Kesha’s mother Pebe Sebert has defended name-dropping serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in her daughter’s 2010 song Cannibal.
The Netflix series, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, received backlash from Dahmer’s victims’ families and was accused of “retraumatising” them when it was released last month. The controversy expanded to include songs which name-dropped Dahmer, such as Katy Perry’s Dark Horse and Kesha’s Cannibal.
On Sunday, Pebe offered up some context behind the lyric on TikTok and insisted they “never meant to hurt anybody” with the tongue-in-cheek song.
“The whole Jeffrey Dahmer lyric in Cannibal is a big controversy right now,” Pebe began in the video. “I thought I’d just say a few things about it because that was my line that I wrote in Cannibal.
“At the time, Kesha and the other writer were too young to even know who Jeffrey Dahmer was. Literally, the way it happened is I have this rhyming program called MasterWriter for Songwriters. We were looking for a rhyme for ‘goner’, at the very end of the widest rhymes was Jeffrey Dahmer. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s a perfect lyric.'”
Pebe insisted that Cannibal is “a tongue-in-cheek funny song” and not actually about cannibalism, and Dahmer was “just part of the culture” when she came up with the lyric.
“I’m sorry for anyone whos lost a family member in this tragedy,” she added. “We certainly never meant to hurt anybody or make anybody feel bad.”
In Cannibal, Kesha sings, “Use your finger to stir my tea/ And for dessert I’ll suck your teeth/ Be too sweet and you’ll be a goner/ Yeah, I’ll pull a Jeffrey Dahmer.”
Dahmer murdered and dismembered at least 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991.