The point of "Period"?
I'm not as dialed in to pop culture as I used to be. I don't know why; it just is a thing that is. All of this is to say that even though I had Kesha's new album pre-saved(?) on Spotify, I didn't know when it was coming out until I opened up the desktop app on July 4th and there it was.
The first track is titled "Freedom," and it starts as kind of nebulous, woozy, crystalline ambience before abruptly segueing into more of what we're used to. Kesha has ditched the dollar sign in her name, but she's back to where she wants to be - singing about having a good time and not giving a fuck. I don't know if I'm here for it just yet, but I'm definitely not against it.
Kesha's early party pop felt like the kind of life that I might have had if I had not made a few key choices. It felt like the kind of life I was forbidding myself to have, though god knows why. I'd left my childhood of religious fundamentalism for the military, with heavy drinking and adventure and spicy ethnic food that would give the church potluck ladies a fierce case of the vapors. I was running away from grief after my brother's death. I was running away from the pain of being assaulted twice by coworkers. I could live a life of well drinks and body glitter, but wearing a metaphorical hair shirt felt just so much more correct.
How Calvinist of me, I guess. Even grief is repressed.
The cracks started to show as I worked through my undergraduate degree in communication studies. I don't remember what class it was for, but my group had decided to do a presentation on Kesha's legal battle with Dr. Luke. When presentation day came, I choked. I couldn't talk about it. I asked my group and my professor if we could present our topic to him without an audience because of my anxiety. The professor agreed.
Later on, I was sitting in the lounge area waiting to be let into that class and I heard one of my classmates say, "Geez, I wish I could get out of doing things just by saying I was nervous."
He didn't know I was sitting there and that I'd heard him. I wanted to fling myself out of the nearest window, but I instead followed my secondary urge and pushed myself up from the chair. I muscled my way into his conversational circle. Red-faced and shaking, I said, "How fucking dare you. Do you even know what anxiety is? Do you even know why I asked for an accommodation?" Mumbled negatives. "Next time you want to talk shit, make sure you know what the fuck you're talking about." And then I ran to the nearest bathroom to maybe throw up.
Several years later, I'm listening to Kesha's new album, Period - I had to check how to render its title, since it's stylized into a single punctuation mark - and it started stirring up old feelings of anxiety and nausea. However, some new feelings also came up that were more difficult to place. Pride? Joy? Relief?
Reviews of Period seem to be mixed. They question whether the album has anything to contribute to the pop genre that Kesha helped build, and they wonder just what she's trying to say with it.
I've gone to intensive PTSD therapy to cope with the fallout of being assaulted. I've been married, I've been divorced. I've started to let myself visibly be a messy dyke instead of the carefully curated Stepford-esque career boss femme. What is there to say about all of it that I haven't already said?
"Bitch, I just got a brand new start!"
When there's nothing to be said, sometimes the point is just to be heard.
