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The Daily Tar Heel

Column: Loving, leaving and loving Kesha again

Annie Kiyonaga
Columnist Annie Kiyonaga

All parents seem to have one popular musician who they really love, inexplicably yet completely. 

I had a friend whose mom’s iPod had one song on it: “Where is the Love,” by the Black Eyed Peas. My mom loves the band Train — specifically, their 2009 song, “Hey, Soul Sister” — with a ferocity that is at once unsettling and sort of touching.

Most confusingly, my dad, a criminal defense attorney and father of four, has always loved Kesha. He heard somewhere that she had a “genius IQ,” and never failed to remind me thereafter of her intelligence whenever one of her songs came on the radio. (As far as I can tell, this fact has no credible support, although she did score a “near-perfect” SAT.) 

It always made me laugh — my dad, very serious and very smart, asking me if I knew that Kesha was “a genius,” as Kesha sang in the background about kicking boys to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger.

Personally, I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with Kesha’s music. By that, I mean that I hated myself for loving her early music. “Cannibal,” the EP version of her first album, “Animal,” came out when I was in 8th grade. The degree to which I loved that album made me question, even at 13, myself and my music taste. 

Why, I would ask myself, was I listening so often to a song called “Grow a Pear”? 

Why did I know all the words to “Cannibal,” including the classic line, “Be too sweet, and you’ll be a goner/Yup, I’ll pull a Jeffrey Dahmer"?

Something about her dark lyrics and aggressively catchy beats sucked me in, though.

Even “The Harold Song,” her strange early attempt at a slow, emotional song, got a decent amount of play on my iPod Touch. To summarize: I was, however reluctantly and apologetically, an early Kesha fan.

High school was a hard time for a closet Kesha fan. I started listening to more and, admittedly, better music. I forgot my middle school love for songs like “Blow” and “Blah Blah Blah.” 

I figured it was for the best. I had loved Kesha, but it was time for me to let her go.

Watching the Grammys this weekend, though, I was brought full-circle in my love-hate-love cycle of Kesha. Not because of her potentially genius intelligence level or acceptably inappropriate lyrics or insanely catchy songs, but for what seemed to be some real iteration of herself. 

As she sang “Praying,” her stinging invocation of the years of alleged abuse and sexual violence at the hands of her former producer, Dr. Luke, her voice swerved and dipped and shook with emotion. 

It wasn’t pretty. It was scary, actually, and deeply affecting. Something about large groups of women, coming together for a common cause, always makes me cry anyway. 

But I cried, mostly for Kesha, watching this singer who once entranced both myself and my dad sing a song which finally was about her.

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