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.

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.

Review: Horehound by The Dead Weather

Jack White must be the musical equivalent of a shark: He must keep swimming or he’ll die. Tuesday will see the release of Horehound by The Dead Weather, his second side-project’s first album, as well as a pair of shows at the 930 club to kick off the band’s first tour. This means that in three years, he’s released three albums with three different bands, toured with all of them, and wrote a (somewhat disappointing) theme song to a (definitely disappointing) Bond movie.

While The Raconteurs sometimes hewed a little too close to sounding like a four-person White Stripes, The Dead Weather will invite no such comparison, mainly because Jack’s role within the band has shifted. He touches on everything in the album — guitar, rhythm, and vocals — but dominates none of them. Alison Mosshart (The Kills) handles the majority of the vocals, alternating fairly seamlessly between a sultry, bluesy moan to a rocker’s wail. The guitar work, mostly from Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age), is almost completely draped in a heavy fuzz, a mixture of “Icky Thump” and “Sick, Sick, Sick.” The two Jacks, White and Lawrence, stay mostly in the rhythm and supporting section, giving a bluesy base for the other two to build on. (I do suspect a few of the solos are White’s doing, however.)

The album is blues-rock played deliberately messily and heavily. As a whole, it’s a lot more interesting than The Raconteurs’ output, though not as memorable or flawless as The White Stripes. If we must compare it to the band members previous work, it’s probably closest to the Kills, so Mosshart might be more of a creative force here than White. That’s not a bad thing at all; the Kills are a great band.

The album is at it’s strongest when it leans hard in either the blues or the hard-rock direction. The album’s best song, the brilliant opener, “60 Feet Tall,” manages to do both. It’s is a slow escalation with spare instrumentation and crooning vocals that leads to a pair of loud and distorted solos. This structure resurfaces in “So Far From Your Weapon,” with slightly diminished returns (still worth listening to). Other stand-out tracks include the heavy, instrumental “3 Birds” and the slow pseudo-surf rock of “Rocking Horse.”

Jack White is normally a master of the pop-hook, but the album’s main attempt at a more accessible track falls mostly flat. Certainly don’t judge the rest of the album by the first not-terribly interesting single, “Hang You Up From the Heavens.” Also try not to be distracted by the fact that the opening seconds are identical to Weezer’s “American Gigolo.” “Treat Me Like Your Mother” is much more likely to be a hit song. It’s more energetic, Mosshart and White both share the vocal spotlight, and it doesn’t sound much like anything either of them have done before, much less like most things on the radio.

As with any supergroup like this, it’s hard to tell how committed the members will be to expanding the project, but I’d be happy to hear another Dead Weather album a few years down the road.

A Portmanteau Is Not An Argument

Due to the Tea Party protesters crowding up the roads in front of the Merrifield Post Office, my drive home from work yesterday took more than twice as long as it should. After sitting in the rain and the traffic slowly creeping down Lee Highway, the first protester I saw was holding a sign that said “Stop CommunIslam!” An unsettling sensations settled over me. I was both appalled at the sign’s insinuations and baffled at what those insinuations were supposed to mean. The protester who made the sign would’ve called this emotion “appaffled.”

Bit of the old ultra-violence

This is more than a little delayed since I was on vacation, but if anyone’s still cares about my thoughts on the Watchmen movie, here they are:

In both the book and the film versions of Watchmen, brutal vigilante Rorschach relates a formative experience to a prison psychiatrist: his first kill. In essence, both versions are mostly in sync with each other. After a fairly typical investigation into hunting down a missing girl, Rorschach breaks into the kidnapper’s house. Snooping around, he finds evidence that the kidnapper has killed the girl and disposed of the evidence using his two German Shepherds. Rorschach waits until the killer returns, kills his two dogs, then chains the killer up. In the book, Rorschach lights the house on fire and leaves the killer to burn. That works just fine for the story, but the gesture is exceedingly cold and impersonal. Not exactly an act of passion. In the film, while chained up, the man confesses to the crime. He says he’s sick and that he needs help. Jackie Earle Haley, as Rorschach, does an excellent job even behind a mask conveying the all rage and hate growing at the idea of this murderer being institutionalized. As the man begs for his life, the camera focuses on Rorschach’s mask, breathing heavily, shoulders heaving, as his anger reaches a boiling point. He grabs an oversized meat cleaver and hoists it over his head…

…then the camera cuts to the cleaver digging into the killer’s skull. The audience collectively says “ewww…” and the emotionality of the moment dissipates.

“Jon can give you cancer, then turn into a car!”

Can’t believe I’m saying this about something on Newgrounds, but this Watchmen Saturday morning cartoon theme song is effin’ hilarious.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/485797

Hurm…

Okay, time to kick off the Watchmen seminar.

