NEED TO KNOW
- The White House posted a TikTok on February 10 showing a fighter jet shooting a missile at a naval ship set to Kesha’s “Blow,” captioned “Lethality” — racking up 14.5 million views.
- Kesha fired back, calling the video an attempt to “incite violence and threaten war,” saying it was “disgusting and inhumane” and the opposite of what she stands for.
- White House Communications Director Steven Cheung mocked the backlash, but Kesha’s response — “Stop using my music, perverts @WhiteHouse” — has nearly 547,000 views compared to his post’s 26,000.
Leave it to the White House to turn a sparkly 2011 banger about a killer party into the soundtrack for military aggression. Kesha is officially done with it.
The controversy erupted after the White House posted a TikTok video on February 10 featuring her hit track “Blow” alongside military jets, including a fighter jet launching a missile at a naval ship, with the caption “Lethality.” The clip racked up more than 14 million views and 1.8 million likes. Subtle, it was not.
In what appears to be the offending TikTok, her track plays as bomber jets soar around the sky before one targets and drops a bomb on a ship — perfectly timed to the lyric “This place about to blow.” Whoever was in charge of that sync cue clearly had a sense of humor. Kesha, for her part, does not.
On Monday, the singer took to Instagram and X to make her feelings known in no uncertain terms. “It’s come to my attention that The White House has used one of my songs on TikTok to incite violence and threaten war,” she wrote. “Trying to make light of war is disgusting and inhumane. I absolutely do NOT approve of my music being used to promote violence of any kind.”
She kept going. “Love always trumps hate,” she added. “Please love yourself and each other in times like this. This show of blatant disregard for human life and quite frankly this attack on all of our nervous systems is the opposite of what I stand for.”
And if that wasn’t enough, she concluded her message with a pointed reference to the Epstein files: “Also, don’t let this distract us from the fact that criminal predator Donald Trump appears in the Files over a million times.” Kesha stays multitasking.
The White House, predictably, did not take the criticism lying down. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung quoted Kesha’s post on X and wrote, “All these ‘singers’ keep falling for this. This just gives us more attention and more view counts to our videos because people want to see what they’re bitching about.”
The implied victory lap didn’t quite land the way Cheung intended. As of just pre-publication of this article, his post had just over 68,000 views on X. Kesha’s response to him? Almost 5,000,000.
That response was, by the way, a masterclass in brevity. Just five words: “Stop using my music, perverts @WhiteHouse.”
White House Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr did weigh in with a statement: “Kesha quotes are like Popeye’s Spinach to this team. Memes? They’ll continue. Winning? Will also continue.” The White House declined to comment specifically on the “perverts” post, which, honestly, tracks.
Kesha joins a long list of musicians who have called out the White House and Trump for using their songs without permission — at campaign rallies or on social media. Those include Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, SZA, Celine Dion, Kenny Loggins, Linda Ronstadt, the Foo Fighters, and the White Stripes, among many others.
The pattern is hard to miss at this point. The White House appears to specifically select songs by artists likely to dispute the use of their music in promoting the administration’s endeavors. It is, in a strange way, a very efficient PR operation — for both sides.
Just days before Kesha’s post, Radiohead slammed the Department of Homeland Security for using their song “Let Down” in a pro-ICE video, telling them to “go f**k yourselves.” “We demand that the amateurs in control of the ICE social media account take it down,” they said. “It ain’t funny, this song means a lot to us and other people, and you don’t get to appropriate it without a fight.”
As of publication, the White House has not removed the “Blow” TikTok — which has 1.8 million likes and nearly 17,000 comments.
“Blow” reached No. 7 on the charts in 2011 and has been streamed over 330,000 times on Spotify. Kesha has racked up more than 11 billion total streams on the platform and currently has 41 million monthly listeners. Safe to say the White House could have just… asked.
