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Kesha's mom Pebe Sebert has addressed a controversial line in her daughter's hit song "Cannibal" which has a lyric that references serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. "The whole Jeffrey Dahmer lyric in 'Cannibal' is a big controversy right now," Sebert said in a TikTok. "I thought I'd just say a few things about it because that was my line that I wrote in 'Cannibal.'"
She went on to explain, "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 Master Writer 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.'"
In Kesha's 2010 hit, she 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." She also noted that "Jeffrey Dahmer was just part of the culture back then," and that "Everybody talked about him for many years. What he'd done was so extreme, and so worse than anyone had ever done that anybody knew about."
Sebert continued, "Not to be insensitive to anybody whose families were involved in this and lost loved ones. At the time, it was a song that we were writing about Kesha. It was a tongue-in-cheek funny song. It was not actually about cannibalism. It was just a title."
With the recent success of Netflix's series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, several of the victims' relatives have criticized the show for making them relive the trial and "retraumatizing" them. Because of this, Sebert gave a direct apology to the victims' families.
"I'm sorry for anyone who's lost a family member in this tragedy," she said. "We certainly never meant to hurt anybody or make anybody feel bad. There's a [show] out right now that's kind of bringing attention back. The song's been out for more than 10 years, probably almost 12 years. This is not something that we've recently written."