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thesinglesjukebox · 10 months

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KESHA - "EAT THE ACID"

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Harlan recommends an artist about whom we've always had lots to say...

[6.86]

Leah Isobel: The other night, I was walking home from work and listening to the Song Exploder episode about this song. For 20 minutes, neither Kesha nor any of her collaborators -- nor Hrishikesh Hirway, the podcast's host -- ever mentioned Luke. Instead, they talked about advice that Kesha received from her mom, Pebe, not to take acid; they talked about a dream or vision or panic attack that Kesha had had one night, in which she felt that she had come into contact with the immortal being at the heart of the universe. She described this as a deeply comforting and beautiful experience, but the song is paranoid and itchy, its synth tones dissonant and harsh. I found this episode affecting in ways I can't quite articulate. I see a lot of myself in Kesha's story, and the hardest part about the years since The Stuff That Happened To Me is how I find it seeping into my brain and my life and my perspective basically all the time. I don't even really think about it that much anymore; I have mostly forgiven him, or at least the version of him that still lives in my heart. And yet, a few days ago, I had a fight with my partner in the way that we fight, which isn't combative but sad and puzzled and hurt, and they asked me if I really allowed myself to be angry. I know that I don't, and I knew it then, but hearing it asked so openly did make me think about The Stuff That Happened all over again. I've been having dreams about it. It never really goes away. I remember feeling, after it was over, as if I had seen through something, like the curtain blocking reality as it is had pulled back slightly. Some old friends, whom I have since stopped talking to, described DMT as having similar effects. Trauma affects brain function; in some ways, it's a drug that stays in the system forever. And yet I still petulantly cling onto the vision of who I once was, who I could have been. I go to work, and I feed myself, and I clean my room, and I write. I kiss my partner. I go to choir rehearsal. I play Ghost Trick on my Switch. And in all of it, that shift -- that change -- lurks. Maybe I spoke with God, back then, and didn't know it. Kesha sings "hate has no place in the divine" without passion, reciting a mantra without really believing it or hearing it. Maybe this is how God speaks: with indifference. [8]

Harlan Talib Ockey: "Eat the Acid" doesn't address Kesha's struggle for justice as explicitly as "Fine Line," but it's a powerfully unsettling meditation on the sheer depths of the wilderness in the universe. Kesha has sounded this raw before ("Praying" being an obvious example), but here she does so with incredible understatement, bringing unearthly intensity to dark, minimalist production. (From Rick Rubin!) It's like nothing she's ever done before. [10]

Alfred Soto: It took fifteen years of craft and a lifetime of torment to produce "Eat the Acid," the natural sequel to "Tik Tok." Eloquent as gesture and devastating as product, it maintains its austerity because even at its most electro-shivery the Kesha of 2010 shivers in its core. [7]

Taylor Alatorre: Credit to Kesha for managing to get "art pop" as a genre tag on Wikipedia before Gaga did. Unfortunately, most of "Eat the Acid" is diminished by what made that achievement possible: a Rick Rubin-helmed effort to reverse-engineer a Strange New Respect by brandishing the familiar totems of artistic maturity. No one's asking Kesha to go back to the Animal/Cannibal days (though maybe one more Gottwald-less entry in the series wouldn't hurt), but would these circular ruminations about the dangers and/or benefits of hallucinogens have suffered if they were set to a higher BPM? Only in the final minute is the minimal-ish mood-setting sharpened into something like a point, with the word "divine" serving as a sleeper cell activation code for rhythm and propulsion and full-bodied sonic texture. Wish it didn't take that long to get there, though. [6]

Micha Cavaseno: I said elsewhere, but Gag Order feels less like a victory of emancipation than a morose departure, a heartbreaking turn for one of the most charming songwriters of the '00s. "Eat the Acid" demonstrates this perfectly in how hollow the vocals, organ, and guitar loops just languidly hang there disjointed. Sebert's hollow mourn is devoid of glamour in the way someone fresh from jail has yet to learn how to have someone to be again, flatter than a stilled pulse. There's no sense of unity or oneness in this supposed revelation; instead it gestures at the hint of a phantom limb as proof of survival. I don't need the old "her" to come back and mask the pain, but I'd like to know that the spark isn't hidden away forever. [3]

