Ten Feel-Good Songs About Murder

Maybe its the recent release of Dethklok’s “Dethalbum II,” but for whatever reason, music and murder (“Murmaider?”) have been on the brain recently. I have kind of a sick fascination with songs with violent lyrics that come from unexpected sources. If Cannibal Corpse pens a song about a shotgun to the face, we’d have to categorize it among their least imaginative in-song deaths. But if Elton John sang similarly gruesome lyrics set to the same sort of chords, rhythms, and melodies as “Crocodile Rock,” then color me intrigued.

Speaking of Elton John, and to get some sense of the type of dissonance I’m looking for in this list, take a listen to “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself.” It was an early contender, but I had to disqualify songs about suicide, since wow there are a lot of upbeat songs about suicide. No, for this list, it’s 100% “I-shot-a-man-in-Reno-just-to-watch-him-die” murder.

Keep in mind that the following list is in no particular order.

The Beatles — Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

The "nice one" has the decapitated head of a baby in his lap.

The individual personalities of the Beatles’ are usually summed up in one or two words, i.e., Paul was the “nice” one. But to McCartney’s credit, he knew how to subvert this label. Take “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” which must be some kind of sick joke. If you don’t understand English, all you’d hear is a bouncing beat, an anvil used for percussion, and high-pitched background vocals echoing certain lines. If you do understand English, and I”m assuming you do otherwise you probably wouldn’t have made it this far, you hear a song about murder-happy Maxwell breaking the skulls of his girlfriend, teacher, and judge. In the case of the judge, it seems like the bailiff really dropped the ball in letting Maxwell carry his weapon of choice into the courtroom.

Warren Zevon — Excitable Boy

This late 70’s rock song is catchier than it has an right to be, especially since the lyrics sound straight out of the pages of “American Psycho.” The titular character lives in a world where no one pays any mind to the various terrible things he does.

He took little Suzie to the Junior Prom
Excitable boy, they all said
And he raped her and killed her, then he took her home

And that’s it. No third act redemption arc in this song. The last thing the excitable boy does is dig up Suzie and build a cage with her bones. Guitar solo!

This issue of Rolling Stone has Bob Marley on the cover and articles praising Jimmy Page and the Beach Boys. The October 2009 issue has Megan Fox on the cover and articles praising Mariah Carey, John Mayer, and Paramore. Sigh.

Bob Marley & The Wailers — I Shot the Sheriff

Just to prove that sometimes our cold-blooded killers can take responsibility for their actions, the narrator of this song insists that if he is to be punished, that it only be for the crimes he actually committed. Not exactly an innocent victim either, since the sheriff drew his pistol first and apparently just had terrible aim. Reggae is such feel-good music that I had to include it on the list. Obviously there is a social justice theme underneath the main story, but it’s sometimes easy to forget that when listening to one of the many, many lesser cover versions. (Not knocking your take on it, Clapton.)

The Clash — Wrong ‘Em Boyo

Like reggae, ska can effectively mask some brutal lyrics with a few joyful upstrokes on guitar and a horn section. In “Wrong ‘Em Boyo,” a disagreement over a dice game between Billy Boy and Stagger Lee ends with Billy shot to death. Stagger Lee was a real-life murderer who’s become an urban legend with quite a few songs detailing his mostly fictional exploits. The funny thing about the Clash version, a cover of a reggae song by a little-known group called the Rulers, is how little focus the murder gets. The song’s hook is “Don’t you know it is wrong/To cheat a trying man.” Shooting a man dead is one thing, but to “lie, steal, cheat, and deceit/In such a small, small game” is unforgivable.

The Misfits — Last Caress

The Misfits are pretty much synonymous with tongue-in-cheek carnage, so I couldn’t leave them off the list. Equal parts Ramones-like song structure and casual depictions of nightmarish imagery. “Last Caress” is especially murderiffic though, as this song’s narrator happily confesses that he both killed your baby and raped your mother, delivered in the same spirit as the Ramones singing “Hi-Ho! Let’s go!”

Johnny Cash — Delia’s Gone

Pictured: Only available image of Johnny Cash smiling.

Johnny Cash, one the other hand, is one of the last artists you’d think of when you think “upbeat.” And true, “Delia’s Gone” is slow and acoustic, a far cry from the pop-like sound of most of the above  songs. But “Delia’s Gone” is also pretty far removed from the raw pain and bleak nihilism of “Folsom Prison Blues.”

