DR. LUKE AND MAX MARTIN had come across Kesha’s demo in 2005, while working their way through a stack of a hundred or so, listening for something that caught their interest. Eighteen-year-old Kesha Rose Sebert, of Nashville, Tennessee, had made the two-song demo with her mother, Pebe Sebert, a professional songwriter, and Samantha Cox, a musical director at BMI, the artists’ rights organization. The first song was a conventional country ballad; the second was bizarre rap.
I’m a white girl/From the ’Ville/Nashville, bitch. Uhh. Uhhhhh.
“That’s when I was like, ‘OK, I like this girl’s personality,’ ” Dr. Luke told Billboard in 2010. “When you’re listening to a hundred CDs, that kind of bravado and chutzpah stands out.”
Dr. Luke wanted Kesha Rose to come out to L.A. immediately. She was a high-school senior in Nashville, a good student with excellent SATs who was planning to attend college the following year. Dr. Luke, no great believer in formal education—the lack of it certainly hadn’t held him back—persuaded the teenager to drop out of high school and move to L.A., where she signed with his production company, Kasz Money. He also signed her to a publishing deal with Prescription Songs. Kesha first lived in Luke’s house in Hollywood, which he was renting with his girlfriend; later she moved into a series of cheap rentals with other struggling musicians.
Dr. Luke’s plan was to develop Kesha, write some songs for her, and shop her to the labels, hoping to get a deal. But the plan was derailed when a friend introduced Kesha to a prominent manager, David Sonenberg, who had bad blood with Gottwald going back years to his Kasz days, when Sonenberg’s offer to manage him and was turned down. Sonenberg examined Kesha’s contracts with Kasz Money, and reportedly told her and her mother, “This contract is worse than the one Lou Pearlman made with the Backstreet Boys.” Sonenberg managed to get Kesha out of her contract with Kasz Money, and worked on getting her a major-label deal himself; she gave Sonenberg a year to get one. When he failed, Kesha signed again with Dr. Luke (Sonenberg subsequently sued both of them), and later, when Gottwald got his label deal with Sony, Kesha became Kemosabe’s first artist.
KESHA’S BREAKTHROUGH WAS “Right Round,” Flo Rida’s 2009 hit (the song that began the Boy’s protracted DJ set in the car). The original idea for the song came from Aaron Bay-Schuck, an up-and-coming A&R man at Atlantic Records. He wanted his artist Flo Rida to do a rap that sampled “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by Dead Or Alive, the mid-’80s hit created by the SAW hit factory. “It’s gotta happen. It could be huge,” Bay-Schuck kept saying. But his attempts to realize the song had so far fallen short. Bruno Mars and his writing partner, Phil Smeeze, had taken a crack at it, but the song still wasn’t working. So Bay-Schuck gave it to Dr. Luke, and Luke brought in another key early collaborator, Kool Kojak.
“Dr. Luke and I both had success with the shuffle beat,” Kojak recalls, “starting back in 1999 when I composed the song ‘Sao Paulo’ for my band Supla Zoo.” The song’s swung eighth-note triplet later featured in “I Kissed a Girl.” Kojak: “We rode that bitch hard and we were about to put her to pasture with her greatest incarnation ever,” which was “Right Round.”
Late in 2008, Bay-Schuck had booked Conway Recording Studios, a fancy oasis of song making in slummy east Hollywood. Flo Rida showed up with an entourage that included E Dub, a former football star; De Vante, from the ’90s R&B group Jodeci, who was smoking an enormous blunt; and Cubana Lust, an exotic dancer. Strippers and their patrons are important arbiters of hip-hop music, because the music is often too raunchy to play on the radio. Strip joints are the only establishments where the uncensored songs can be heard by the public. Accordingly, “Strip clubs have become the main breaking place for records, especially in the South,” Jermaine Dupri, president of urban music for Virgin Records, told Billboard in 2008.
