

Kesha went to public school, played in the marching band, and invented her own dumpster-diving aesthetic. Pebe’s songwriting career didn’t pick up. When Kesha was still young, Pebe got a new publishing deal, and she moved Kesha and her half-brother Lagan to Nashville, where Kesha mostly grew up. By the time Kesha was born, Pebe was broke, and Kesha has said that her family lived on welfare and food stamps. Pebe Sebert had the one hit to her credit, but one hit can’t pay the bills forever. Dolly’s version didn’t cross over to the Hot 100, but it went #1 on the country chart. Her mother Pebe Sebert was a country songwriter whose big claim to fame was that she and ex-husband Hugh Moffatt wrote “Old Flames Can’t Hold A Candle To You.” That was a minor hit when the country singer Joe Sun first recorded it in 1978, and it became a much bigger hit two years later, when former Number Ones artist Dolly Parton recorded her own version. (The night of that party, Bon Jovi’s “ Livin’ On A Prayer” was the #1 song in America, which feels somehow appropriate.) Even if the born-at-a-party story is a total fabrication, this is one of those situations where you want to print the legend. Legend has it that Kesha Rose Sebert was born at a party in the San Fernando Valley.

That something is Kesha, a star ready to arrive.
#Tik tok kesha live full#
Even after all that, he’s still making hits, but very few of those hits have the loopy charisma or the giddy joy of “Tik Tok.” The song is built from scavenged parts that have been glitter-glued together, but there’s something shooting all that mess full of energy and purpose. Luke’s reputation has plummeted in recent years, and tons of his old collaborators are barely willing to even speak his name.

Luke produced a lot of hits for a lot of pop stars, and plenty of those hits will appear in this column. At least for some of us, though, those revelations haven’t dimmed the sheer fun of “Tik Tok” itself.ĭr. Kesha wasn’t really the party-monster caricature that she played on “Tik Tok” - or she wasn’t just that, anyway - and her future court battles with Luke would make this moment feel creepy and sinister in retrospect. Luke was able to do whatever he wanted, with major-label machinery focusing its efforts on blasting his hooks into every radio in America. The song is also a document of a moment when Dr. Luke gleam that was so dominant on the pop charts at the time. Kesha’s “Tik Tok” is a pure product of its moment, an irreverent dance-pop sledgehammer that brandishes the otherworldly Dr. You already know everything you need to know. When the gigantic chorus hits, Kesha’s out the door, riding off on her lowrider bicycle and looking for more trouble. Did she hook up with some unseen relative the night before? Or did she just crash her way into a random house with an empty bathtub, looking for a place to get some sleep? It doesn’t matter. She staggers around in one cowboy boot, then ambles down the stairs of a picturesque suburban house, shocking the family that’s gathered around the breakfast table. Kesha wakes up in a bathtub, her hair in a riotous tangle, while flashes of the previous night’s revelry flash through her head. Kesha’s “Tik Tok” video brings that character sketch into live-action cartoon color. But the real Diddy would never brush his teeth with a bottle of Jack Daniels. Diddy, and the voice of the actual Diddy chimes in with approval. Kinda-sorta rapping in a vocal-fried and Auto-Tune-drenched valley-girl chirp, Kesha tells us that she wakes up in the morning feeling like P. On her very first single, the 22-year-old Kesha, previously known only as a disembodied voice on Flo Rida’s “ Right Round,” takes all of 25 seconds to establish a fully formed pop-star persona.
