’s lawyer told me that Luke is looking forward to seeing his name cleared in court. His lawyer says that Kesha has always been welcome to record and can be in a recording studio as early as this week. But if you were to create a spectrum of emotional experience, you’d find that Luke v. Kesha sits on the opposite end of where we sit when we want to listen to a pop song. Their old music already sounds distorted and spoiled to me. The only thing we know for sure is that this case will forever define both of them, and that while it’s going on, the world doesn’t get to see this new side of Kesha. The only thing we know for sure is that even if it is ever resolved, this story is forever.

At last, I was able to hear four of Kesha’s new songs. I went to an office in Manhattan and sat in a room and listened while two of her representatives looked on. Kesha told me that when the inspiration hits her with a song — a lyric, a hook, a melody, anything — she is struck dumb with it until she puts it down on paper, that the inspiration itself feels like a divine act. I heard “Hunt You Down,” which was a real country song with banjo and some real country sentiments: “If you [expletive] around, I’ll hunt you down.” I heard “Learn to Let It Go,” which sounded like something you’d hear in heavy rotation on radio with Kesha’s beautiful, low voice singing that a happy ending is up to you. I heard “Rosé,” a toast to an old boyfriend who has married. “The good things never last,” she sings.

But the song I want to tell you about most is “Rainbow.” If it ever emerges from private listenings, it will be your favorite Kesha song. It’s big and sweeping, and you can hear every instrument that Ben Folds and his associates played — it does recall a Beach Boys vibe, just as she wanted it to. And as Folds said, the way she sings the song is so rich and so real that it jerks you out of your expectation of a pop song. “I found a rainbow, rainbow, baby,” she sings. “Trust me, I know life is scary, but just put those colors on, girl, and come and paint the world with me tonight.” In the final section, her voice becomes stronger and more strained, and the effect is devastating. I asked to hear it three more times.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a contributing writer for the magazine and for GQ.