Cubana Lust “walked in the studio and flashed a really charming smile,” Kojak remembers. “Then she turned around and all I could hear were air horns. Like, big tugboat air horns. Two denim watermelons. Cubana Lust had that bam-bam. Not like these injected phony buttocksed rappers who are popular today, with their scrawny chicken legs and impossibly buoyant inflata-booties. She was the real deal.” That booty was the inspiration for the song. It was the ass that launched Kesha’s thousand ships.
At this point, “Round Round” as Flo Rida called it, consisted of Flo’s rapped verses over an ’80s-sounding beat. It was embarrassing. “We all got in the control room, and Aaron played the demo,” Kojak goes on. “It wasn’t even ten seconds before Cubana Lust broke out cackling, ‘Yo! Ain’t no niggaz gonna fuck wid dat shit! Hahahahaha y’all tripppppin! Fuck deez niggaz!’ All the homies started hooting and hollering. I was like, ‘Fuck that.’ Me and Luke looked at each other like, ‘Yo, we ain’t goin’ out like that!’ ”
They got Flo to rewrite his verses, and the producers dug in. “The stress was like a trash compactor,” Kojak says. “We made the beat in a weekend, between bouts of me sleeping on the studio floor, waking up, plugging in the KAOS pad and the Casio VL-Tone. Luke looked like he was defusing a bomb. We were in the zone. Sunday we jumped in the pool and knew we’d busted out a real banger.”
They still needed something extra on the hook, and Dr. Luke thought of Kesha, who had by then disentangled herself from Sonenberg. Kojak was dispatched to find her. She had recently jumped in Dr. Luke’s pool with her cell phone in her pocket, and her e-mail was bouncing. She had no fixed address, and was living out of two cars, a gray Honda and an early ’80s gold Mercedes sedan. Both were teeming with fast-food wrappers, bottles of whatever, cheap headphones, unmatched boots, high heels, and garbage bags full of clothes. The young lady from the ’Ville would roll up in front of parties in the Hollywood Hills to which she was not invited, emerge from her garbage scow in a heavy-metal shirt, tiny shorts, boots, and a vintage fur coat, and stride right in and up to the bar, parting the seas like Moses.
Kojak eventually located Kesha in a rental house in Echo Park known as the Drunk Tank. “The walls were literally crumbling,” he recalls—“nicotine stains, cigarette butts everywhere, old pizza boxes, blacked-out windows, filth. The place was nightmarish.” Amid the debris sat Kesha, drinking beers and cranking tunes.
“Luke texted me: ‘What up????’
“I’m like—‘Yo! I found her!’ ”
Kojak turned to Kesha.
“C’mon girl, time to go make you a star!”
The studio was still packed when they returned: Flo, Luke, Bay-Schuck, the engineer, the homies, and Cubana Lust, who was resting on her moneymaker. Kesha walked into the room slugging whiskey from a plastic water bottle. She sat next to Flo and they played her the song. “The glint from her gold-capped tooth blinked in the dark,” Kojak remembers. “She loved it—the song, the attention, the rapper, people jumping off the walls. She goes, ‘I love strippers! I love boners! Let’s do this!’ ”
Cubana Lust just shook her head. “Y’all niggaz cray-zee!”
Kesha waltzed into the booth and warbled the hook a few times.
You spin my head right round right round
When you go down when you go down down
It didn’t sound great, but when Kojak activated the Auto-Tune everybody went wild.
“Bro!” Bay-Schuck was screaming. “Worldwide number one, bro!”
“It sounded huge!” Kojak says.
Kesha’s contribution to “Right Round” was the single most memorable detail in the song, and it launched her into superstardom. However, Dr. Luke didn’t give her a songwriting credit, so she earned nothing from the smash. It was around this time that she changed the “s” in her name to “$.”
“RIGHT ROUND” WAS ALSO a breakthrough song for Dr. Luke. Not only was it his first pop rap chart-topper; it was his first number one without Max Martin. The track is edgier than those on his Max jams; the sound is closer to the space-alien vibe of his early Kasz days. And, of course, the song introduced his Kemosabe artist Kesha to hits radio, launching his new career as a mogul. His next task was to create a Kesha album that would fully realize her raggedly joyous sound.