First time I shot her I shot her in the side
Hard to watch her suffer
But with the second shot she died
Delia’s gone, one more round Delia’s gone

All appearances aside, the song ends up being bleakly funny, mostly from Cash’s dry delivery, but also from the little details of overkill (“grab my sub-machine”) and the narrator’s admission that his only options were murder or marriage. (“If I hadn’t shot poor Delia/I’d have her for my wife”) It’s the classic trope of love and hate being only a half-step apart, which leads us right to…

Guns N’ Roses — Used to Love Her

One of the most upbeat songs Gn’R ever wrote, “Used to Love Her” is a short and simple ballad with a rhythm you can clap along to and a killer (sorry) lyrical hook. What’s the hook? “I used to love her, but I had to kill her.”  Repeat with slight variations, which reveal that she’s buried out back, since the narrator knew he’d miss her. It would have been a great blues song if it wasn’t played so happily.

Scissor Sisters — I Can’t Decide

The Scissor Sisters are one of the only bands today that are willing to look at 70’s disco as a source of musical inspiration. They’re also a band that has no objections to the total dissonance of violent lyrics and cheery instrumentation. “I Can’t Decide” is even more dance/Euro-pop than most of the Sisters’ songs. The lyrics on the other hand… well, the titular decision is “whether you should live or die.” The narrator considers drowning and poisoning, but rules out burying alive because “you might crawl out with a knife/and kill me when I’m sleeping.”

For super dissonance power, during the chorus, over the lines “no wonder my heart feels dead inside/it’s cold and hard and petrified” we get a slide whistle!

Beck — Girl

I know, I know, I’m an idiot for even trying to pin down a meaning to a Beck song. But this song is so upbeat and everything from the midi intro to the slide guitar throughout makes this song just plain fun. Fun with lines like “I know I’m gonna make her die/Take her where her soul belongs.” That seems straight forward enough, but how about “Got a ticket for a midnight hanging/Throw a bullet from a freight train leaving”? Is the narrator shooting the girl and trying to run, but knows he’ll be caught and executed for his crime? Hell, I don’t know, this is Beck, I’m just taking a shot in the dark.

Science!

Jonathan Coulton — Still Alive

The song over the end credits of the brilliant video game Portal can certainly be enjoyed on its own, but it’s also tied to the plot, so I’ll try to be as spoiler free as possible. The song is a pleasant little pop tune about science and all the great things science can do… “for the people who are still alive.” While the murders aren’t mentioned explicitly, it’s made clear that testing on human subjects is how “the science gets done.” Over the course of the song, “the people who are still alive” go from being the benefactors of “science” to the subjects of future “research.” Sunrise, sunset.

Review: ‘The Resistance’ by Muse

I was aware of Muse for awhile, but didn’t start listening to most of their catalog until the end of college. The first few songs to catch my attention were some of the odder ones, namely “Apocalypse Please,” a densely layered arrangement of piano, guitars, high-pitch vocals, and high-speed drum fills. These weren’t the songs that made me a fan though. Songs like “Hyper Music,” “Plug In Baby,” or “Knights of Cydonia” had unbelievably catchy main riffs that weren’t terribly hard to play and sounded great. That’s what hooked me on the band — guitar-driven rock that was just plain fun to play. That was really all I ever wanted or expected from the band.

Muse has always been compared to Radiohead but that never seemed a fair comparison. There’s only three similarities as far as I can tell (1) both bands are British; (2) both have vocalists with a somewhat high, somewhat quavering tone; and (3) Muse’s “Falling Away With You,” which sounds so much like Radiohead, I often forget it isn’t Radiohead when my iPod is on shuffle. I always thought Muse had more in common with groups like Rush or Queen. Muse lacks Radiohead’s subtlety, but makes up for it with bombast and infectiously enjoyable ridiculousness. Radiohead wouldn’t write a song about an epic battle with a robotic space dragon, but for Queen or Muse, that’d be par for the course.

(See below the video for “Knights of Cydonia,” which includes ludicrously named kung fu techniques, Old West shoot-outs with lasers, A binkini-clad woman on a unicorn, and mustaches.)

It’s not a glam rock parody, a la The Darkness. It’s still being played straight, but with a wink to the audience, reminding us how much fun songs like “Princes of the Universe” were.

I think this is why the recently released The Resistance initially feels like a bit of a let-down. The music is more complicated, more self-serious, and less fun. The opening track, “The Uprising,” is the only one to sport the sort of boot-stomping rock energy I’d expect from Muse, but even that gets somewhat soiled by lyrics that appear to be influenced by singer/guitarist Matt Bellamy’s beliefs about a 9/11 conspiracy:

The paranoia is in bloom,
The PR transmissions will resume,
They’ll try to push drugs to keep us all dumbed down,
And hope that we will never see the truth around,

Another promise, another seed,
Another packaged lie to keep us trapped in greed,
With all the green belts wrapped around our minds,
And endless red tape to keep the truth confined,

The album is experimental, I’ll give it that, but it jumps in so many directions at once, sometimes within the same song, that I don’t really know what to make of it. There’s “Undisclosed Desires,” where Muse suddenly sounds like Depeche Mode or New Order. There’s “Guiding Light,” which could easily have come from U2. There’s two piano ballads with awkward titles, the Queen-like “United States of Eurasia (+Collateral Damage)” and the poppy, half-French, self-referencing “I Belong to You [Mon Couer S'Ouvre a Ta Voix].” To top it all off, the album ends with a three-track 13-minute symphony called “Exogenesis,” which alternates (more seamlessly than you’d expect) between classical piano and arena rock.

