There are as many ways of taking Kesha Sebert in conversation as there are of listening to her debut album, Animal. You can skim the froth off the surface and — as a number of notably irate and mostly male reviewers have done — dismiss the 23-year-old from Nashville, and her songs, as lightweight, or calculating, or crude, or bonkers. Many would contend that that last description would apply to the moment, late in our encounter, where she launches into a long riff about positive thinking and reincarnation.
“I’m into energy,” she twinkles. “I recently went to see a past-life regressionist, who is also a psychic. I wear my placenta around my neck every day, because it’s supposed to give you second sight. I feel like I’ve had many lifetimes before.”
You can view her whole shtick — the provocative videos, the co-opted dollar sign that renders her professional name as Ke$ha, the tales of throwing up in Paris Hilton’s wardrobe and breaking into Prince’s mansion — as Gaga-like attention-seeking, as the antics of someone who is more victim than victor in the cauldron of celebrity culture. Or you can listen, without prejudice, to the case she makes for herself, to the brutally attitudinal or self-aware lyrics, to the outrageously weird, ADHD-frenzied sonic inventiveness of Animal, and conclude that, when it comes to chart pop in 2010, Sebert is right at the front of the pack.
The millions of people who have bought downloads of her songs to date (chiefly, the worldwide smash Tik Tok) most probably just like the tracks. It is safe to assume that none of them has responded to Sebert with anything like the precision vitriol and ostentatious outrage her detractors have huffed and puffed with. The least of these dismissals amounts to labeling the singer, with sometimes barely disguised misogyny, as nothing but a good-time girl. Funny, I thought she was someone who writes and sings brilliant, batty electro-pop.
“So many people,” she sighs, “say, ‘So, what, are you a party girl?’ And I say, ‘I’m a walking good time.’ Do I sometimes go out and drink? Hell, yes. But could I have a No 1 song if I wasn’t also working hard? Maybe that needs a little more respect. Also, the phrase ‘party girl’ implies someone who is out at a club, maybe doing some guy in the back who you’ve just met. Then you get in your car and you flash your vagina at the paparazzi. And I’m none of the above. None of the above.”
Sebert is just getting warmed up. “I’m so not a victim,” she continues. “I have been working on realizing this dream, my path, my mission, for years. I’ve really invested a lot of thought, time and effort into it. The last thing that makes me is a victim. I think it’s a bummer when people don’t represent that properly, when they portray me as purely one-dimensional.”
Can she understand why they might? “But this is nothing to be embarrassed about,” she responds, with real feeling. “People like to have fun. And sure, there’s my deepest, darkest hipster side that wants, for whatever pretentious reason, to hate pop music. But I’m just trying to give people a way to think, it’s cool, you can not hate my record. You know — it’s okay.”
Sebert, who was born in California, moved with her single mother, Pebe, and siblings to Nashville when she was four. Pebe would later find success as a songwriter for the likes of Dolly Parton, and has co-written several tracks on Animal, but the early years were hard, penny-scraping ones, an experience her daughter believes armoured her against the more vapid and vulgar sides of the music business. “It’s a nasty world,” she comments. “But then you do a concert, and people are moshing, crowd-surfing, it’s insanity, and you think, ‘This is why I do music.’ F*** all the haters, all the industry people that tried to bring me down [Sebert moved back to LA at 17]. And those people that are online talking shit, like, go get a job — why are you sitting around blogging about why this particular outfit doesn’t look good on me? I’m not doing it for you.”
She reacts with good grace to questions about the Hilton incident, although you sense she’s weary of the topic almost to the point of exasperation. I can’t help asking, however, just how much vomitorial damage and reach we’re dealing with here. “I don’t exactly recall it,” she laughs, “but I know there were shoes involved.”
Sebert was at the infamous heiress’s house because she had been working as a backing singer on her album. “I needed rent money,” she mock-pleads, “and it paid $1,000, which was, like, amazing money — two months’ rent. As for the vomiting, well, I guess that was kind of my statement on American society, the celebretard, really extravagant, $8,000-handbag, coked-out rich-girl thing. I’ve got some money myself now, but that doesn’t mean I suddenly believe in spending it all in really gluttonous and disgusting ways, which American society has for so many years almost glorified. I have nothing against [Paris Hilton] specifically, but that whole only-wears-name-brands, only-wears-something-once thing…” She screws up her nose.
Party at a Rich Dude’s House, the track inspired by the Hilton debacle, captures everything that is so wonderful about Animal. Over a scuzzy, hyperactive backing, our bleary-eyed, puffy-faced heroine stumbles at dawn from the party, cackling defiantly: “We’re young and we’re broke/And I can’t find my coat/And the sun is coming up and, oh my God, I think I’m still drunk/Ewww… where’s my coat?” A lethal, perfectly timed pause, “Where?”, then the music crashes back in, an explosion that both nails the compulsive, chaotic waywardness of such a lifestyle and, beneath the major-key propulsion, hints at the flip side, the disadvantages and even misery. The album is not, Sebert insists, a straightforward celebration. “There are always repercussions,” she says knowingly, looking suddenly much older and less perky.
If that track, or others such as the dreamy 1980s soft-pop of Stephen, or Sebert’s revealingly jaded, anti-scenester new single, Blah Blah Blah, were from, say, the stable of Britain’s über-hit-makers Xenomania, or by the Swedish electro pixie Robyn, you just know they would be praised to the skies. For reasons that aren’t altogether clear, Sebert’s name above the title opens Animal up to a good kicking. The involvement of Dr Luke and Max Martin (Britney Spears, P!nk, Katy Perry et al) has failed to placate critics at the more pursed-lipped end of the spectrum.
“Yeuucch,” Sebert spits. “Look, you can be intelligent and also like to be happy. You don’t have to be so pretentious that you can’t have a good time. Sorry, but if you need an excuse to get your arse on the dancefloor…” The rest of the sentence is lost in a sound that expresses, messily but perfectly clearly, her disgust.
For the most part, though, she comes across as unbothered, and possibly even thrilled, by the harrumphing. “It’s really funny,” she laughs, “that men are getting their panties in such a twist over my album. I’m just saying the stuff they say to women — I’m saying it back. And I’m doing it with a smirk on my face. It’s just silly, just fun — there’s no need to get upset over it.”
The real point of the Prince story is not that Sebert snuck into the star’s house. It is that, wanting to get a demo to him, she had the crazed chutzpah to think that she should try. “Nobody actually believes this story,” she begins. “But I did watch him rehearse, yes. And his driveway really was lined with purple. I walked into his house and found a bedroom, and I did think then, ‘I can’t go in there, Prince could be sleeping — awkward. Or having sex with somebody — even more awkward.’ So I go round the corner, and there he is, rehearsing, as far away from me as that chair. I freaked out, called my mum and said, ‘Mum, what do I do?’ And she was, like, ‘Honey, what do you mean you’re in Prince’s house?’”
And the Jack Daniel’s lyric? “Everyone’s really offended by that,” Sebert says, shaking her head. “But come on, brushing your teeth with Jack Daniel’s: what girl does that? People are like, ‘Do you really advocate brushing your teeth with bourbon?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, actually, I do, every day, for everybody. Especially eight-year-olds.’ I mean, what are you talking about? Of course I don’t. Come on.” She laughs delightedly as she says this, and she doesn’t look calculating, or bonkers, or like a victim. Her expression says one thing, loud and clear: do I look like I need an excuse?
Animal is out now on Columbia
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