Ariana Grande's Dinner Date With Dahmer

Surprising, sure — but hasn't pop culture always reflected a taste for flesh?

Not your usual checkout-aisle fare: People Magazine post from June 28, 2024

Years ago, I was listening to an interview where one of my favorite musicians, Igor Cavalera, brought up Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous serial killer who murdered 17 men. Dahmer, who dismembered and mutilated his victims, often also engaged in cannibalism and necrophilia with their bodies. Cavalera, longtime drummer of the legendary Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura, recalled a story about playing Milwaukee in the early-’90s after the Dahmer case became a national news sensation.

According to Cavalera’s account, a fan came up to him after the show and handed him a receipt for a refrigerator purchase, indicating that it was a receipt for the same fridge which Dahmer, it had been discovered, kept the body parts of his victims. The fan must have been the one to sell the fridge to Dahmer, who had lived most of his life and committed most of his crimes in Milwaukee. (Either that, or the fan worked at the same store and somehow got ahold of the receipt.)

I remember thinking at the time, What a strange, fucked-up thing to be given by someone in your audience. As I’ve recently written about, I’ve had two notable instances in my life where I experienced a powerful response to inanimate objects, as if information from those objects had transferred directly into my awareness. But even for people who aren’t that responsive to energy, I still can’t fathom why on earth anyone would want to keep something like that on their person or in their home.

The interview didn’t immediately turn up when I did a quick search, but Igor’s brother Max corroborated the story in 2010, when Max’s band Soulfly released a song named “Jeffrey Dahmer.” From what I remember of listening to Igor tell it, though, the fan had enthusiastically gifted the receipt to him as a reward for being so moved by the band’s performance. Igor kept it as a souvenir, the same way one might cherish a keepsake to preserve the memory of a trip abroad.

I thought it was gross, and I was thoroughly unimpressed.

I’ve interviewed Igor several times myself, and I’ve always really enjoyed it. Each time, I found Igor to be highly gracious, thoughtful, and reflective. The most recent time was in 2016, when we discussed the 20th anniversary of Sepultura’s 1996 album Roots, a groundbreaking hybrid of indigenous and Latin sounds with various strains of metal. I wrote about the album extensively here, describing it as "inarguably one of the most radical [stylistic] departures” in the history of heavy metal. (The Wikipedia entry on Roots heavily sources both my articles.)

I’ve spent my entire writing career taking metal bands to task on their casual romanticizing of violence, particularly real-life violence. As a lifelong metalhead, I’ve acted with free license to interrogate this artform that I love. To truly love something, I feel, is to weigh the aspects of that thing that are difficult to grapple with. I apply the same lens to my Puerto Rican identity, my Indian heritage, being an American, my family members, my favorite Substackers and podcasters, etc.

Over the last ten years, I’ve effectively become a free-speech absolutist. My arrival at this position has largely been driven by the widespread push among my music-journalist peers to police expression. So it’s easy to read some of my editorializing — for instance, on gore-obsessed death metal giants Cannibal Corpse, or on gangsta rap pioneers N.W.A., etc. — as falling in-line with our culture-wide sense of hyper-vigilance to hold artists “accountable.”

For me, however, being critical of artists’ intentions necessitates being ever more fervent in my defense of free speech — and vice-versa. As thought-provoking as I’ve found heavy metal to be, I’ve largely found the musicians themselves to be coy, shallow, and evasive when it comes to their subject matter — going out of their way to get attention by being provocative and then whining about the negative attention.

I’ve long thought that, in a culture where free speech is enshrined into law at such a fundamental level, it’s all too easy to take the First Amendment for granted. As a brilliant ex of mine once put it so astutely: “Freedom of speech… Okay, fine — but what are you saying?” In other words, having the freedom to say something and giving some thought to what you’re saying (and how you’re saying it) are two different things. Prior to the last decade, I’d been fond of putting it this way: “There’s no law that makes it illegal for me to say ‘fuck’ around your grandmother or call her a cunt — but I choose not to do so out of tact.” And tact doesn’t have to be legislated.

Oftentimes, when I’ve questioned metal musicians about their choice of imagery or lyrics, I’ve been met with defensiveness, as if they automatically assumed I’d been implying that they should be censored. In my experience, many of them have acted like they’re being hassled, and they’ve tended to wave-off the questions with irritation and dismissiveness. From my perspective, though, freedom of speech always felt like a given, because it felt (to me) like we weren’t in any real danger of losing in. So I felt like it made sense to set the speech issue aside and just talk about creative choices.

