The Singles Jukebox

We still ride for you, Kesha!

[Video]
[7.25]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Kesha: unburdened by what has been, living in the context, realizing what can be. 
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: It’s hard not to overrate Kesha singles. Like all right-minded pop listeners, I want her to thrive, and I want every song to sound like proof that she is. I initially thought “Raising Hell” was the glorious height of Kesha’s hedonism; in retrospect, it was a little perfunctory. Likewise, I really want “Joyride” to be the Rabelaisian outsider carnival everyone says it is, enough to resist the reality that nothing about it is outside the bounds of normie pop. Cowriter Madison Love has a back catalogue spanning years of pop singles with a similar chaos quotient: Lady Gaga’s “Sour Candy,” Machine Gun Kelly and Camila Cabello’s “Bad Things,” Ava Max’s “Sweet But Psycho”; to contextualize even further, she’s written enough for enough B-listers that some of that back catalogue inevitably went through Dr. Luke. (A few antis have tried to turn this fact into a gotcha, as if it’s impossible to work with an asshole colleague then want to stop.) The arrangement is less love honk than cruise control, coasting in the lane of its donk. The chorus sounds kinetic, springing out and bouncing around like a jack-in-the-box; it also sounds like “Run the World (Girls)” but slower. The lyrics can’t decide whether they’re about sex or Regina Georgish camaraderie (I doubt it’s both), and while Kesha sounds as depraved as ever, slurring and purring out bars like “label whore, but I’m tired of wearing clothes,” none of them outsleaze her Simple Life days, let alone a brat summer. All this said, the song pre-empts every criticism possible: she has, truly, earned the right to be like this. I’ve written all these objective pans, and my heart is in none of them. 
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I often (perhaps too often?) critique a song by saying it sounds like something out of a movie about a fake pop star. Those songs are worthy of critique, obviously — they’re constructed entirely out of cliches and misremembered fragments of out of date pop hits, with any hooks accrued seemingly by accident. Yet “something out of a movie” is not necessarily the right put down. Case in point: “Joyride,” from its deliriously overcranked accordion hook on down, sounds absolutely like something out of some feverish fictional property. And yet, this absolutely works — the first Kesha single in years to work as both commentary and as a straight ahead banger.
[7]

Leah Isobel: Kesha’s 2022 loosie “Rich White Straight Men” introduced a soundscape that was big not in the sense of pop but in the sense of density: it was carnivalesque and menacing, stuffed with cartoonish sound effects, barely making room for her theatrically affected vocal. While Gag Order had an austere musculature that spoke to the effort of keeping hope alive, that song was the sound of despair, garish and hopeless and too much in every respect. Like everything that overflows with sincerity, it was a little alienating, a little cringe. “Joyride” revisits that soundscape, but offers an innovation: by pairing a similarly maniacal accordion loop with the straightforward momentum of her dance-pop side, the song achieves something that I almost want to call Brechtian? It is impossible to listen to a new Kesha song without immediately thinking of her context, her Story, her Narrative; this has made it exceedingly difficult for her to reclaim the joy and delight that was her trademark. But the accordion is so fucking ridiculous, so cringe, that it actually short-circuits all other considerations. The question goes from “is Kesha happy?” to “what is that?” And then I’m dancing. She fucking did it.
[8]

Alex Clifton: Have you ever wanted to go to a lightly demonic monster truck rally run by evil clowns who love to dance? Because that’s exactly the kind of wild party Kesha’s conjuring here, silly and fun and insanely catchy. Initially I was a little over the “I am Mother” line, thinking, “that will date this all to hell,” but maybe this one should absolutely be dated. July 2024: the first month Kesha released new music unshackled from Dr. Luke. The sense of freedom and excitement here is so palpable; Kesha’s clearly having a ball on the recording, hamming up her performance in a way that’s simultaneously goofy and sexy. (The only other singer I can see delivering “beep-beep bitch” this well is Gaga, the established queen of camp.) I’m excited to see where newly-freed Kesha goes next, as she’s bound to show us the best night of our lives. 
[9]

Joshua Lu: Hedonistic carnival final boss OST — nobody knows how to make trashy pop music like Kesha.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: I respect the outré ambition here — it’s fun to hear Kesha find new paths into the realm of the obtuse — but this song has some very annoying sounds. The accordion is annoying! The brassy high-pitched delivery of the title on the hook is annoying! Declaring yourself to be “mother” more than a year after Meghan Trainor did it is annoying!
[3]