David Moore: "Eat the Acid" is track two on Kesha's Gag Order, her collaboration with Rick Rubin that serves as the exit from her straitjacket contract with Kemosabe Records. When I heard this, it made me wonder whether it was her "Paranoid Android," and thus Gag Order was her OK Computer. Well, it was, and it is, for me, anyway. When I was 16, hearing OK Computer in its entirety for the first time unspooled reams of totally unhinged poetry from me that I threw in the garbage a couple years later. With distance, I see how good music and bad poetry sparked a lifetime of chasing down the sublime in music with words, and I have some fondness for the kid who bought Radiohead's miserablist codswallop and was inspired to write the way it made him feel. It becomes clear as you get older that some parts of you are just you, always were and always will be, some parts are just habits and inheritances you might be able to nudge or massage or exorcise out of you, and you really have to muck around in there to sort out which is which. You start to understand that the totality of yourself includes your past and its people, even the ones you've discarded or who've discarded you, even and maybe especially the ghosts, and it also includes a whole bunch of other stuff you thought you'd forgotten but almost certainly didn't. And if you have kids -- god, the kids! Mercenary little memory-dredgers. Was I like that? Are they really like that? Or am I just thinking about me again, unable to see them? (Projection is the second-worst sin of decent parents, after possession.) At pushing-forty I've started to make acceptance with all of those accumulated parts of myself, and to preemptively make some amends for the sins of my present. That's what Gag Order is, an album that articulates ugly and beautiful and inconveniently truthful moments in one's life, the jagged edges and things that can't be unseen, with unflattering documentary clarity but also a premonition of the eventual grace from having healed from it someday. Life keeps on fucking you up, and you keep figuring out how to say thanks, even if you need to indulge in a little woo-woo to get you through now and then (preferably stopping short of falling for outright charlatans like crystal people or Radiohead). From the liner notes: "THANK YOU to the universe for compiling the life force of atoms and energy to make this cosmic dimensional existence available for me to experience." And I can't help but say yes to this, just like I said yes to misanthropic robot rock back in the day, the "no" that I treated as a yes. I was convinced it was telling me something important about the universe and my place in it, and in some sense, it was. But now I only seek the "yes" that is actually a yes. And I ask, hopefully not in an oblivious butterfly meme sort of way: is this wisdom? [10]

Aaron Bergstrom: Fragmented shadow reality. Fear of a higher plane. Partial realization. Hostility. Overwhelming visions. Hidden truths revealed. Understanding. It's Kesha's Allegory of the Cave. [8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Mimics a real comedown from a high: "Eat the Acid" aims for apotheosis about the divine and universe, but instead of transcendent, the result is dully profound and profoundly dull. [4]

Michelle Myers: Apparently, Kesha and I both have "Dark Minimal Gothic Synthwave Compilation 2 Hours" in our YouTube recommendations. [7]

Dorian Sinclair: "Eat the Acid" is a stylistic departure for Kesha, but if you -- like me -- still think twice about her weird decade-old Bob Dylan cover, you knew she's always had an interest in this kind of minimalist, droney accompaniment and deliberately-undersung vocal line. I don't think that cover entirely works, but "Acid" absolutely does, pairing the buzz and mumble with a spectral backing choir, delicately plucked guitar, and ominous, evocative lyrics. The additions give it a structure and direction that her take on "Don't Think Twice" lacked, and the decision to build the tension to an almost oppressive degree before abruptly cutting the cord feels like the only right choice for how to end the song. It's an audacious choice for a lead single, but a great one. [9]

Oliver Maier: Undeniably a bold move from Kesha -- but "from Kesha" feels like an important qualification. I don't mean that in a demeaning way, just that it's hard to imagine taking an interest without the name tag. I wouldn't go back to this if I heard it from a relative nobody on Bandcamp. Shame to snuff out that intriguing build-up at the end, too. [5]

Nortey Dowuona: Rick Rubin, Stuart Crichton and Jason Leder are listed as producers, but the drum programming, bass and keyboards on this song are played by Tom Kahre. Did you know that he helped TiRon and Ayomari make their album The Great New Wonderful, one of the best forgotten albums of the 2010s? That he's been Big Sean's engineer since at least 2016? That he engineered a Babyface Ray song in those duties? That he got Mya nominated for Best R&B album in 2016? That with Erica Campbell he won the 2015 Grammy for Best Gospel Album? That he got Charlie Wilson a 2014 Grammy nomination for Best Gospel Song? If you like this song you should. [7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Like a bedroom pop version of Nico's Desertshore, "Eat the Acid" plods along with a knowing sense of importance and mysticism. It mistakes negative space and minimalism for grandiosity, reducing Kesha's vocals to textured detritus. [3]

