While you listen, consider the DJ. Stand with me in a silent club. The lights are still up. There are people here, talking quietly at tables. Someone laughs. Beverages clink in emptying glasses. It is bright and the people do not like it. Even as someone who does not club, I know this is incorrect. A club like this is not the club.

Until the DJ. The lights dim at his arrival. The space becomes new. He—indulge me, the DJ we are imagining just now is Male—weaves together the myriad threads of instrumentation and rhythm to make music—but not just music. He makes the club. The heat haze of dancing bodies, the churning assemblage of appendages in motion. (The wiggling. The jiggling. My heartbeat.) The DJ creates the space in which we are all contained. He is the one who draws the astral selves from Dylan Mills and Kesha Sebert, who Hydes them away, leaving Ke$ha and Dizzee Rascal to flail in the numinous melee of the club. The DJ makes the club, and remakes the people within it.

So when Ke$ha calls out the DJ in the bridge of “TiK ToK,” to whom is she speaking? And how does she address him?