Kesha, Neon and Unbothered: Basslines, TikTok, Boiler Room Rebirth

Photo Credit: Brendan Walter

The basslines hit first—thick, rubbery waves that made dorm windows rattle and spilled drinks shiver on sticky tabletops. It was the late 2000s bleeding into the early 2010s, the last gasp of the iPod era and the dawn of the algorithm: nights began with a text thread and ended with floors sticky from cheap vodka and Red Bull.

Fluorescent bracelets lit up the sidewalks, glitter clung to every collarbone, and the air in every bar-turned-dance floor smelled like citrus body spray and borrowed cologne. Pop wasn’t a pristine showroom then—it was a house party with the door left open, subwoofers chewing through electro riffs as strangers became friends for the length of a hook.

But the heartbeat of that period stretched beyond dorm rooms. The rave and nightclub scene thrived in parallel, humming with euphoric excess. Warehouses pulsed under makeshift light rigs, bodies jammed shoulder-to-shoulder beneath fog machines and laser grids, and strobe lights fractured faces into shards of color.

Sweat glistened beneath ultraviolet beams, glow sticks painted trails through the darkness, and every drop seemed engineered to keep the crowd suspended in collective surrender. For a generation stepping into adulthood during economic uncertainty, these nights weren’t just an escape; they were survival rituals, communal declarations that joy could be louder than anything weighing them down.

That was the ecosystem Kesha Rose Sebert stepped into.

A Young Kesha

Born in Los Angeles but raised in Nashville, she grew up surrounded by songwriting traditions before exploding onto the mainstream with a persona that felt the exact opposite of polished country roots. When she arrived on the scene, she looked like someone who had raided a thrift store, a rave shop, and a glitter factory all at once, and wore it all unapologetically.

Sequined tights, neon paint, and eyeliner smudged like war paint became part of her arsenal, but so did the attitude: a mix of irreverent humor, brash sexuality, and a kind of reckless confidence that resonated instantly with a youth culture tired of pop princess perfection. She was not a brand to be managed—she was a glitter bomb exploding in real time.

She didn’t just sing over those basslines that defined an era of clubs and dorm rooms; she weaponized them, turning the pulse of the dance floor into anthems for kids who wanted nothing more than to scream themselves hoarse under strobe lights.

The Breakthrough

Her breakthrough began with “TiK ToK” in 2009—a cocktail of talk-rap cadence, stamped-on 4/4 kick—the steady, four-beat rhythm where the bass drum lands on every beat, the backbone of most dance and pop songs—and a hook engineered to leave you in a euphoric trance for the rest of the night.

The single rocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it remained for nine consecutive weeks, marking the longest run at the top of 2010 and a rare feat for a debut single by a female artist. In total, it charted for 38 weeks on the Hot 100, ultimately finishing as the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Year-End Hot 100 chart for 2010.

Celebrating Fifteen Years Later

Fifteen years later, the song continues to prove its staying power: on January 2, 2025, Kesha took to X to celebrate “TiK ToK” returning to the spotlight, thanking fans as TikTok logged its biggest streaming day ever. “It was 15 years ago that I got my first #1 song! YALL did that… Thank you for supporting my art, y’all give me purpose,” she wrote, as reported by Billboard’s Gil Kaufman, a reminder that her debut anthem remains culturally magnetic (Billboard – Gil Kaufman).

The Next Tracks

Animal (2010) extended that reach with tracks like “Your Love Is My Drug,” “Blow,” and “We R Who We R.” These weren’t just charting singles; they were declarations that loud, messy joy could be the very thing that made pop both universal and liberating. Kesha’s aesthetic—smudged eyeliner, deliberately DIY glamour, lyrics that sounded like secrets shouted over basslines—stood as an antithesis to the high-gloss star-making machine. Alongside Lady Gaga, she made room for artists who treated the club floor not just as a venue, but as the natural habitat of their art.