Dr. Luke tried to explain to me the kind of music he wanted to make. “If you listen to hip hop in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says, “you can hear that at a certain point people discovered that if you’re rapping, and then someone sings a hook—that works. You know? And the reason that works is that it does a lot of the things you have to do in songwriting. One of the most important things in songwriting is melodic rhythm.”
What is melodic rhythm? I ask.
“OK, say that you have a verse, and it’s done in eighth notes, and everything is starting on the one—DAH-ut da-ut da-ut da-ut DAH-ut . . . Right? OK then when you go to the pre-chorus you probably don’t want to start on the one, and you don’t want to do eighth notes. So you come in on the two, or on the upbeats, or go to long notes, so it stays fresh.”
The same principle works in reverse. In a song that’s mostly singing, a sixteen-bar rap provides new texture. The key is to switch up the feel to keep things lively. “That’s why rapping in songs is interesting,” he goes on. “Intrinsically, if you’re rapping, and then you’re singing, you’ve created a new part. There’s no question about which part is the chorus—it’s the sung part. When you’re doing something without rapping, you still have to make that distinction, but you do it all with melody and rhythm. And that is fundamentally what songwriting is.”
“TIK TOK” (2010) WAS Kesha’s first solo number one, a monster smash that established her as the louche pop-rap queen—more Lady Gaga than Katy Perry. (In fact, “Tik Tok”’s melody is strongly reminiscent of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” but not quite similar enough: another case of “close but no cigar.”) The lyrics, an ode to round-the-clock partying, begin with the arresting opening hook: “Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy,” followed by Diddy himself giving Kesha a little shout-out: “What up, girl?” In keeping with Luke’s songwriting practice, Kesha raps the verses and sings the chorus. Her distinctive vocal personality saturates the record, for example in the odd way she pronounces Mick Jagger’s name.
“Tik Tok” also marked the first chart topper for young Benny Blanco, Dr. Luke’s songwriting protégé. Blanco recalls, “I went out to L.A. to work with him for the first time and I was only going to be there a week and a half and I stayed nine months.” He goes on, “There was no one else. Now he has like thirty or forty people. But then it was just me and him, and we were just making songs every day.” It was the beginning of Benny’s hot streak, and Dr. Luke made the most of it.
After “Tik Tok” came “Your Love Is My Drug” in 2010, which peaked at number four on the Hot 100. Benny co-produced and co-wrote the song with Dr. Luke’s next major discovery, a young African American called Ammo, whose real name is Joshua Coleman. Ammo grew up in Baltimore, where his parents were musicians, and began making tracks and rapping over them when he was twelve. His first job, loading trucks in a Saks Fifth Avenue warehouse, was not to his liking and hardened his resolve to be a musician. He interested Jim Edmunds, an A&R man at Epic Records, in some of his beats, and Edmunds played a couple for Dr. Luke. Luke invited Ammo to come to New York and meet him in the Sony Building, where they went out for sushi. Ammo had never eaten sushi before. Later they went back to the office and Luke played Ammo some tracks he was working on with Benny—“super next-level stuff,” as Ammo describes it. Inspired, Ammo returned to Baltimore, stayed up all night making beats, and e-mailed ten of them to Dr. Luke, who called the next day and offered him a publishing deal, which included a nice advance. “He gets a piece of my publishing and I get to be in the room with some of the biggest talents in the world,” Ammo says proudly.
After Blanco headed back east—he doesn’t care for the pressure that Dr. Luke likes to work under—Ammo took over his spot at Luke’s right hand, as well as Benny’s air mattress on Luke’s floor. Luke and Max gave Ammo “Your Love Is My Drug” to work on. Ammo explains his process: “I listened to Kesha’s last record a lot, trying to figure out those sounds—how to do it, but make it a bit different, like take those same thirds and put them over a kick pattern. I put my best verse melody together with a chorus melody and a pre-chorus melody, and played it for Max. At first he was quiet. He went outside, then he came back and took the tag from the second half and put it in the first half and that was it! That song was my landmark and I graduated from track guy to songwriter.” Ammo followed that hit with an even bigger smash—“We R Who We R,” which debuted at the top of the Hot 100.