Jonathan Bogart: In October, I visited my family in Texas. It was only supposed to be for a few days before my younger sister and I flew to Guatemala for a shared vacation slash pilgrimage to the land of her birth slash memorial for our brother, who had died there in 2022. But massive protests against government corruption erupted a week before our travel plans, crippling Guatemalan infrastructure and indefinitely postponing our trip. So I spent my accrued vacation weeks in Houston instead, and splurged on a quite different set of expenses. One of those included a road trip to see Kesha at Austin City Limits with my sister and brother, resurrecting an old shared interest and bonding ritual. We played her most recent albums on the way there to familiarize ourselves with her current state of play. Like most of America, they had stopped paying close attention to Kesha once she dropped the $, and even I had only taken in the recent singles. Thirteen years on from the culture shock that was "Tik Tok," which fundamentally rewrote the rules of pop music in my head -- I had been a classicist who overvalued Sixties models of rock and soul -- Kesha has grown into being less of the wild child she was initially marketed as and more of an institutional provocateuse. Like her role models, Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop, she combines a swaggering attitude, a limited but effectively deployed vocal instrument, and a generic set of rebellious postures that seem frozen in time. The sounds of current pop have moved far away from the gleefully scuzzy vulgarity that made her famous, so she's free to chase her own rather basic aesthetic muse rather than the prevailing winds of pop fashion. In Austin, the audience on the floor appeared to be primarily made up of gay white men in their thirties and late twenties, who came alive the most at the old reliable bangers from Animal and Cannibal, but for whom the emotional highlight was undoubtedly when Kesha got choked up introducing "Rainbow." "I'm fucking free!" she hollered when she found her voice again, to a responsive roar, and that conflation of a lawsuit settlement (and the gendered violence that originated it) with the queer identities of the fans drinking up her emotional catharsis is perhaps the most quintessential aspect of Kesha's post-Dr. Luke career. "Eat the Acid" was the first song in the second act of the three-act show, coming after four dancefloor bangers in a row followed by a routine by her dancers to Macklemore's "Good Old Days" while she changed costumes. It was performed so deep back on the stage that she was invisible to my section of the balcony, and its near-tempolessness meant that it was the only time in the show that her audience seemed even a little bit bored. The ancient knock against psychedelic music has always been that a meaningful trip is uncommunicable to anyone else. The lysergic quality of "Eat the Acid" is limited to Imogen Heap-style vocal processing, so there's not even a lot of texture to get lost in; while the lyrics, in post-2015 Kesha's special blend of self-mythologizing, hippy (and occasionally -dippy) spiritualism, and It Gets Better sloganeering, allude to an experience of transcendence that remains permanently out of focus. All the better for listeners to apply their own history and desires onto, of course; as much as critics like me love specificity in lyrics, too much of it is alienating to the broader audience for whom pop is about large, communal emotions, not granular interior ones. Unfortunately, "Eat the Acid" falls between both stools. I bet it means a lot to Kesha, but like recounting a dream, the meaning fades in the telling. It's time to wake up. [4]

Ian Mathers: Not all knowledge is helpful. Not all trips are good. But maybe nobody else gets to decide or interpret which ones are which for you. [8]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: There's a pervasive aura of dread, and terrible consequence, in semi-contrast to approximately half of the lyrics. Giving it up to the divine isn't really my thing--I'm a bit too rage-filled for that--and my personal relationship with psychedelics is less cognitive exploration, more barricading myself in a club restroom until things stop moving wrong. However, I've never had a massive public trauma and personal excoriation in the manner Kesha has, so if this song helps her to live the life she wants, so be it. [6]

Will Adams: Yes, the subtext runs deep (don't be changed like what changed you?) -- it always does. What is more striking to me is how "Eat the Acid" sounds. The searing organ tones; Kesha's vocal, numbed and distorted and frayed; the clipped synth arppegio; guitars filtered to sound like ghosts; elegiac choirs; it's all arresting. I'm reminded of the William Orbit remix of Sarah McLachlan's "Black" -- both move their respective elements in and out of view, like scenes of a dream, all the while maintaining an unsettling energy. It's a crystal ball of a song, showing a dark future that might be yours, whether you choose it or not. [7]

