genrenoirmurderballads

[genrenoirmurderballads]

MURDER BALLAD 25 - Where the Time Clock Ends

 “Well, they’re building a gallows outside my cell” drawls Johnny Cash in the opening line of “25 Minutes to Go” and over the next 3 minutes he describes his desperation and dread as the sand runs out of his hourglass.  Johnny Cash was a master of the Murder Ballad.  There is some humour in the lyrics of this song, but it largely details the rote encounters with various authorities in the last moments of a man sentenced to death.  With each line we see his chances for a stay of execution slip away, but Johnny manages to give the song spirit with his “gallows humour” delivery.  The song was written by Shel Silverstein in 1962.  Shel also wrote “A Boy Named Sue” another Johnny Cash classic about a son who has been abandoned by his father.  When they are reunited they mutilate each other in a brawl.  The son plans to kill the father and though he spares his father’s life, the bad blood remains.  Shel was a songwriter and a cartoonist.  He served in the army and created illustrations for a military magazine after returning from Korea.  He then spent 40 years creating cartoons and poems for Playboy magazine after meeting Hugh Hefner, who was also a cartoonist in his early years.  Shel even became a reporter for Playboy with a cumbersome gonzo style - often travelling the world to cover stories from bullfights in Spain, (where he got gored) to the gay holiday resort of New York’s “Fire Island” (where he was hit on).  The exotic locations and their inhabitants are the butt of most of Shel’s petty gringo humour, and on occasion he deigns to modestly mock his own confusion and naivety when attempting to fathom the lifestyles of those he reports on in his inimical style.  More precisely, he disguises his antipathy towards the gays/nudists/foreigners by suggesting that he is trying to empathise and understand them but they are all just too ludicrous.  

Once upon a time it saw itself as rebellious, but like an old cowboy wearing rhinestone chaps and a bunny tail, Playboy now awkwardly straddles a fence between redundant and ridiculous and unable to get a leg over.  But back in the day, Shel the maverick was like a bigoted buffalo who would roam anywhere the inferior deer and the antelopes played, and seldom was heard a discouraging word about his jaundiced yellow journalism.  His work became the second most popular feature of Playboy magazine.  Shel’s style of reportage was a tired and tawdry take on the travel writing of Mark Twain.  Twain’s comical writing appeared a hundred years earlier than Silverstein’s, yet it is Shel’s work that seems the most dated today.  Mark Twain was no mere humorist - antiracist, anti-imperialist, and a supporter of women’s suffrage - his writing is rich with insights into the triumphs, trials and tribulations of life’s struggle.  No one escapes his sarcasm and wit, and yet he paints his characters with compassion and a complexity that was not available to the cartoonist Shel.  Both may outline the opportunistic foreigner exploiting the gullibility of the American tourist, but Twain’s tapestry of caricatures often shows a sensitivity to the humanity of people and their motives.  Twain’s marks are irony and inconsistency.  He may play the sincere journalist, the truth-stretcher, or the ignorant and racist American, depending on the needs of his journey with the reader.  In his travel book “The Innocents Abroad” he tells us:

“I think the Azores must be very little known in America.  Out of our whole ship’s company there was not a solitary individual who knew anything whatever about them…These considerations move me to put in a paragraph of dry facts just here. The community is eminently Portuguese—that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy…The donkeys and the men, women, and children of a family all eat and sleep in the same room, and are unclean, are ravaged by vermin, and are truly happy.  The people lie, and cheat the stranger, and are desperately ignorant, and have hardly any reverence for their dead.  The latter trait shows how little better they are than the donkeys they eat and sleep with.”

 Twain’s arrogant American and his irreverence and dismissiveness of cultures is a theme explored throughout his work from his travel writings to his science fiction work “A Confederate Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”.  His unreliable narrators compel the reader to read between the lines, to think beyond the surface, and to laugh at the bluster of the self-righteous American, whose enormous ego eclipses objectivity, whose delusion erodes any sense of truth, and whose self-belief and disdain create bad faith.  His technique parallels Voltaire’s “Candide”, another travel book with a narrator whose naiveté in the face of horrors and disasters cannot be taken at face value.  Voltaire’s Candide is constantly claiming that we live in “the best of all possible worlds”, despite being robbed, starved, and witnessing the death and destruction wrought by wars and earthquakes.  Both writers explore their environment as partisans with unreasonable expectations and sarcastic assessments - Both posit themselves as protagonists in their narratives, marking them as the original gonzo journalist.  Ok, Voltaire doesn’t appear in his own writing but his sarcasm and satire are so biting you feel his breath on the back of your neck as you read Candide.  Voltaire’s dark humour exposes the hypocrisy of the church, the nobility and many sacredly held beliefs of the Enlightenment - to such an extent that he was banned from France for several years and was an involuntary guest at le Hotel Bastille for a year.  Twain narrates as the flash American, the know-it-all and the fool and insults all culture he comes in contact with, including his own.  Twain plays the naif, the visionary and the buffoon - and each character provides a new perspective from the landscape of American archetypes, each story like a picture on a View-Master disk, each vista described presenting a view from a different personality.

