The crowd erupted during lesbian actor and musician Reneé Rapp’s Coachella set Sunday afternoon when pop star Kesha made a special appearance on stage.

And it wasn’t just because she’s Kesha, whose records “Die Young,” “Blow,” “Your Love Is My Drug,” “We R Who We R” were amongst the major pop songs of the aughts. During Rapp’s set, she invited Kesha out to sing “Tik Tok,” Kesha’s biggest song yet, and long before the phrase was associated with the now-giant social media platform.

The element of Kesha’s surprise performance had Rapp’s crowd losing it, and the two duetting “Tik Tok” only brought the house down in screams. But it wasn’t until a major lyric change in the first line of the song that had many people’s jaws dropping.

“Wake up in the morning like ‘f*ck P. Diddy,’” the two shouted with their middle fingers in the air—even the guitarist can be seen in the back with his middle finger also up in iHeartRadio’s TikTok clip of the iconic moment.

The line was a stark change from its original line “Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy,” insinuating that music business mogul Sean “P. Diddy” Combs is no longer someone to aspire to fourteen years since the song was released.

In a powerful moment of queer resistance, the two pop stars flipped the script on Kesha’s hit song. Their bold lyric change targeting Combs bounded by mounting sexual assault allegations amplifies a legacy of female and LGBTQ+ artists calling out powerful abusers.

Combs’ ongoing sexual assault allegations against him gained public traction when R&B singer Cassie Ventura filed a lawsuit in November last year. In the lawsuit, Ventura’s details go back as far as 2005, her 19 and him 37. Additionally, she notes that in 2018, he forced himself into her house and raped her.

Even following the string of accusations against Combs in the past seven months, Combs’ homes in Los Angeles and Miami were both raided by the FBI in connection to an investigation on sex trafficking. Additionally, since Ventura’s lawsuit, three women and one man came have sued him for various sexual assault allegations.

A fight ‘til they see the sunlight

It’s no surprise Kesha switched up the lyrics to “Tik Tok,” given her own experiences of sexual assault in the music industry as a young woman. Over a decade ago, Kesha filed a lawsuit against Dr. Luke, the founder of her former record label and producer of “Tik Tok” for allegedly raping her, and enduring years of his abuse.

A month before their case went to trial, both Dr. Luke and Kesha released a joint statement, reaching a settlement in June of last year.

Rapp herself has been vocal about not only her queerness, but the violation she felt as a teenager playing Regina George on Broadway’s “Mean Girls” production, being picked apart for her body size.

Although Kesha identifies as neither gay nor straight, she has long been a champion of the LGBTQ community. In 2019, she even ran a cruise tour called “Kesha’s Weird & Wonderful Rainbow Ride,” hiring many iconic drag queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race like Bob The Drag Queen, Thorgy Thor, Detox and more. She was also the 2016 recipient of the LGBTQ Visibility Award.

Her moment with Rapp on stage exuded queer resistance akin to moments like trans legend Sylvia Rivera’s “Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech to cis gay men or out gay rapper Lil Nas X calling out homophobia in the Black community in a diss track to BET. Not to mention Kesha and Rapp expressed their denouncing of Combs at a major music festival like Coachella.

“I love women so much like you don’t understand how important Kesha and Reneé Rapp are to me,” X user @starringnae wrote yesterday. “I listened to “Tik Tok” on my hello kitty mp3 player on the way to school every morning and now I listen to Reneé on my way to work and it’s all full circle and very gay and beautiful.”

As if it needs to be said, Kesha set the record straight in an X post yesterday anyway, referring to her moment on stage with Rapp.

“That’s herstory.”