Kesha’s mother addresses controversial Jeffrey Dahmer ‘Cannibal’ lyric in 2010 hit song

Kesha’s mother has addressed the line in her daughter’s 2010 hit single “Cannibal” which name-drops the infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

In response to the recent controversy regarding references to Dahmer following the release of the Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Kesha’s mother Pebe Sebert explained the context behind the lyric in her daughter’s song.

The lyric goes: “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.”

The 35-year-old singer’s mother, who has co-writing credits on the song, said: “The whole Jeffrey Dahmer lyric in ‘Cannibal’ is a big controversy right now, and 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,” she said in a TikTok video on Sunday (2 October).

“Literally the way it happened was I have this rhyming programme called MasterWriter for songwriters. We were looking for a rhyme for ‘goner.’ At the very end of the widest rhymes was Jeffrey Dahmer. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s the perfect lyric,’” she added.

“Not to be insensitive to anybody whose families were involved in this and lost loved ones,” Sebert said. “We certainly never meant to hurt anybody or make anybody feel bad.

“There’s a movie out right now that’s kind of bringing attention back. That song’s been out for more than 10 years, probably almost 12 years. This is not something that we’d recently written.

“Once again, Jeffrey Dahmer’s name wouldn’t even be in the song if it wasn’t for the MasterWriter that threw his name up there because he was a person who became famous, unfortunately, because of what he did. Jeffrey Dahmer was just part of the culture back then. Everybody talked about him for many years. What he had done was so extreme and so worse than anything anyone had ever done that anybody knew about,” Sebert added.

Netflix released the controversial series, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, last week.

Dahmer, who is portrayed by Evan Peters, murdered 17 men and boys between the years 1978 and 1991. He was arrested in 1991 and was murdered in prison three years later.

Since its release, a number of relatives of Dahmer’s victims have come forward to speak out against the series.