The Momentum Stops

Then came the silence. In 2014, when Kesha’s legal battle with producer Dr. Luke went public, the momentum that once seemed unstoppable screeched to a halt. Her lawsuit alleging abuse wasn’t just a personal revelation—it was a public confrontation with the structural exploitation underlying pop music’s biggest hits.

For fans who once blasted “We R Who We R” while painting their faces with glitter, the realization that the woman who embodied freedom was trapped in legal chains was jarring. The industry, which had been more than happy to brand her as the messy queen of the party, seemed unprepared to support her as a woman demanding autonomy.

The Return Of Kesha

By the time she returned with Rainbow in 2017, Kesha was a different artist. The album carried the weight of spiritual searching and emotional survival, with tracks like “Praying” reframing her narrative from glitter-soaked irreverence to raw vulnerability.

The accompanying 2018 documentary gave fans an unfiltered view into the costs of her stardom and the private battles behind the public silence. Yet even as Rainbow found critical respect, the musical landscape had shifted. Trap beats and streaming algorithms defined the charts, and attention itself was fractured into fleeting moments. The party girl had grown into something deeper, but the question lingered: where could she exist in an ecosystem that had already moved on?

TikTok In A Different Way

The irony is that the door back into the spotlight was opened by an app that shared its name with her most famous hit. TikTok’s rise in the late 2010s, accelerated by the global lockdown of 2020, reshaped the way music lived. Instead of radio rotations or MTV premieres, choruses and bridges were now chopped into seconds-long snippets for memes, dances, and comedic skits.

For an artist like Kesha, whose music thrived on unforgettable hooks and instantly recognizable refrains, the platform was less a new environment than a revival ground. Songs like “Cannibal” suddenly became pandemic anthems for Gen Z, who lip-synced its sharp lyrics and rediscovered Kesha’s chaotic brilliance.

For many teenagers scrolling on their phones in quarantine, their introduction to her catalog was not a club night or a radio hit—it was a viral sound on their For You Page. And yet, the reaction was the same as it had been a decade earlier: bodies moved, smiles cracked, and energy shifted.

A Culture Of Reinvention

More recently, the “Your Love Is My Drug” trend cemented her place in TikTok’s culture of reinvention. Users plucked the playful middle section of the song—“Do you wanna have a slumber party in my basement? Do you wanna make your heartbeat like an 808 drum? Is my love your drug?”—and turned it into a duet-style meme.

One person lip-synced the calm setup, while another burst into the high-pitched chorus, creating a comedic contrast. The trend became more than just another TikTok wave because it carried a multigenerational twist: parents who were in their teens or college years when Animal first dropped were now filming videos with their kids, staging lighthearted skits that bridged nostalgia and discovery.

In living rooms across America, families recreated the chaos of Kesha’s lyrics in bite-sized videos, proving that what once defined a generation’s nights out could be reinterpreted as a cross-generational joke. In those clips, you can see the durability of Kesha’s early work—music born in neon clubs and sticky dorm rooms, now echoing through smartphones in suburban kitchens.

Re-Recording An Infamous Line

The feedback loop intensified in 2024, when Kesha re-recorded the infamous opening line of “TiK ToK.” What had once been “Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy” was altered into a blunt expletive: “Wake up in the morning saying f*ck P. Diddy.”

Beyond its shock value, the move represented a deeper act of reclamation. Kesha wasn’t simply revising a lyric; she was rewriting the narrative of her own mythology. For fans who had followed her struggles, the tweak was a small but powerful assertion of agency, proof that her songs were not static artifacts but living documents she could update, critique, and reclaim.

For a generation raised on accountability, this act resonated: the woman who once embodied carefree chaos was now showing that even glitter-coated anthems could evolve with time and conscience.

An Intro To Boiler Room

If TikTok reintroduced Kesha to a new wave of fans, it was Boiler Room that reintroduced her to the physical space where her music always belonged: the dance floor. Founded in London in 2010, Boiler Room started as a window into underground DJ culture, streaming intimate sets from cramped warehouses to anyone with Wi-Fi.