The first listen will likely leave you thinking, “Well… that was weird.” I initially figured this review would boil down to little more than “I have no idea what to make of this.” Subsequent listens have cleared up my view a little, and ultimately the album’s excess has begun to grow on me. The video below is for “United States of Eurasia (+ Collateral Damage).” The abrupt increase in volume at 1:18 sounded cheesy (and VERY reminiscent of Queen) during the first few listens, but somewhere in the review-writing process the cheesiness became endearing.

In many ways the overwritten songs have held up better. On my first listen, “Unnatural Selection” stood out as the only track that sounded as if it could’ve come from the old Muse: fast, heavy guitar rock with a very distinct riff. But there isn’t much depth to the song. The guitar work is too precise and too sterile, not the more distorted and more energetic sound the band has had in its early albums. “Unnatural Selection” was an early favorite, but I’ve been listening to it less and less. On the flipside, “I Belong to You [Mon Couer S'Ouvre a Ta Voix]” has grown on me because of it’s weirdness: an upbeat rhythm over minor chords and vocals that breaks into a classical-sounding middle section with French lyrics, then leads into a clarinet solo (not sure about this, this is my best guess on the instrument) before returning to its poppy beginning. Sound completely unpalatable doesn’t it? Somehow, it works, or maybe I’ve just listened to it so many times trying to figure it out what the hell it is that I’ve lost my mind and fallen for it.

Not sure how much I’ll return to this album, but I do have to give Muse credit. Since an unhealthy portion of the band’s American fanbase knows them as “the band that did that song in Twilight,” I was worried they’d release an album of “Supermassive Black Hole” soundalikes. They didn’t, thankfully, opting for instead for an hour of music that recklessly alternates between insane and excellent.

Tea Parties are for girls

A thought experiment occurred to me after I heard news of another round of “tea parties.”

I thought, “hmm, these folks are so dead-set on not paying taxes, I say, let’s exempt them from taxes.”

How, you might ask, could we exempt these right-wing foot soldiers from their duty to pay for the services they enjoy? Simple: stop including them in these services.

But how could we exclude them effectively? I mean, no one would voluntarily give up the privilege of driving on the roads, public education —well, maybe some of these Bible-thumpers would be OK with that one — enjoying the protection of the armed services, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., etc.

So, then I thought, why not just gives these whiney, wannabe tax-cheats their own country, you know, the part of America that consistently votes Republican.

But what would this look like? I mean the last time part of the country seceded from the other part, didn’t that turn into a national disaster, and didn’t the conservative, backwards part of the country get thumped bad and forced to reintegrate? Who would comprise the Conservative States of America?

Well, we can lose these tea partiers right off. I mean, tea parties are for little girls, not gainfully employed adults with a sense of responsibility.

But who else do we lose? Creationists. Still, I’m thinking good riddance.

I can see test scores improving already. There will also be much less people with Confederate Flags, people telling me that “God hates fags,” and almost no pro-lifers.

Things are really looking up for the Blu-Nited States of the East and West Coast of America (and parts of the Midwest)

But, the real pain is going to be that we will lose large portions of our armed services, and a lot of rich people. This could be a blow to the B. S. E. W. C. of A. (and parts of the Midwest).

But maybe we’ll get by. I mean, there will be less federal and state government employees, who come to tax-funded jobs Monday through Friday, and then attend tax protests.

We’ll have achieved what conservatives wanted all along, and shrunken a bloated, ineffectual bureaucracy. Hmm, still looking up. Maybe we’d even be able to cut taxes, too.

So what will the Blu-Nited States look like? Well, we’ll have universal health care, most of the Hollywood elite, the “main stream news media,” artists, the gay, lesbian and transgendered members of the military, I would imagine pot would be legal, everything would be unionized, and women’s bodies would be their own business.

We’d also get D.C., so there would be no need to relocate the nation’s capital. Hmm, not too bad.

But who gets Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and the other defense contractors? Well, they tend to go with the highest bidder, and since the Blu-Nited States would still have the nation’s richest states, I think we’d be OK there, too.

