Kesha Gets Her Old Weird Sparkle Back With Her New Single “Rich, White, Straight, Men”

Literal and off-putting, it’s also irresistible.

Lora Olive/ZUMA

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This week: “Rich, White, Straight, Men” by Kesha (Kesha, 2019)

Why we’re into it: Kesha returns to the oddity and weirdness that made her early career so exciting.

It’s been almost a decade since Kesha became a household name with her record-breaking single “TiK ToK.” But when she stormed popular culture in 2009, no one could’ve predicted how she was going to evolve over the next 10 years.

From pop’s party girl to “Praying,” Kesha has transformed herself from one of club pop’s defining stars to one of the few mainstream pop musicians actually engaging with the political world around us. That’s as apparent as ever in her newest track “Rich, White, Straight, Men.” But the song is more than a political statement. Kesha finally sheds the restraints of her recent work for the direct and literal, returning to what made her a star in the first place: excessiveness packaged in oddity.

Rainbow was (is!) an incredible album that did have past elements of Kesha’s signature much-too-muchness—the weird and colorful music video for “Praying,” the tongue-in-cheek interlude in “Boots“—but for the most part it opted for a traditional folk/rock/pop sound. And that sound paid off. Fans who had been longing for new Kesha music ate the album up, rocketing it to a Billboard No. 1 debut. It even snagged two Grammy nominations.

“Rich, White, Straight, Men” definitely isn’t Kesha’s strongest track (Hello! “Sleazy” exists!) but it sure as hell is one of her weirdest. It’s sarcastic and tart, invoking many of the tools and theatrics that have become synonymous with musicians like Danny Elfman and early Brendan Urie. For every progressive claim she makes, a power-drunk male voice has a retort. “And if you are a boy who loves a boy you’ll get a wedding cake and all,” she sings as this voice creeps in to interrupt, “Not in Colorado!

Some aren’t quite fans of the tune, and that’s understandable. With just a first listen you can tell this isn’t a mainstream pop song. The lyrics are literal, and the production is off-putting. It comes off as a rallying cry rather than a song. But it’s liberating when leaned into. “What if rich, white, straight men didn’t rule the world anymore?” she chants, and it’s hard not to give in and chant with her.

This is the artist who engaged in a rainbow gun fight while half unicorn/half humans partied around her. She wrote a song about “climbing into” her “Gold Trans Am.” She said she’s actually brushed her teeth with a bottle of Jack. Rainbow was a welcome and mature diversion from that. But with “Rich, White, Straight, Men” Kesha leans back into her oddity, and it’s a fun take on using pop music to do more than make muddled metaphors about politics.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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