Over time, it evolved into a global cultural hub, where the exclusivity of live clubbing collided with the accessibility of digital broadcast. Unlike polished arena tours, Boiler Room emphasized rawness—sweaty crowds, unpredictable sets, and cameras embedded in the chaos. Its cultural significance lies in that tension, offering artists and audiences alike the chance to reconnect with music as a visceral, communal act rather than a polished product.

Kesha’s Appearance In Miami

So when Kesha appeared in Miami in May 2025 for a Boiler Room x White Claw event, the result felt less like a booking and more like destiny. The night unfolded with escalating anticipation: local DJs like Robyn Sin Love and Alejo set the tone, Portland’s Tasha Tektite worked the crowd, and Flirty800 pushed Jersey-club kicks into overdrive before handing the decks to Ty Sunderland, a New York DJ known for transforming pop into glitter-disco bacchanalia.

By the time Kesha stepped out, the room was primed for chaos. Dressed in camo hot pants and a cropped top, she arrived like an apparition from the very era TikTok had revived, but sharper, freer, and more in control. When she teased the crowd with her famous line—“And the party don’t start ’til I walk in”—it didn’t read as nostalgia. It read as truth. Throughout the set, she leaned into her trademark provocations, at one point urging the women in the audience to “take your tits out,” and later whispering to a fan in the front row, “I love your nipples.”

These flashes of brash, playful irreverence were pure Kesha—equal parts shock, humor, and intimacy—fueling the delirium as phones flew up to capture the moment.

The set itself blurred eras and genres with deliberate precision. Kesha and Sunderland flipped through a megamix that tethered her classics to club staples, weaving her catalog into the broader architecture of electronic music.

A “Joyride” remix bled into Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction,” while a Charli XCX cut detonated with fluorescent mischief. An unreleased track, “Boy Crazy,” peeked out, promising a future beyond nostalgia. And when a Cirkut-driven refang of “Blow” dropped, the crowd erupted, proving that songs written for neon-soaked 2010 still carried enough voltage to set a 2025 club ablaze. The atmosphere was chaotic but cathartic, a collision of memory, presence, and possibility.

The power of the night wasn’t just in the music, but in the collaboration. Flirty800’s warm-up work created the scaffolding, Sunderland’s instincts stitched transitions seamlessly, and Kesha’s brash humor and body-positive provocations tied it all together.

In a scene that has often drawn lines between “serious” underground credibility and pop maximalism, the performance erased those boundaries. What mattered was velocity, not taxonomy; movement, not discourse.

For fans, it was a reminder that the club has always been a space where labels dissolve and only rhythm remains.

Rewriting The Role

Boiler Room’s appeal lies in its ability to broadcast intimacy. Cameras captured the sweat, the shrieks, the mascara running into tears of joy, and then streamed it to millions who could replay the experience on demand.

For Kesha, this meant that her Miami set lived two lives: one in the room, chaotic and unrepeatable, and another online, archived and amplified for fans who couldn’t be there. In both formats, the message was consistent—Kesha was not a nostalgia act. She was a living artist, rewriting her role in pop’s narrative.

More Than A Comeback

What makes this moment powerful is that it represents more than just a comeback. Culture loves a redemption story, but Kesha’s trajectory isn’t about revisiting the past. It’s about carrying the raw energy of her youth into the present with a new kind of authority.

The same glitter, grime, and basslines that once defined her rise have been updated, patched, and rebooted for a generation that consumes music differently but still seeks the same rush. In Miami, under hot lights and hotter air, Kesha didn’t resurrect a memory—she created a new chapter.

She moved through that room like someone who had endured silence, fought for her name, and earned the right to be loud again. The set wasn’t just a party; it was a declaration that she is still capable of bending the culture toward her orbit.

For an artist once written off as disposable, there is nothing more subversive than longevity. Still neon. Still unbothered. And once again, gloriously, unapologetically wild.