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‘I’m not just a little pop moron’

IF YOU WANT insight into a celebrity’s self-image, you could do worse than watch one make the brief walk from the star’s chosen chariot to the red carpet before an awards show. The frenzied VIP drop-off area at the recent Grammy Awards reveals more than any klieg-light TV interview could. Alice Cooper pulls himself from a nondescript car and strolls — nonchalant and unassuming — through the throng before anyone can look twice. Lady Gaga’s mini convertible pulls up with her sitting atop the back seat, eyes fixed studiously on a point in the distance; as she exits the car, some of the dozens of wires that orbit her dress get caught on the seat, and there’s a collective holding of the breath as she detaches.

And then there’s Ke$ha. The 23-year-old steps out of a black SUV with the grace of a baby colt — all legs that she sometimes looks to be still learning to use — squints and rubs her eyes. She’s stunning, twirling and spinning in her gold Nicolas Jebran dress, teetering on Guiseppe Zanotti heels. She has the designers’ names scrawled on a cheat sheet, and as she makes her way down the carpet for the pre-show carnival — cameras clicking and stressed TV producers yelling her name — she murmurs Jebran’s name to remind herself. Her long blonde hair is dishevelled, even when styled. She wobbles and looks around warily. Everything in her body language, expression and posture perfectly conveys one thought: “I’m not sure, but I may still be drunk.”

It’s not so different from the look on her face when she climbs out of the bathtub in the video for her breakthrough song, TiK ToK, which just spent its ninth consecutive week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the longest stretch for a debut single by a female artist since Debby Boone held at No. 1 for 10 weeks in 1977 with You Light Up My Life. Her album, Animal, debuted the week TiK ToK hit No. 1, selling more than 150,000 copies and becoming the No. 1 album on the Billboard 200. It even did the undoable and finally stopped the Boyle-dozer, ending Susan Boyle’s six-week run atop the albums chart.

Just 18 months ago, swanning down this or any red carpet would have been unimaginable for Kesha Rose Sebert. She had no major record deal, no manager, and she was estranged from the producer who discovered her, Dr. Luke. Tonight, Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas walks by and yells, “Ke$ha, I love you!” Ryan Seacrest talks to her for a full minute or so. Cameras flash nonstop in her direction and networks beg her PR team to stop for even one question.

As she waits to go on E! and share a love-fest interview with Adam Lambert, she suddenly turns to one of her handlers and loudly asks, “Can you see my a**?” Her designer dress is made of hundreds of thin, 3-inch-long metal chains that swing as if on a flapper’s gown. Her handler doesn’t hesitate. From one knee, she carefully inspects, and then pronounces Ke$ha’s a** “ready.”

Mother’s little helper

A couple of nights later, Ke$ha is sitting in a loft studio halfway between Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, California. She’s taking a break from a photo shoot for Q magazine and wearing a faux fur coat, giant arty rings on her left hand, about a pound of glitter and not much else. She’s in the borrowed office of the absent studio manager, and Ke$ha picks at his dinner, left on a desk; quickly, one of her day-to-day managers comes in, takes the plate away with a sheepish grin and replaces it with a cup of coffee.

At the Grammys, everyone wanted to ask her the same two questions. One was “the Prince thing” — and yes, she says it’s true she snuck into Prince’s house in Los Angeles and gave him a demo. (He never called.) The other, she says, was, “Am I a party girl?” She launches into her answer.

“I’m having a party in this weird office, hanging out with you, totally sober. If you mean ‘party girl’ like, at a club with a short skirt on with no underwear, then no. I’ve gotten drunk before but never gotten a DUI. I don’t go to clubs. I don’t do drugs, but I think I’m a walking good time and I talk kind of funny, so people think I’m messed up all the time. I’m not.”

You can see where those people might get their ideas. In the space of a few minutes sitting in the office, conversation veers from the ghosts she has seen (her first experience was at an old ex-brothel in San Antonio), to the book she’s reading (A Brief History of Everything, by Ken Wilber), to her favourite dinosaur (the plesiosaur, of course). Ke$ha burps a lot — unapologetic, hearty man burps—and she punctuates her sentences with bits of song, laughter and words like “retard” and “DoucheBerry,” which is the only way she’ll refer to her BlackBerry. In short, the Ke$ha you hear on her songs is the Ke$ha you get in person: irreverent and deceptively ambitious.

She was born in Los Angeles in 1987 to a struggling songwriter mum, Pebe Sebert. (Ke$ha doesn’t know who her father is.) Sebert had written a successful song for Dolly Parton called Old Flames, and her work had been recorded by Johnny Cash, but she’d fallen down on her luck. When Ke$ha was 6 or 7, her mother moved her and her two brothers to Nashville.

Ke$ha says her time in Nashville was largely defined by academics. She says she got a 1500 on her SATs and was enrolled in an international baccalaureate programme. For fun, she would listen in on classes about the Cold War at Belmont College. “I’m not trying to say I’m an expert on the Cold War,” Ke$ha says. “If you grilled me on it, I’d sound like a retard. But I was interested. The point being, I’m not just a little pop moron.”