My stance was: I’m not interested in limiting what you can say, but I’d prefer that you at least have a handle on what it is you’re saying — and I’d prefer my artists to at least be semi-coherent about what they’re putting forth into mass consciousness. I’d always just assumed that artists were never legally responsible for the way people chose to act in response to their work. That question seemed so blatantly obvious to me that their indemnification opened the door to weighing more abstract questions about their responsibility to their own craft.

Since 2014, the social polarity has flipped dramatically, and the threat to speech has become palpable in a very practical, on-the-ground kind of way — at least in terms of what I’ve been able to see unfold vis-à-vis music. I recently referenced how commonplace it’s become for critics to openly call for censorship. These days, it’s just assumed among critics and other arts/entertainment commentators that speech should be limited.

For examples, just go to any of the sites I’ve written for — Pitchfork or Paste, most notably — and you’ll see what I’m talking about within a few clicks. There are literally thousands of examples spanning the last decade. And, much like the metal musicians I’ve pressed to consider their choices, critics also take free speech for granted. And they don’t take kindly to being challenged on their assumptions.

Only someone who’s been raised in a climate where it’s permissible to say whatever you want would be misguided enough to try to restrict what people can say — because they can’t fathom what it’s actually like to live in a society where speech can be curtailed by the state. So they have no reference point to anticipate the consequences of their actions. Both art and its critics have suffered from not being pushed to understand how vital — and fragile — of a right free speech actually is.

Musicians of my generation may wear their skirmishes with the PMRC as a badge, but it has to be said that, even in the most conservative parts of the U.S., those musicians still by and large lived in a country where their transgressions translated into more exposure, rather than real material threats to their safety. In a manner of speaking, we no longer live in that same country. And the Stasi-like army of critics all too eager to police not only speech but thought are only now having to confront the unsustainability of the circular firing squad they’ve created.

And so it is that we arrive at Ariana Grande. The bubblegum-pop superstar recently caused a stir with comments she made on the show Podcrushed, recalling that she was once asked — in front of a group of children and their parents, no less — to pick the one person she’d have dinner with if she could have her pick of anyone who’d ever lived. Her answer: Jeffrey Dahmer.

Grande also added that she was “infatuated with serial killers” when she was younger. Typically, I’d be disturbed (or at least dismayed) by this. I mean, it is disturbing, particularly since Grande seemed incapable of acknowledging the appropriateness of her response — even as she pointed out the disconnect between that response and the setting, i.e: that there were children present. As she tells the Podcrushed hosts, she first asked the parents if they were okay with her giving them her real answer.

Of course, the parents had no way of knowing that Grande was going to go to such a grim place. And her tone just seems so off when she tells the story. (There’s something oddly mechanical in the way Grande and other pop figures like her express emotion in general, almost as if they’re in a state of de-realization.) By contrast, at one point in the same interview, Grande weeps openly while talking about her recent duet with her Wicked co-star Cynthia Erivo.

Grande’s syrupy demeanor is to be expected when gushing about Erivo, but her detachment when talking about Dahmer reveals — or at least suggests — a mis-calibration in her affect. And it was her casual off-handedness that no doubt outraged the family members of Dahmer’s victims. Now, to be fair, there’s context missing from the news reports that have, predictably, framed the story with the intention of casting Grande in a bad light.

As Podcrushed co-host Penn Badgley explains in the clip, Grande grew up with a mother who’s really into horror and the macabre. Still, even with Badgley giving her ample runway to save herself from coming-off as an emotionally cauterized automaton, Grande doesn’t pick up the ball. Neither do Badgley’s co-hosts, who just continue to chirp away on the most superficial level.

So why am I celebrating Grande’s mention of Dahmer when I decried one of my favorite musicians for saying almost the exact same thing that she did — especially when she was just as flippant as he was?

I would prefer not to think about Jeffrey Dahmer at all, and having his name tossed into my lap so thoughtlessly certainly feels unpleasant. The fictitious, highly theatrical and stylized violence of bands like Cannibal Corpse is easy enough to shrug-off, but it disgusts me when artists use actual murder as a prop. Whether it’s gritty underground metal acts like Unsane or highbrow avant-garde darlings like John Zorn or the noise act foot and mouth disease putting murder victims on their album covers, my response is the same: this person’s death is not wallpaper for your fucking music.

