Cannibal by Kesha - Songfacts

Album: Cannibal (2010)

Charted: 77

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This song finds Kesha singing about being a man-eating cannibal, eating boys up "breakfast and lunch." At the time, this was her brand, and she played it up in interviews. She told Spin magazine: "When I really like somebody, it totally flips. But before I give two s--ts about a guy, I tend to treat him as my plaything, like a cat playing with her food before she eats it. It's kinda f---ed up."
Kesha wrote the song with her mother, the Tennessee songwriter Pebe Sebert, who explained in a 2021 Songfacts interview: "At that point in time she was a hot little pop star who could f--k with guys' heads in any way she chose to. She's always been the girl who's trying to give guys what guys have always done to women. I feel like that is Kesha in a nutshell. Like, if you're going to talk about us like we're objects and talk about how you can have any girl you want, like the rock stars have always done, she's the girl who is going to take that same attitude.

It was fun. No women had been as nasty and vile as men, so she was trying to be just as nasty as men have always been, but in a funny way, not in a gross way, because she wasn't really doing any of that."
This grimy number is the title track from Kesha's 2010 EP Cannibal, released 11 months after her debut album Animal.
"Cannibal" was produced by Ammo (Joshua Coleman) and Billboard (Mathieu Jomphe), who each have writing credits on the track.
Pebe Sebert, who co-wrote this song with Kesha, was a rock singer in the '70s, then a staff songwriter; she co-wrote Dolly Parton's 1980 Country chart-topper "Old Flames (Can't Hold a Candle to You)." Pebe had fallen on hard times by the time she had Kesha in 1987, but the two became very close and Kesha inherited her mom's musical gifts. Pebe placed a few songs in the '90s and early '00s, but didn't land another hit until she started writing with Kesha. She co-wrote three tracks on her daughter's debut album, including the hit single "Your Love Is My Drug."
Back in 2010, Kesha's debut solo single "TiK ToK" became the first Billboard Hot 100 #1 of the decade. Ten years later, she benefitted from the app bearing the same name when "Cannibal" had a TikTok-fueled resurgence. The song's revival was prompted by a dance challenge on the social-media platform based around the final line of the chorus and beginning of the second verse.

Kesha contributed to the viral craze when she posted a video of her "Cannibal" dance moves.
When Netflix broadcast its 2022 series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, it garnered backlash for exploiting the cannibalistic serial killer's crimes. The controversy spread to this song, as it namedrops Dahmer.

Be too sweet and you'll be a goner
Yeah, I'll pull a Jeffrey Dahmer

Pebe Sebert took responsibility for writing the lyric. "I thought I'd just say a few things about it because that was my line that I wrote in 'Cannibal,'" she said in a TikTok video. "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.'"

"I'm sorry for anyone who's lost a family member in this tragedy," Sebert added. "We certainly never meant to hurt anybody or make anybody feel bad."

Comments: 8

Arithis song is great I listen to it with my friends & LOVE IT!!!@ :-D
The Meat Wanter from This Is Not Seriousi wish lol :3
Queer Llama from Redacted Info!I love this song! The message is...... unsettling, but its still a good song!
Utv from No One Needs To KnowAnonymous mankind is already screwed, younger generations don’t want to work, we have a dumb you know what for a president now, our constitutional rights are being threatened
Bruh from Lol karen? is that you? @anonymous
AnonymousThis is crazy. We're really gonna let our little kids and babies, teenage children of future generations be damaged by a song called cannibal. in the song Kesha says I am cannibal. shes telling people I, a cannibalistic person. that kills and eats people, the song and the bottle in her concert are proof . it wasn’t cool aid it was blood. come on people. the rich go to cannibalistic parties. why. why sacrifice people. when you have all the money in the world to buy a seafood dinner and a yacht, we should not have our children singing or rejoicing in a song that has to do with killing and eating people, it. is nothing I would want my kids to sing to, I’m an aunt. and I would never let my nieces and nephews sing dance or do acts of the behavior. the fact you can expose your kids to this stuff. this act or practice or song , it’s disgusting, I’m not perfect, no one is. i made mistakes i wish I could take back. but I can’t. no one can. but it is our job as the older generations of people to not turn our. Children into a Katherine knight or Jeffrey dahmer where their singing, dancing, hearing kesha sing that song. or seeing her drink the blood. being apart of the acts of it. you just don’t, it’s damaging to our new generations of children and people. and on top of that. you create a monster in our children. one that gets older and stronger and vicious. out of anybody’s control. then they make their first kill. after that they are not our children anymore. they change. into something scary, i know, I have an aunt who became that way. association. joining in on the act. get the first taste of blood. she was gone. she wanted children. my uncle wouldn’t give her any. thank, god, she acted more like a animal, then, she did a person. normal, people don’t make hissing sounds like a feral cat. they don’t roll around in blood or spell words in it. no person when their bleeding or someone else is bleeding. should like their hands. or have a chunk of human blood and flesh in their mouth. so this is very personal to me. it hits close to home. no one was able to save my aunt. but it’s not too late to do right by our children, our new next generations to come. it, s not to late to protect them from people who are involved in that. teach them that their are people out there who are evil and sick mentally. like, kesha, like the stars our children idealized. teach them just because Katy perry, Miley Cyrus or kesha do it, it’s not something good that they should copy or act in. the children are our future. how we raise them. what we do or say matters. who we let them hang around and what we like them see or deal with. it f--king matters. so wake up now or mankind is forever screwed up, lost and evil
Megan from Stevenson, AlOMG! Me and my friends listened to this on the way to prom! Ha! lol
Daniel from Winchester, OhKe$ha's a mastermind. xD The princess of pop. :DD

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