Sebert often brought Ke$ha to the studio and encouraged her to sing and write songs. Ke$ha had been recording demos for a couple of years when one wound up in the hands of Samantha Cox, senior director of writer/publisher relations at performing rights organisation BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.). Cox had done some work with Sebert, and it was Cox who passed along Ke$ha’s demos to a friend at BMI, who ultimately passed them to the manager of then-rising producer Lukasz Gottwald, better known as Dr. Luke.

The gospel of Luke

In 2005, Luke had just enjoyed his breakthrough, writing and producing the Kelly Clarkson hits Since U Been Gone and Behind These Hazel Eyes, in partnership with Max Martin. And he was aiming to expand his work beyond writing and producing. “I’ve only written two songs I didn’t produce,” Luke says. “I can control the song a bit more by producing it. The next evolution of that was to just find an artist.”

Luke solicited more than 100 demos from friends and contacts. Included was one from a then relatively unknown singer, Katy Perry (Luke and Martin wrote and produced the Perry hits I Kissed a Girl and Hot N Cold) and another from Ke$ha.

At Conway Studio, where Luke works in Hollywood, he plays two songs from the Ke$ha demo for this reporter, each striking for different reasons. The first is a gorgeously sung, self-penned country ballad that hints at what could’ve been had Ke$ha pursued a different path. The other is a gobsmackingly awful trip-hop track. But at one point toward the end, Ke$ha runs out of lyrics and starts rapping, for a full minute or so: “I’m a white girl/From the ‘Ville/Nashville, bitch. Uhh. Uhhhhh.”

Luke and his producer friends were smitten by this bit of screwball-gangsta improv. His face lights up even now as he remembers. “That’s when I was like, ‘OK, I like this girl’s personality. When you’re listening to 100 CDs, that kind of bravado and chutzpah stand out.”

Luke and Martin called Ke$ha’s Nashville home from Sweden, where the two were working. In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction moment, when Luke called the first time, Nicole Richie hung up on him; the Seberts were a host family on that season’s The Simple Life. Eventually he got Ke$ha on the phone, and then to a meeting in New York. Ke$ha left her international baccalaureate programme behind and moved to Los Angeles. At 18, she signed to Dr. Luke’s label, Kemosabe Records, and his publishing company, Prescription Songs.

Ke$ha was anything but an overnight success. Luke was busy with his burgeoning production projects, and Ke$ha rarely worked with him. It was in a co-writing session with Katy Perry and Mika producer Greg Wells that Ke$ha says she honed her four-on-the-floor, beat-driven sound. After some disputes surrounding her contract with Luke, Ke$ha reunited with him.

At the end of 2008, Luke was working on a track with Flo Rida called Right Round and the two decided they needed a female hook. Luke pulled Ke$ha into the studio, and within two months, Right Round was an international No. 1 and set a single-week record for digital sales that still stands. Suddenly Ke$ha — though she wasn’t credited on the U.S. version and didn’t get paid — was a hot commodity. Atlantic, home to Right Round, expressed interest, as did Jason Flom’s Lava label, now at Universal. But Luke and Ke$ha chose RCA.

Rap sheet

The rest of 2009 was spent recording Animal. The resulting album is relentlessly uptempo electro pop, spritely and fun one minute, Girls Gone Wild raunchy the next. Ke$ha has a writing credit on each of the album’s 14 tracks, and to hear her speak in her highly animated streams of consciousness is to realize that her lyrical style is indeed her own. But she initially was reluctant to rap on Animal.

“The white-girl rap swagger thing is really a little bit of a joke,” she says. “I never thought of myself as a rapper. This is just the way I talk.”

But toward the end of the recording process, she wrote Blah Blah Blah with U.K. electro-poppers Neon Hitch and Benny Blanco, who does a lot of work for Dr. Luke’s Kasz Money production house. “I didn’t come up with it,” Luke says of Ke$ha’s sing-songy rapping. “But when I heard it, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, we need more songs like this.”’ To that end, Luke, Blanco and Ke$ha sat down in a room and came up with TiK ToK.

Luke says that a New York Times article that tagged Ke$ha as a white rapper caught them by surprise. “We were all like, ‘No, no, no — she’s not a rapper.’ But in actuality they were right and we were wrong. If you look at the iTunes charts, after Animal came out, the tracks where she was rapping were the ones that were in the top 10.”

Indeed, during the week her album was released, TiK ToK and Blah Blah Blah were the two biggest-selling tracks in the United States. Animal set records for first-week digital albums sales for a debut artist — almost doubling American Idol victor David Cook — and for the highest-ever percentage of first-week digital sales for a No. 1 album (76 percent); previous bests from John Mayer, The Fray, Colbie Caillat and Coldplay were all in the 40 percent range.

Ke$ha is taking her sudden fame in stride. It’s tough to tell exactly when her coronation became official. It could have been any one of her chart feats. It could have been the night before the Grammys at Clive Davis’ star-studded party, when Ke$ha, singing TiK ToK, looked left and saw Barbra Streisand, then right to see Jane Fonda. Or maybe it was at the awards show itself, where, after sharing the stage with Justin Bieber to promote a Bon Jovi fan contest, she went backstage and ran into Ringo Starr, who congratulated her on her success.

“He congratulated me?” Ke$ha asks incredulously. “Ringo Starr? Congratulations to me? It was more like, ‘Congratulations to you for being a f***ing Beatle!”’