The aforementioned noise artist — a friendly acquaintance of mine whose work I greatly admire — used a photo of what he presumed to be the body-bagged victim of Rochester serial killer Arthur Shawcross. It wasn’t actually his decision, and his work overall hews towards conscientious, if pointedly irreverent, social and political commentary. (Trivia note: I was once in a relationship with the daughter of Shawcross’s postal carrier. And, for my money, album titles just don’t come any better than foot and mouth disease’s Cocaine Psychosis - It’s Killing Your Music Career.)

I must also admit that I love the front cover of Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide, an album by Max Cavalera’s group Nailbomb that features a photo of dead bodies in the aftermath of the infamous Jonestown mass suicide. Suffice it to say, though, that I turn my nose up at the fetishizing of serial murder in pop culture, particularly among musicians. The reason I’m relieved to find it rearing its ugly head here is because it’s a sliver of harsh truth cutting through pop music’s candy-coated facade.

Perhaps it’s that same truth that metal dudes in tattoos are trying to connect with when they let themselves get drawn into lurid fascination with the extravagantly gruesome. In 2005, Korn frontman Jonathan Davis decided to get rid of his collection of items belonging to Ted Bundy and other serial murderers. Davis told World Entertainment News Network at the time:

“I'm just bringing negativity and negative shit in my house with it, and I don't want that around my kids. There is definitely a vibe and weird shit attached to those things. I really don't want to glorify these people and what they did and display the shit.

I wasn't thinking straight when I bought that stuff. I was sucked into it because it was so dark, and I'm like, 'This is cool.' When I started to think about it, I was like, 'What about those 70 girls' parents — their babies got killed in that car, and I wanna display it! That is fucked up.'"

Kudos to Davis, who once so poetically sang the lyric look at the pages that cause all this evil in an attempt to fathom what impels people to commit the very acts he eventually felt a need to distance himself from. I may disparage his choice to collect the Bundy paraphernalia in the first place, but I think I see what he was trying to do, which was to feel tough enough to confront horror face-to-face. Maybe that’s what Grande was trying, in her own way, to do as well. I wouldn’t say that she or Davis properly measured the weight of what they were dealing with, but that’s the whole point: we all have a curiosity about these things, and in order to get close enough to make any sense of them, we have to dis-arm them of their ability to freak us out.

It’s been well-documented that the audience for true-crime podcasts and documentaries consists mostly of women — and by a huge margin. See here/here, here, here, here, or here, with an especially interesting theory put forth by Nancy Jo Sales. Author of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno, Sales proposes a link between the rise of true crime podcasts and the proliferation of online dating.

Whatever the case, pop culture has always reflected an appetite for human flesh. For proof, we needn’t look any further than Charles Manson, who remains a household name — indeed, a celebrity — more than half a century after the murders that carved his name in the public record. And I could easily spill 150,000 words addressing the death-cult nihilism that pervades the way we’ve come to talk about gangsta rap. (Alas, that’s a subject for another time.)

For now, I’ll just say that Ariana Grande has given us the latest glimpse into a submerged reality that throbs and howls behind the mesmerizing gloss of popular entertainment. And while it may be highly discouraging that people feel so detached and numb that they need to look into an abyss of tragedy, torture, and decomposed cadavers in order to feel something, it’s useful to be reminded that these horrors walk among us.

Grande, in her carefully packaged harmlessness, is part of the very mechanism that lulls the public into a kind of narcotic trance. For her of all people to spit-up a reference to an agonized soul whose sexual urges fused with violence of inexplicable extremity… well, that’s pop culture telling on itself, in a way. And I think that’s a good thing, even if I prefer not to hear it myself.

There has always been something hideous under the surface. We hide from it at our own peril — but, as Jonathan Davis discovered, we wallow in it to our own detriment too. Maybe he and Grande should get together and geek out about true-crime trivia and post their conversation on YouTube. Now that would be something.

And speaking of Bundy, I still get the chills when I hear the line show me everybody naked and disfigured, nothing’s shocking from the Jane’s Addiction classic “Ted, Just Admit It…” — a song that resonates with the same chilling power today as it did in 1988.

<3 SRK