The one truly positive takeaway from Kesha’s first album out of Dr. Luke’s clutches is that she has never not been herself in the nearly two decades since she arrived on the radio, mouth frothed with Jack Daniel’s. . (pronounced Period) brings her signature party-fueling hedonism to both current trends and the recession pop aesthetics she helped pioneer. Everything is an earworm that hugs your face like a newborn Xenomorph, but it’s so corny and who-cares, you must Ripley this shit no matter how truly meaningful it is that the album exists and Kesha is free.
This was evident from the polyglot gluttony of the singles—the accordion’d out cataclysm “Joyride.”; the hyperpop clichéd “Boy Crazy.”; the half-baked bro country of “Yippee-Ki-Yay.” that benefits from a deluxe-edition version featuring T-Pain, her fellow guardian angel of Flo Rida’s hooks. Their linkup is a reminder that some of the most vital contributors to the sound of this century’s pop music have suffered in ways both overtly devastating and insidiously undermining at the hands of the industry. And there are other ways to read this album: Kesha taking on the trailer park is a nod to her pre-Hollywood roots in Tennessee, and that BRAT aesthetic grows from a garden that Kesha’s long sown. In many ways, . is pointing off the page.
Still, there are moments of grounding. In opener “Freedom.” Kesha fugues over twinkling piano and synths, singing “I’ve been waiting for you/Everything’s changed now.” But the simmering disco bass and house-gleaned aesthetics suggest a much more powerful mission statement, and the song devolves into middling party-pop. Lyrics like, “I only drink when I’m happy/And I’m drunk right now/All of you motherfuckers watch out, ’cause your bitch back in town” and “I’m making this song stuck in your head/Maybe this bitch is off her meds” are forehead-slappers. “Love Forever.” is modest disco about pining for a perennial paramour. “Glow.” has the muted verve of the nearly bangerless pop of the first Trump administration and actually funny lyrics amid all the cringe: “You’re too cool for pop shit/But I made it so good/It’s playing at the Target/Oh and your mom loves the song/But she won’t sing along/But she wants to/Sing it, bitch.”
It’s easy to celebrate how Kesha makes the word “bitch” elastic. It is punctuation, an opening address, an appeal. Kesha has always worked in the interstices of pop and rap—valley girl intelligentsia that blurs the line between Clueless and the bling era—and here she continues to hold her ground. . marks a reclamation of her work to date and raises questions about what else Kesha’s music could be. She’s shown us a little bit with “Attention!”, a one-off house-influenced bitch track featuring her heir apparent Slayyyter and UK singer Rose Gray released during the album rollout but missing from the main tracklist. It’s just another bit of confusion on top of the pile.