But what would life be like in the no-tax, no science, states’ rights CSA? The way I see it, kind of like the bastard child of Franco’s Spain and the Confederate States of America.

While roads, and other public works projects are completely unfunded, and all services are privatized, but staffed by a relatively incompetent pool of workers, the quality of life for the average person will comparable to a third world country.

The military will be a national one, paid for by levies upon the public. I say levies because they won’t call it taxes, even though it essentially will be.

The rich will live in great manses, guarded by private security forces to keep the roving bands of the poor, uneducated and drunk from entering. They will still fly Leer jets and secretly do business with liberal rich people in the Blu-Nited States, while chanting demagoguery lifted from the Dark Ages to the masses. There will be no roads after about two years from the strain of the SUVs driving on un-funded highways, but this will be fine because “we’ll make our own roads.”

If you get sick and can’t afford insurance, well, in the words of the now-immortal cyborg Dick Cheney, “fuck you.”

Broken bridges covered with ivy will stand as monuments to an ancient civilization of wonder at every road crossing the Mighty Mississippi.

The clergy and business interests will still collect money from the masses in the form of tithing, and a largely feudal state will emerge, the conservatives’ wet dream since Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre (look it up.)

Jobs will largely consist of the option to work at McDonalds, or the option to work at Wal-Mart.

And while the liberal-socialist paradise of the Blu-Nited States, with its relative affluence, top-class entertainment, sexual liberation and free-wheeling attitudes towards drugs will produce a contented culture, the repressive authoritarian culture of the Conservative States of America will require an outside enemy.

Without anyone to hate, the uneducated, superstitious and aggressive populace will turn against each other.

Churches will compete over who can be the most ridiculous in their rejection of fact and hatred for those who are different. Rednecks, without any gays, blacks, or really any brown people besides Ramesh Ponnuru, will turn against each other in a nation-wide orgy of bar fights.

Anarchy will erupt, even in the completely, monistically homogenous society, because, let’s face it, conservatives need something to hate in order to get out of bed in the morning. And who would be better than the queer-loving, Godless socialists next door.

A cry will rise from a jail cell somewhere in Alabama, a book detailing the struggle of the white working man to succeed despite a government that doesn’t tax him or question his supremacy will be written, tea parties thrown, brown shirts donned, and war will be declared against the Blu-Nited States, because the CSA needs “breathing room.”

And the overly-militarized CSA, despite its lack of innovation, will still have numerical superiority in the longest, bloodiest land war in history.

Rednecks with M-4s will mow down pot-addled college students, given a divine sanction by the Southern Baptist Convention. George Clooney’s head will adorn the pike of a small, toothless child wearing a shirt proclaiming “Lucky Devil.”

Eventually, Premier-for-Life Obama will have to nuke middle-America, dooming the remainder of us to a nuclear winter in socialist paradise.

So, go ahead and have your tea parties, bitch about the taxes you have to pay without reflecting on the services they provide for, and threaten secession. I mean, we Democrats may want a socialist paradise, but we’d still get the nukes in the divorce.

Thoughts on the Venture Bros. Season 4 Trailer

• One of the best parts about watching this trailer, just like when the trailer for Season 3 came out last year, is how a lot of the clips shown are even more amusing in no context whatsoever. (Like Dean’s “Hitler just needs someone to believe in him!”)
• Part of me is still a little concerned about how entertaining 21 will be without 24, but I do admire the balls it takes to kill off a character everybody loves.
• Anyone else kind of sick of Sgt. Hatred? I liked him better when he was a reoccurring off-screen joke, rather than an actual character with still, just one joke.

New Weezer Song v. Old The Jam song

I’m weirdly not bothered by most accusations of musical plagiarism. I can appreciate the Chili Pepper’s “Dani California” and Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” on their own merits, in spite of the nearly identical chord progression and strum pattern of the verse. I had no real opinion in the whole Coldplay vs. Joe Satriani vs. Cat Stevens debacle, because hey, there a millions of musicians and billions of songs, and every artist is inspired by everything else he’s heard before. Riffs will repeat themselves.

Depending on how litigation happy the former members of The Jam are, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Weezer’s newest single get slapped with a lawsuit. Compare Weezer’s “If You Are Wondering If I Want You To” with The Jam’s “Town Called Malice.”

vs.

Disclaimer: As long as we’re talking about plagiarism, I should point out that this discovery was not my own. The similarities were pointed out to me in the comments on the UltimateGuitar.com news feed.

HOW DID I MISS THIS!??!

http://newsarama.com/comics/070924-QuesadaAnnounce.html

1 Month of Friday Bowies!

Maybe we’ll have some content to go with these youtube videos one day!

If it’s Friday then it must be Bowie!

Oh no, I forgot Friday Bowie!

Friday Bowie