Alfred Soto: Immersing himself into the Eurotrash with which she has long flited, Kesha sounds buoyant like she hasn’t been all decade. She sounds best when harmonizing with bleeps and bloops and synth gahoozits. 
[8]

Ian Mathers: Not the accordions I thought I wanted but, it turns out, the accordions I needed. Hyperpolka? Can that be a thing for a bit?
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: It’s an open question why the most prototypically American pop singer to emerge from the Recession Era – sorry, Lana, but you first hit the U.S. top 40 with a Cedric Gervais remix – would want to declare her label independence with a high-density slab of blaring Eurotrash. In freeing herself from one set of constraints, Kesha seems to have placed herself under a not-entirely-new one: a dual mandate of familiarity and novelty, of embracing the garishly extroverted attitude of Animal and Cannibal while running away from their most obvious sonic totems. “Joyride” is too fixated on these matters of branding and self-presentation to truly give off the uninhibited vibe it wants to, though Kesha’s everything-at-the-wall approach does produce at least one undeniable hook: those perfectly timed, perfectly trashy car horns. An appeal to the 5-year-old in all of us, who just wants to hear the big vroom-vroom machine go beep-beep.
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: When someone’s trying to make another campy “Padam Padam”-style summer hit, I hear it and I know — this is a fascinating mix of effortless strangeness and ‘omg this is for the gaaayzzz brat summmerrrrr so juuuliiaaaa’ pandering. There’s a lot of off-putting material here; the chorus melody sounds like that meme where every note in “Fireflies” is tuned to C and the spoken title drop sounds uncannily lifted from an ARTPOP reject (you can’t tell me that’s not Gaga!). In a lot of ways, this isn’t too far from a song like Camila Cabello’s “I Luv It”, but Kesha is an actual weirdo cramming her weirdness into a pop song, not Cabello retrofitting her normalcy into a would-be weird song. That’s why she’s much better at calling herself “Mother” than other singers, and why she can get away with an accordion in place of the usual synthesizers. “Joyride” is not trying to be an accidental masterpiece; it’s just zaniness for the sake of zaniness. There’s nothing wrong with letting her be like that. 
[7]

Will Adams: “I’ve earned the right to be like this” is one hell of a mission statement (and she’s right). “Joyride,” like any other successful Kesha single, has an appealing weirdness — the accordion riff, the octave swoops in the chorus, dramatic-ass choir — that makes for a fun ride. However, there’s some light pandering in the form of “mother” and the Mean Girls quote which stops it just short of being a full Obnoxious Banger (though this self-remix by producer Zhone takes it there).
[7]

Jackie Powell: What makes Kesha such an instinctual pop star is how well she knows herself. With “Joyride” she returns to the type of cheekiness and camp that introduced her to the world. Her diction and enunciation on some of the consonants in each verse is what is so unique to Kesha. She knows what words to accent and which ones not to. Not every artist has this awareness. Kesha had to take a bit of an artistic journey to return to her old sound with as much spunk and moxie as “Joyride”, and unlike another artist we know, she did it successfully. Kesha and Madison Love wrote a song that empowers without being too cheesy, frivolous but without being meaningless. 
[7]

Kat Stevens: Admittedly I’ve left it a little late to qualify for Paris 2024, so I must now set my sights on LA 2028. It’s true that I’m now older than US swimmer Dara ‘Grandma’ Torres was when she won three silver medals in Beijing, however legendary Uzbek gymnast Oksana Chusovitina managed an average 14.166 score for her two vaults in Tokyo (aged 46), and still hasn’t officially retired. There’s hope for me yet! As such I got cracking with my altitude training this morning (running up Crystal Palace hill, elevation above sea level: 112m) and switched up my playlist from French house to a new Los Angeles-themed one, with “Joyride” by Kesha in pride of place at the top. Beep-beep, bitch — we’re going to the Olympics!
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: Madison Love woke up in the morning, saying fuck P. Diddy. 
[6]

Mark Sinker: Nothing shorthands my favourite year in pop for a long time than responding to whatever anyone now says or does with the word “JOYRIDE” in a Kesha voice. 
[10]