RELATIONS BETWEEN THE LABEL head and his biggest star soured during the making of Kesha’s second full-length album, Warrior, in 2011–2012. Kesha wanted this album to establish her rock bona fides. Her reputation as a fun-loving pop rap queen might be good for Dr. Luke’s overall market share—after all, with Katy and Avril and Pink, Luke and Max had the pop-rock genre covered—but Kesha wasn’t really a rapper. She was a rocker, and she wanted to make a dirty-sounding ’70s rock record à la the Rolling Stones—the kind of album her mother always wanted to make. “People say that rock and roll is dead,” Kesha stated in Billboard, “and it is my mission and my goal to resurrect it in the form of my pop music.” She added, “We’ll see what happens. That’s a very ambitious and lofty goal, but that’s my goal.” She added, “Some will also be excited to know that I don’t just do silly white-girl rap,” though possibly those people did not include Dr. Luke, who had signed her to do just that.
Kesha and her mother wrote a clutch of rock songs for the sophomore album, all of which Dr. Luke eventually rejected. He and Kesha also spent a couple months in L.A. working together, but the sessions didn’t yield anything that sounded like a radio hit. Kesha brought Luke and his crew to Nashville, trying to get a Southern-rock vibe onto a record. Benny, Ammo, Kool Kojak, and Bonnie McKee were all brought in to help. Young Cirkut, who had only recently arrived, also worked on the album. The factory was running at full capacity. But still the hits wouldn’t come.
Max Martin summoned Kesha to Sweden, to record a song called “All That Matters (The Beautiful Life)” that he had written with his latest protégé, Johan Schuster, a former death-metal rocker who calls himself Shellback. Together the pair would go on to write huge hits for Pink (“Raise Your Glass,” “Fuckin’ Perfect”) and Taylor Swift (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “Shake It Off,” and “Blank Space”). But “All That Matters” wasn’t a hit.
Warrior was supposed to come out at the end of 2011, but the album was delayed because, Kesha explained to Billboard, “I want to take enough time to make sure it’s the reinvention of pop music. That’s the ultimate goal, to reinvent pop music.” That would take another six months, she reckoned. “May sounds right,” she said. But May came and went with no album. Kesha took some time apart from Luke, and she and Pebe wrote some more songs. Dr. Luke supported her, but he also reminded Kesha, somewhat ominously, that the more songs they wrote, the more would have to be cut, ultimately. In the end, only one of the songs Kesha wrote with Pebe made it onto the album.
Finally, Dr. Luke put his foot down: Warrior would continue the Kesha as party-girl vein. Together with Benny, Cirkut, and Nate Ruess from the band Fun, Dr. Luke wrote and produced “Die Young,” and released it as the first single, in the fall of 2012, with the refrain:
Let’s make the most of the night
Like we’re gonna die young
The song topped some charts, but immediately after the December 14 Newtown school massacre it all but disappeared from the radio, and the Kesha haters went into a frenzy on Twitter.
Kesha had previously claimed to have written the lyrics by herself. In her book My Crazy Beautiful Life she said, “I rewrote the words a thousand times until I found something simple that felt right.” She added, “When I sing, ‘Like we’re gonna die young,’ I’m promising that no matter how old I get I’m never going to lose my youthful spirit.’ ” But on December 18, four days after the Newtown massacre, she tweeted, “I did NOT want to sing those lyrics and I was FORCED to.” Who had forced her? Kesha’s fans thought they had a pretty good idea.
In September 2013, a super fan named Rebecca Pimmel started an online petition to “Free Kesha” from Dr. Luke’s clutches. The petition accused the producer of stifling the artist’s creativity by making her sing the same generic, predictable, recycled pop songs. It was a tune as old as Phil and Ronnie Spector, but social media gave it wings. “It’s no surprise that Ke$ha is ‘forced’ to work with the same collective group of people, through each record,” Pimmel wrote in her petition. “Dr. Luke is controlling Ke$ha like a puppet. . . .”
