Kesha Origami

As Kesha embarks on a sort of “2.0” version of the Tits Out Tour called the Freedom Tour this summer, her motif of “letting it all hang out” is something she very much wants to keep going. And, in that spirit, her latest single, “Origami,” is all about embracing her sexual freedom. Something she hadn’t been able to tap into during her nine-year, extremely stymying legal battle with Dr. Luke. But now, after shedding all the fear and trauma associated with that period (no album title reference intended), Kesha has, as she recently told Alex Cooper on Call Her Daddy, reclaimed her sexuality.

Among her many ruminations on being comfortable in her own body and pleasure in general, Kesha remarked on how, oftentimes, when a person (particularly a woman) goes through something harrowing, the thought of sexual pleasure isn’t usually top of mind. Least of all as a means for healing. However, Kesha would urge everyone to rethink that approach, telling Cooper, “I keep coming back to pleasure. It is okay as a woman to feel pleasure in this world. When you go through things, pleasure is not the number one neural pathway that your brain always goes to when you have survived things. And I had to reprogram that, and I do it every fucking day, and I’m not even embarrassed about it.” Nor is she embarrassed about much of anything anymore. Least of all telling her lover du moment (presumably an Italian one, since she said she’s celibate except for when she’s in Italy) exactly what she wants. Which is, ultimately, as Charlotte York would say, to be “really pounded hard.”

Even so, Kesha is “woke” enough (and always was before it became “chic”—then returned to being “out of fashion” thanks to a certain Orange Creature’s presidential reign) to commence the song with a message of consent as she declares, “I give you my permission/Let’s try that new position.” Though there are many other positions she would clearly like to try, hence the song’s innuendo-oozing title. One that pays plenty of homage to the benefits of flexibility as she urges her object of desire to take her “to the bedroom, to the kitchen/To the bathroom, at the addition [which is probably the first time someone has mentioned this architectural phenomenon as a place they want to fuck in, or at least the first time it’s been immortalized in a song]/In the Uber to the airport/To the penthouse, yeah, on the top floor/Kick it up a notch, karate/Getting hotter than wasabi/Boy, come bend mе how you want me/Make me origami, ah.”

Of course, because Kesha is wielding the ancient Japanese art as a sexual metaphor, there are times when she borders on the slightly offensive in an overly fetishistic, reductive way with phrases like, “Love me like Japanese/Hop in like kawaii.” But beyond that, she manages to avoid total effrontery as she continues to make it about owning her sexual agency while asserting, “I’m serving supersexual/Flexible, intellectual/Meet me down in Shibuya/Practice that Kama Sutra/Bodies drop when I shake these tits/Can’t blame and they pussy wet/New Birkin, yeah, buy me shit/Oh, you’re making my pussy drip.” The latter lines alluding to her recent “open call” for a sugar daddy, as she’s been saying things like, “I’m manifesting a sugar daddy and a yacht, and I would like to be on my sugar daddy’s yacht in Italy [there’s that Italian love again] as soon as possible, baby” since the end of 2024.

But even a broke ass man might do…if he knows how to use his “equipment” properly in the boudoir. Enough to make her say, “Bend me, twist me how you want me/Baby, make me origami.” Though Garbage once put it a bit more romantically on “I Think I’m Paranoid” with the lyrics, “Bend me, break me anyway you need me/All I want is you.” And all Kesha wants, apart from a deft lover, is to be naked (as she already said back in 2010 on “Blah Blah Blah” with, “I wanna be naked and you’re wasted”). Something she also expounded on to Cooper by saying,

“…being comfortable in my nudity is kind of an act of resistance too, because after being a pop star from 2009 to current present day, I have almost just started waging a war against my own body due to things I read about myself. And I just internalized all these external voices. So to then be in my body enough to just be like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to be naked in my backyard and I’m going to call my tour the Tits Out Tour’—that is also an act of resistance. I don’t hate my body anymore. I actually love my body. And I went to Italy and I ate a lot of pasta and I love it. It’s so cunty to just be in your body and love it.”

That message of being comfortable in her own skin (whether it’s covered or not) is part of what comes across in “Origami.” Along with Kesha lyrically and sonically backing up her statement to Cooper, “I am having a fun time immortalizing this reclaiming of my sexuality. The past year and a half, two years, I’m reclaiming myself, and part of that is my sexuality.” Not in the Jenna Maroney on 30 Rock way (who likes to say her secret weapon is “my sexuality”), but in the way that audiences first remember her appearing so free and wild—so unapologetic—during that 2009-2010 era when she was tasked with reminding the world how to have a good time in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

And now, Kesha is challenging herself musically even more in 2026 by trying to make people remember that it doesn’t all have to be so sexless and stodgy despite the world staring down its environmental demise (among many other kinds of demises). After all, the fall of Rome was when sexual freedom was at a peak, no? So why shouldn’t the same be true for the fall of this particular “empire”?