Alan Moore’s Watchmen prominently features two newspapers on opposite sides of the political spectrum, conservative The New Frontiersman and liberal Nova Express. Think of these as mid-’80s print versions of the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post, respectively. Even as the end of the world bears down on them, these two publications often seem more interested taking potshots at each other than worrying about the impending nuclear crisis.

Here is where things start to go differently than you might expect, in ways I didn’t really notice (or maybe just didn’t care about) when I read this back in high school. It’s the Nova Express that breaks the sensational (and probably untrue) story that Dr. Manhattan is responsible for the cancer that killed his friend and co-worker, Wally Weaver, and is slowly killing ex-girlfriend Janey Slater and ex-nemesis Moloch. Dr. Manhattan, ashamed, exiles himself. Then the Soviets invade Afghanistan, and the U.S. interprets it as a threat now that it lacks its superman. In a nutshell, the liberal leaning paper is the catalyst for disaster.

The New Frontiersman, meanwhile, lauds the heroes for defending traditional values while blasting the government for tying their hands. Some of Moore’s political thoughts are somewhat dated, but this observation is one of the most timeless. Despite the fact that Moore’s fictional 1985 has unchecked, aggressive conservative leadership in the form of a four-term Nixon, the conservative paper still has the stones to publish stories that make it seem like the liberal government is out to screw the hard-working, freedom-loving Republican. If the last election taught us anything, it’s that this rhetoric refuses to die.

If not handled carefully, this is only going to get worse after this story is filmed. Watchmen’s final scene shows a zit-faced copy editor at The New Frontiersman reaching for Rorshach’s journal, chock-full of dangerous knowledge. I guarantee you this scene will be cited ad nauseam by giddy conservative minds, who will at last have a big budget representation of the conservative renegades taking on the big bad left-wing conspiracy. (It certainly makes a lot more sense than this.)

Over the next few weeks, there will undoubtedly be an inflation of blogs viewing Watchmen, book and film (though unfortunately, I’m sure mostly film) through a politically biased lens. The majority of these exercises, I think, will miss the point. I’m wary of trying to find deliberate political bias for two reasons. First, if the film really is as faithful an adaptation as Zack Snyder claims it is, than any way it deviates from the political conceits of the book are most likely a failure on Snyder’s part. (For the record, I apologize for how snobby that previous sentence sounds.) Let me put it another way. Snyder isn’t Kubrick. His adaptations aren’t going to twist the source material into a completely different animal. My guess going in is that any new themes that might crop up in the movie will be unintended (still haven’t seen the movie, so I might be way off the mark here).

The second reason comes from the content of the book itself. It’s easy to say that the book is conservative, since Adrian Veidt and the Nova Express are liberal, and respectively do so much deliberate and accidental damage. It’s just as easy to argue that the book is liberal, since it’s the warmongering conservative leadership in both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that escalate the war situation. Both points are true, but to accept either conclusion requires the reader to ignore the other one.

Appropriate to the Cold War, Watchmen props up lots of these opposing ideologies: The U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the Nova Express and The New Frontiersman, and personified in Rorschach and Ozymandias (even before the ending, one staying the vigilante and the other becoming the ultimate sell-out). But throwing around terms like “conservative” and “liberal” loses sight of how extreme, fascist even, the perspectives of these characters are. Rorschach conveys complete devotion to the idea of righteousness at the expense of personal humanity. Ozymandias, meanwhile, is complete devotion to the ends, at the expense of personal humanity. It doesn’t stop there. The Comedian and Dr. Manhattan could be seen as two different forms of supreme indifference, amorality/anarachy and a purely scientific/quantitative perspective. In all cases, these characters lose their ability to empathize with the human condition.

So this might be an odd note to start the debate on, but I submit that the only political conceit in Watchmen (the book at least, can’t speak on the film yet) is an intense mistrust of any extreme point of view. Devotion to ideologies, even supreme indifference, destroy humanity.

Anyway, getting back to our seminar…

I had what I think to be a pretty good idea for our next discussion seminar.

I was re-reading Watchmen the other day — for the first time since high school, I think — in anticipation of the upcoming I-refuse-to-get-excited-until-I-see-if-its-any-good film. Like any good book, I noticed things that I had never really paid attention to before, specifically the rivalry between The New Frontiersman, to the right, and Nova Express, to the left.

So I suggest a discussion of politics and the press in Watchmen,  which, in Moore’s fictional 1985, hadn’t yet witnessed the serious jump in opinion-entertainment-news we have today with the birth of the 24-hour news network or the blog. Possible sub-questions: Why is it the left-leaning Nova Express that drives Dr. Manhattan into exile? Why set the final scene in the offices of The New Frontiersman? The right-leaning publication tends to support the masked vigilantes more, is Moore saying that is something intrinsically right-wing about the concept of the superhero? Depending on how much mileage we can get out of this, maybe we segue into a discussion about what the film gets right and wrong, since, apprehensions aside, I’m sure we’re all going to see it anyway.

What do you think?