Pitchfork: Gag Order

May 18, 2023

"Swerving away from party-pop irreverence, Kesha collaborates with Rick Rubin on a spare and eccentric album about coming to terms with ambivalence."

Spoiler

Tonally and spiritually, Gag Order recalls another album made by a pop star in the wake of a high-profile conflict with a powerful industry antagonist. The old Kesha can’t come to the phone right now, etc.

It feels like part of what Kesha is giving up is an idea she’s always championed: that pop music is galvanizing, collectively validating, full of the promise of the night and the dancefloor. On Gag Order, “we” dissolves into “I.”

Kesha’s lyrics, as subtle as a hammer, feel more startlingly raw than lazily underwritten. Her voice, which she has often wielded like a blunt instrument, is used more delicately, smudged through filters and applied in rich, textural layers, in the mold of singers like Feist or Fiona Apple.

In Rubin—as much a guru as he is a producer—Kesha’s found a collaborator willing to indulge her spiritualist tangents. But neither the ideas nor the audio clips feel fully integrated into a broader theme of the album.

“Fine Line” ends with something like a thesis statement: “There’s a fine line between what’s entertaining and what’s just exploiting the pain/But hey, look at all the money we made off me.” It’s a line that collects all the demoralizing losses and pyrrhic victories of the past decade of her life and centers not the story but its protagonist, who—despite this record’s sonic mutations and the declaration of her own death—remains recognizably herself. Kesha, as ever, dares us to call her too loud, too messy, or too much.

Full review here.

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