Kesha Slams White House for Using Her Song

Kesha says the White House just crossed a line with "Blow." On Monday, the singer accused the Trump administration of using her 2010 track in a Feb. 10 TikTok that shows US bomber jets and a strike on a ship timed to the lyric "This place about to blow," along with the caption "Lethality." In a statement on social media, the 39-year-old singer said the clip uses her music to "incite violence and threaten war," called joking about war "disgusting and inhumane," and stressed she doesn't approve of her work being linked to "violence of any kind."

She added, "Love always trumps hate," then took a swipe at President Trump, referring to him as a "criminal predator" tied to the Epstein files. She tagged the White House in a follow-up tweet that noted, "Stop using my music, perverts." The posts surfaced just after the US, alongside Israel, launched a new military campaign in Iran that Trump has described as "massive and ongoing." Kesha is the latest in a string of artists—including Radiohead, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and SZA—to object to their music appearing in government or immigration-enforcement videos, per Rolling Stone.

But under current social media music-licensing rules, artists have limited tools to force such content offline. Her criticism also didn't seem to have much effect on the administration: Deadline reports that the White House's comms chief, Steven Cheung, mocked Kesha's post, noting that "all these 'singers' keep falling for this." He explains further, in his own tweet: "This just gives us more attention and more view counts to our videos because people want to see what they're bitching about."