Everything on this site is written about Jeffrey Dahmer. Third person, past tense, sources at the bottom. That grammar is not incidental — it is the distance that makes the work possible. You can examine a man in the third person. You can hold him at arm’s length and still look closely.
A song does not have to obey that rule, and this one does not.
“Dahmer,” from the forthcoming Shyster, is written in the second person. It talks to him. It exists on the record in two versions: the original, classic hip-hop built on piano and scratches, and a heavier industrial rework by GoH Mr. Whatever, with different words layered around the same core. Together they make an argument with itself, and the disagreement between them is more interesting than either version alone.
The original: a defence
The first version opens on an image of fit:
I got the key, you got the lock
Two objects that are useless apart and mean nothing separately. The verse that follows makes the same claim in a different figure — I’ve got a half, you’ve got the other — and then names it outright: my brother.
Everything else in the track is organised against a “they.” They look through you. They make their voodoo. They lose their minds. They have weapons, and they will abuse you and accuse you. The song’s world contains exactly two parties: a you and an I who fit together, and a hostile everyone-else who understands neither.
And at its centre is the line the whole version turns on:
they call you a monster you’re not
This is a defence. Not an examination, not a reckoning — a defence, delivered directly to him, in the voice of someone who has taken a side.
It is worth being honest about what that means, because this site’s method is to be honest about difficult things rather than to arrange them flatteringly. There are no victims in the original version of this song. Seventeen men and boys do not appear in it. The “they” who accuse and abuse are the press, the public, the machinery of spectacle — and framed that way, the accusation looks like persecution rather than the consequence of what he did.
The track also refuses to promise anything. None of us here is gonna win is not triumphant. It is a song that takes his side and expects nothing to come of it.
The remix: a redistribution
Mr. Whatever’s version keeps the original verses intact and builds new material around them. What that new material does is not soften the song. It complicates it, and in one specific place it contradicts it.
It opens somewhere the original never goes:
Cold room, dead eyes, fluorescent light
An institutional image, and then immediately a psychological one — you wanted a friend, you wanted control — which is a two-clause summary of the whole case, and a fairer one than most books manage. The wanting is real. The method was annihilation.
Then the line that changes the song:
But the monster had a heartbeat just like me
Set that against they call you a monster you’re not and you have two incompatible claims sitting on the same record. The original denies the category. The remix accepts it and then does something much more unsettling with it — it puts the speaker inside it. Not he isn’t a monster, but the monster was a person, and so am I.
That is a harder position to hold, and a more defensible one.
The remix also restores what the original leaves out:
You wanted connection, but you couldn’t stay
So you turned every heartbeat into something to take
A body is a memory, a memory fades
There they are. Not named, but present — heartbeats and bodies, people who were taken rather than an abstraction called accusation. The remix will not let the song be only about him.
And it adds a target the original doesn’t have. The chorus turns outward, at the audience:
Everybody wants to know your name
Everybody wants to watch the flame
That is a different “they” from the original’s. Not persecutors — spectators. The people consuming him. Which is a sharper and more accurate charge, and one that implicates anyone listening, including anyone reading this.
The keyhole
The remix ends by picking up the original’s first image and turning it inside out.
The song began with a key and a lock: fit, belonging, two things made for each other. It closes at the same door from the other side.
Look through the keyhole, what do you see?
A monster in the darkness or a piece of me?
The keyhole is now something you look through — the same verb the original used for the hostile “they,” who look through you. The listener has been moved into that position. And the question it asks is the one the memorial has been circling since it began: whether what you find in him is entirely alien, or partly familiar.
Some names become legends
Some names become stains
Then: Dahmer… 213. The apartment number, which is also the name of the project that made the record. The song signs itself with the address.
Why both versions belong on the album
There is an argument for keeping only the second one. It is the more complete piece of writing, it is the one that acknowledges the dead, and it is the one that can be defended without qualification.
But keeping both is the more honest choice, because the two versions are a record of an actual movement in thinking, and flattening that would be its own kind of dishonesty. The first is what it feels like from the inside — the pull toward defending someone the world has flattened into a symbol, the sense of a fit that nobody else can see. The second is what happens when that impulse is examined rather than simply obeyed.
Neither cancels the other. They sit next to each other on the record and disagree, which is roughly the condition of anyone who has spent serious time with this material.
None of us here is gonna win survives into the second version unchanged. It is still the truest line either version contains.
“Dahmer” and “Dahmer (remix)” appear on Shyster. Original lyrics and vocals by Door213; remix, additional lyrics and production by GoH Mr. Whatever.
Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial 