Most baby-faced concert goers grew a little restless waiting out the weather delay in the parking lot, but kept themselves busy filming TikToks. Car horns honked in celebration as the girls, the gays, and the theys strutted across a pretend runway, ass cheeks covered only with fishnets, eyes wild and caked in glitter. The spirit of Kesha is clearly contagious and hugely liberating.
I am thrilled to confirm that Kesha fully delivered everything her rabid, rain-soaked fans (whom she lovingly calls her “animals”) deserved and then some, though die-hards are totally justified if they want to bitch about the pop powerhouse cutting beloved older tracks short to fit in plenty of stuff off her new album, Period.
Before I dive into painstaking details (and I will), you should know that if Kesha gave even a third of the energy and perfection she poured into Monday night’s show, the crowd would have still been well-fed. Instead, she overachieved her return to form by packing in two hours of pop performance art dripping with poetry and sex, while weaving in a shit ton of rock and roll elements that had us panting like puppies.
But first — for the uninitiated — it’s important to understand that the Grammy winner has been celebrating her professional and personal freedom after a brutally long legal battle with her former, long-time producer, “Dr.” Luke Gottwald.
The short version is that Kesha accused the hitmaker of sexual assault in 2014, which he denied and threw a bunch of countersuits at, drawing the whole thing out for roughly a decade. This means all the music she created during that time was alongside her alleged abuser, a contractually obligated nightmare. After a settlement was reached in 2023, Kesha was finally free to create music on her own independent label (Kesha Records), and this achievement was woven into the entirety of Monday night’s show.
Cradling a mannequin head modeled after her younger self (complete with her signature starry-eyed makeup), she opened the show by paying homage to the 2009 Kesha we met back when the dollar sign was still in her name and she was largely marketed as the drunk, bad girl Taylor Swift.
It’s sort of insane to open the show with “TikTok,” her massive debut hit that existed long before the annoying app of the same name, but she did, while sporting a white leotard laced with diamonds, massive platform boots, totally ripped arms, chrome-like fingernails, and a glammed-up, gorgeous mug. She would later laugh, “I’m just hotter than ever,” but it’s no joke. The grown woman slithering across the stage has the same “fuck you” attitude of her original fame, but now has the polished, sexed up confidence of a woman who’s been through it and has come out the other side swinging.
Reminding us to have our middle fingers ready, she changed “TikTok’s” original lyrics from “Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy” to “Wake up in the morning like, ‘Fuck P Diddy,’” before kissing and laying the Kesha head on an altar covered in candles and crystals, which stayed on stage most of the night.
Before long, it’s clear the show’s storytelling is basically split into two acts: one before her freedom rings and one after. The first act has her backup dancers sporting all black costumes (males wearing collars, corsets, and harnesses, females in elevated stripper wear). Act One, as I’m calling it, features dark, edgy, and at times even spooky choreography, while the post-freedom second act has dancers in all white and allowed to smile this go around (of course, both acts are completely sex-soaked).
“These are our songs, and I fucking wrote them for you. These are for us,” Kesha announced before digging into her catalog and popping poetry moments in everywhere she possibly could. Act One often felt like she was edging us, serving exactly one banger before reminding us of her early struggles through spoken word audio clips.
The edging was perhaps at its most unbearable when the unmistakable beat from “Sleazy” blasted out while she donned what looked like a bear headdress, sitting with her feet propped up on a desk, CEO-style, smoking a cigar. But “Sleazy” lasted for what felt like one second before it moved on too quickly, a pattern of throwing us a beloved banger before whisking us onto something newer.
There’s not much that most of us wouldn’t have done for a proper medley of deep cuts somewhere in the middle, but we also can’t complain, as this show was as much high-caliber theater as it is a pop concert. For example, she playfully and not-so-playfully pulls out a humongous butcher knife during “Cannibal,” slicing her dancers’ throats. Then, by the time we get to “Blow,” this woman has pulled out an electric guitar (one of several instances), shreds on it like a goddess, hair whipping on her knees as the crowd goes absolutely nuts under the overworked strobe lights. If Kesha didn’t insist on being pop royalty, it’s clear she would have found a way and ended up a modern queen of rock and roll.
At a certain point, she’s put into a straitjacket, illustrating the aforementioned decade-long court battle, being pushed and pulled around by her dancers, who are now police-like figures, as a wall of cell phones flashes as she struggles to free herself (which, of course, she eventually does).
Slowing things down, Kesha sat cross-legged in a birthday hat for “Happy,” a song she told us she wrote at the lowest point of her life. Her eyes are visibly heavy with tears for this entire song, choking up toward the end, as she promised us she’s now the happiest she’s ever been.
“I’ve always wanted to make music, and I wanted to make music for you. Your love has gotten me through everything. Your love is my drug,” she says, letting us know “Your Love is My Drug” is no longer a bop about some shithead crush, but about her tight relationship with her fans. That relationship, by the way, feels as genuine as possible, with all the teary thank yous she gushed throughout the night. The arrangement here is slowed down and given a fun, synth-heavy `80s makeover.
By the time she says, “This is my last song, so grab your tits,” and “We Are Who We Are” roars over b-roll footage of her debut days, Kesha has popped open her “Kesha Records Bitch” tee-shirt to reveal a barely there diamond-encrusted bra, bringing the “tits out” theme to its climax as confetti rains down. “I hope you feel so safe and loved here tonight,” she breathes heavily. “You belong here.”
The polished party princess left us with the distinct feeling that she’s just getting started.
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This article appears in Cleveland SCENE 7/16/25.