In January 2014, Kesha checked into a rehab clinic to treat an eating disorder, allegedly brought on by Dr. Luke telling her that she looked like “fat fucking refrigerator.”
The artist remained out of sight for most of 2014, but in October remerged in the tabloids in a very big way. Kesha and her mother and their attorneys filed suit against Dr. Luke, charging him with sexual assault. The wording of the lawsuit combines Hollywood Babylon and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and the spectre of Spector hovers over the accusations. “At eighteen years old [Kesha] was an intelligent, family-oriented, and joyful young woman,” the suit reads. “Ms. Sebert excelled academically and had a bright future ahead of her.” Dr. Luke “showered her with promises of fame and fortune,” and persuaded her to move to L.A. to pursue “a glamorous music career under his auspices.” However, once she was in L.A. in the fall of 2005, “Dr. Luke displayed despicable conduct in front of Ms. Sebert. Specifically, Dr. Luke would boast and brag to Ms. Sebert about how he liked to take girls out on a first date, get them as drunk as possible, and ‘fuck them in the ass.’ ”
Soon, claims the suit, Gottwald turned his charms on Kesha herself, forcing drugs and alcohol on her “in order to take advantage of her sexually while she was intoxicated.” The plaintiffs also claim that one night, after drinking with Kesha, Dr. Luke gave her a pill, which he said would sober her up, but which was actually a roofie. He then raped her (reportedly she was a virgin at the time) when she was unconscious in his hotel-room bed. The next day, Dr. Luke allegedly took her down to the beach and made it clear that if she said anything about what had happened, he would “shut her career down, take away all her publishing and recording rights, and destroy not only her life but her entire family’s lives as well,” all of which Kesha supposedly reported to her mother. The lawsuit also gives examples of cutting remarks the producer would routinely make to his star, such as, “I don’t give a shit if you don’t want to sing it, get in there and do it,” and “Go finish the song so I can buy a yacht,” and “You are nothing without me.”
Dr. Luke’s camp released their own countersuit the same day, denying the Seberts’ claims, and alleging defamation and breach of contract. The countersuit accuses Kesha’s mother of pressuring Dr. Luke into letting Kesha out of her contract by threatening to tell a blogger about Kesha’s alleged rape. Dr. Luke’s suit also points out that both Kesha and her mother swore under oath in depositions for Sonenberg’s 2011 lawsuit that the drug and rape accusations, which Sonenberg had heard about, were in fact not true.
Perhaps, as Kesha and Pebe maintained, Luke had forced them to lie under oath then. But Dr. Luke’s camp doesn’t see it that way. An associate of the hit maker’s argues: Wouldn’t a young girl’s mother, on hearing her daughter had been drugged and raped by her boss, immediately call the police? Why would she wait eight years to file charges, a period during which she and her daughter signed a publishing deal with Dr. Luke’s company, and re-signed with Luke as an artist? And, he points out, why would the only remedy they seek be in a civil lawsuit for termination of Kesha’s contract—surely they should be pressing for a criminal prosecution if the charges were true.
EVEN BEFORE THE ONGOING Kesha drama, Dr. Luke’s peers were undecided about how far his unique combination of musical skills and ambition would carry him in the record business. Doug Morris thinks he is the Jimmy Iovine of his generation. “He is certainly one of the most talented people,” Morris says. “He’s had so many hits, and that really is the heart of what the record business is all about—the people who can deliver hit after hit after hit. Creatures like that are enormously rare. He’s already the top producer-writer, and he’ll evolve into a top executive—he can go as far as he wants to go. He’s as good as it gets.” Could he have Morris’s job one day? “Oh, absolutely. You know, these kinds of people come along very rarely, and they’re driven and brilliant and they go as far as they can and sometimes they go so far it’s shocking.”
But could Dr. Luke continue to be closely involved with the creative process of songwriting, developing hit songs for artists, while also running the label that was releasing the artist’s work? It was one thing for a label chief to reject an artist’s songs, as Clive Davis did Kelly Clarkson’s; it’s another for the boss to force the artist to sing his own songs, so that he can get the publishing royalties too. As Luke’s boyhood friend Jarret Myer observes, “A lot of his personality is still tied to making sure he gets the right margin on dime bags. Sometimes he doesn’t let things go. Because if you’re going to make your margin on dime bags, you can’t let things go.”