Katherine St Asaph: "Right after it lobbed off its own knees," Kristin Hersh wrote about Crooked single "Moan," "[the song] told me I should drop my weapons. The ether's smart about weapons. I'm not, particularly." The song she describes is one of hope, telling you that "we're messes sometimes and messes are sometimes OK." But the song she recorded is restorative only like oblivion is. What "Moan" tells you is that "in the deep cold, you won't be brave; in the deep cold, you can't be safe," over murder-ballad chords, barren fuzz, and an unchanging guitar solo with the melodic contour of trying to pull yourself out of your grave and giving up fast. It's among the bleakest songs I've ever heard (though not the bleakest by her), and it reminds me a lot of "Eat the Acid." The songs share a dirge pace that jolts to anxious action in the final seconds, and a moldy-timbred four-chord buzz that sounds more like an empty machinery room than a communal musical space. Kesha's voice is starting to sound a little like Kristin's, too. Much was made of her upbringing by country songwriter Pebe Sebert, but Kesha's roots increasingly seem to lie in folk instead -- specifically, the prickly, sometimes stark, sometimes psychedelic and always harrowing subgenre that includes Hersh, the late Sinéad O'Connor, and maybe Beth Orton ("Eat the Acid" also sounds like the equally bleak "Pieces of Sky.") It says a lot about Kesha as a musician that she's drawn to this kind of folk, rather than the broadly palatable sort favored by so many of her peers who worship their Joni and their Crow, and who could probably sing about brushing their teeth with a bottle of Jack and have it seen as a quippy meta-enabling lark rather than a sign of the party-house decay of civilization. But the path that led Kesha there was pain, and once you've taken that path, that pain can re-emerge anywhere. "Eating the acid," going strictly by the words, is meant to be daring and restorative, in an Erowid-vault, Erehwon-enjoyer sort of way. A few grains of that do remain; Kesha's backing vocals punch up "eat the acid" like an electro hook she might record in some other unrecoverable universe. But Kesha chooses one line as her refrain, and truncates it until it means the opposite: "you don't wanna be changed like it changed me." On the verses, her voice sounds small; on the refrain, she sounds sure. What do you do when people consider you a completed cautionary tale? When what's left for you in life is to find "acceptance" of things that should never have been offered, much less accepted? "Eat the Acid" offers an answer in its final act to everybody but one. "Hate has no place in the divine," Kesha sings, and the divine assumes its understood musical form: celestial choirs, happier keys, soprano harmonies, air-conditioned space above the arrangement, Meanwhile, the song itself is somewhere else, weaponless on its knees. [9]

Brad Shoup: I don't know that "You don't wanna be changed like it changed me" gains much from this much repetition; by the second or third time I was already thinking about fame. (It does make me wonder if Pebe Sebert's ever written a song about acid. In my mind she has, and it has this vibe.) That fluttering sequencer gets Kesha to the cosmos, tab-free; its imperiousness emphasizes how much she's in control. A similar vastness ducks in and out of the comparatively table-flipping "Fine Line": I guess I'll have to hear the LP to find out if it touches or recedes from the face of God. [7]

Rose Stuart: Kesha's post-lawsuit era has centered on moving on from trauma, but "Eat the Acid" is raw like an open wound. There are no pop hooks or bright choruses. Instead, accompanied by the refrain of "you don't wanna be changed like it changed me", Kesha creates an unsettling meditation that feels paralytic and overwhelming. The sparse electronic instrumentation creates a drone in your mind, before bursting into lights at the end. It's a song that forces you to stop and listen to it, and more importantly to feel it, every note buzzing inside your head. [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The drones and the distortion and the hymn-like refrain run up helplessly against Kesha's deep and well-learned skill with a hook -- even as the song threatens to fall into itself, into ego death and self abnegation, she still sounds as captivating as she has since 2010. She's not who she was then, but she's not entirely separate, either; the process of freeing one's self from trauma and specifically the trauma of being made into a symbol or legal instrument will inherently be one of recapitulation and self-paradox. This is a hard song in all regards, but it feels worth it. I hope it is. [8]

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