WITH KESHA’S CAREER IN TURMOIL, Dr. Luke was fully engaged in launching the career Becky G, a sixteen-year-old Mexican American artist he had signed to Kemosabe in 2011. He first spotted her in a YouTube video, rapping over a Kanye West and Jay-Z song called “Otis.” He arranged a meeting and signed her on the spot.
Dr. Luke invited me to the set of a video shoot for Becky G’s first single, a fun number called “Play It Again.” The shoot was in Becky’s ’hood, the Inglewood neighborhood in downtown L.A. Lots of relatives and school friends of Becky’s had turned out, mingling with a troupe of professional hip-hop dancers—muscular dudes doing strenuous athletic moves.
“She’s got it,” Dr. Luke says, watching his artist sing along to the track. “A lot of these young kids are too Star Search-y—they’ve got a mother who has been hauling them off to auditions since they were little. But Becky isn’t like that. Whatever she has, she got on her own, from watching videos.” He gestured toward the girl’s mother, who was watching intently as an assistant touched up her daughter’s makeup, adding, “Becky G is a very nice, respectful girl who was brought up right by her parents with solid values.” Plus, she was easy to work with, which is not always the case with rappers. But whether or not a nice, respectful girl who followed orders would appeal to a hip-hop audience remained to be seen.
Becky G, née Rebecca Gomez, was scheduled to come by the beach house late on a Friday morning. Dr. Luke wanted her to write a rap to the bridge in a song he had co-written for Jessie J, the British pop star. Young Becky arrived on time, modestly attired in a tracksuit. She is petite, with high cheekbones and a gap-toothed smile that is sassy-friendly. Dr. Luke nodded toward Cirkut, and the Jessie J song “Excuse My Rude,” began to play. The hook was “Excuse my rude but I really fucking hate you.” Everyone nodded in silence to the beat. At the end, Dr. Luke said, “It’s a dope song. I think you can go hard on it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Gomez said. “For sure. Make it gorilla!”
Luke wanted her to tap into a sense of anger and outrage. “I know no one ever does anything bad to you because everyone loves you, but just imagine.”
“I’ll just go on YouTube and read comments.”
“Anonymous haters.”
“Yeah.”
Gomez noted that her mother didn’t allow her to swear in her raps.
“I think swearing, though it sounds cool, is overrated,” Dr. Luke says. “Usually, when you make the clean version, you have to think, and most of the time that one’s better.”
Becky went outside on the patio to work on her rap, the Jessie J song playing in her headphones, as the surf beat its own rhythm on the beach. Inside, Luke instructed an assistant to order lunch from a nearby takeout spot. When it arrived Becky came back in. Dr. Luke was seated at the head of the table, the barefoot paterfamilias of a pop empire, his turkey burger with avocado waiting behind a selection of hot sauces.
Becky G, spying the toy car belonging to Dr. Luke’s older child, sat down in it and, scrunching up her knees, began to drive in circles around the living space, childish delight in her face. Dr. Luke looked on, beaming.
BEFORE I LEFT THE beach house, Dr. Luke wanted me to hear a song. “Here, I’ll play you something from the new Katy album. This is the first single.” He nodded in the direction of Cirkut, who punched up the song on the keyboard. It started to play.
I used to bite my tongue and hold my breath
Scared to rock the boat and make a mess
As the song played, I was thinking, Oh, man, what am I going to say? This is a terrible song! It’s way too slow! Luke and Max have really lost their mojo! I was cycling through the studio ejaculations I had picked up in my time with the pros. Dope? Cray-zee? Sick? A real banger?
In the end, I just went with “Cool!”
“Thanks,” says Luke, with a show of gratitude that, like his other attempts to be sincere, had a slightly forced quality. As did my compliments, no doubt—especially since they definitely weren’t sincere.
“That’s the first single?”
“Yep.”
“Huh! What’s it called?”
“ ‘Roar.’ ”