Shel on the other hand, was a mere shill for a smut peddler.  He had no aptitude for complexity in politics or emotion, rather like his boss and the empire he ran.  Ostensibly, Playboy magazine was pro-women’s rights.  Hefner has even claimed “I was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism”, a statement which shows his age more than his credo.   It is true Hefner supported abortion rights and yes, his magazine was passably progressive when it came to women’s rights, but it is also true that this stance was very self serving.  The hedonistic playboy lifestyle that Hefner espoused needed women to be “liberated” but only just enough to strip for the camera and be sexually available to men.  Hefner’s “feminism” was never about liberation from the shackles of patriarchy.  And his sympathy for Women’s Liberation didn’t extend to those women who censured him as an oppressor of women, the women who pointed out that he was objectifying women as opposed to emancipating them.  His response to feminist criticism was to insist that these women represented an antisexual strain within the movement, and if there’s anything that makes a sexist feel that women are antisexual it’s when they speak up for themselves to expose and reproach men.  Hefner preferred women be seen and not heard.

As far as Playboy’s PR was concerned it’s glossy nude pictures were about women becoming agents of their own bodies.  This was sexual liberation Playboy style, and It was no coincidence that it was also addressing male desires.  Playboy was propping up patriarchy.  “Playboy would have to change it’s title, heart and brain cells in order to express the full humanity of men or women” said feminist writer and icon Gloria Steinem, who went undercover as a Playboy bunny to expose the dehumanising world of the Playboy clubs.  Her article revealed that not only did the clubs demand demeaning gynaecological exams for female employees to determine whether they had S.T.D.s. but to be a part of the romance and glamour of the Playboy world she would also be subject to shockingly low pay, forced to forfeit 50% of her tips and pay laundry bills for her skimpy costume.  After the article was published, Gloria found herself blacklisted by many journals when she approached them with her own ideas.  However, she was inundated with job offers for her to go undercover as a prostitute.  In an interview many years later she said “…be warned that if you’re a woman journalist and you choose an underground job that’s related to sex or looks, you may find it hard to shake the very thing you were exposing.”  Meanwhile, for several decades Playboy exploited the photos taken of Ms. Steinem during her two week job at the club.        

Shel’s humour tended towards the unambiguously crude.  When he’s not being misogynistic he’s munificently misanthropic.  A song like “Never Bite a Married Woman On the Thigh” is a “warning” depicting a tooth mark, an adulterous woman and an angry husband.  When the husband enquires about who left the tooth mark on his wife, the narrator explains with a clumsy rhyme that scans with the discordant dexterity of William McGonagle:

“that guy was I, and then he’ll come and find you and he’ll punch you right in the eye”

The distressed husband then books a cheap hotel room where he hangs himself with “his brand new tie” and the shamed wife takes an overdose “and she’s gonna lie on the couch and die”  Shel’s rhymes often putrefy and calcify and his humour tends to be bone dry.  

In another mini murder ballad titled “Someone Ate the Baby” the narrator ends a soporific story with the punchline “I simply can’t imagine who would go and (burp) eat the baby.”

Shel didn’t just write lumpen verse, he was just as adept at ponderous prose.  Shel was a prolific dramatist who wrote short and prosaic plays Ad nauseum.  The critic Charles Isherwood wrote a review of a performance of a collection of these plays for Variety magazine.  His adjectival appraisal uses incisive terms like “tasteless”, “tiresome” “charmless” and “vapid”.  Charles writes ”In the juvenile “Bus Stop,” a man with a sign saying “Bust Stop” (heh heh) accosts a young woman and then begins harassing her with crude nicknames for breasts. She retorts by harassing him back with nicknames for the penis. End of skit.”

Clearly female characters and interactive dialogue were not Shel’s forte.  His success came from writing huge hits for not just Johnny Cash, but a plethora of middle-of-the-road bands like Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.  “When You’re in Love With a Beautiful Woman” and “Sylvia’s Mother�� portray the male narrator as a victim of woman’s beauty or her insensitivity.  Shel even wrote “On the Cover of the Rolling Stone” for them, a song so vainglorious and stupid that it probably single handedly spawned punk as a necessary counterbalance to it’s dreary macho flatulence.  Dr. Hook were discerning enough to turn down the song “Don’t Give a Dose to the One You Love Most” where Shel’s narrator explains that he has V.D. but it’s not his fault, it was given to him by a woman.  But the stool in the crown of his “ironic” compositions has got to be “N*gger Fucker” which was recorded by the little known redneck country singer “David Allan Coe”.  The lyrics are unredeemingly racist and sexist.  “Anyone who hears this album and says I’m a racist is full of shit” says unreliable narrator (and racist) David Allen Coe, who plays a guitar with the Confederate flag emblazoned on it, just for hicks.  What is it with some people and failure of self awareness?  You can explain racism to them, but you just can’t make them understand it.  David Allen Coe’s canon is full of stupid, racist, women hating songs.  That is his oeuvre.  He is an unrepentant, unreconstructed racist who by his own logic would probably believe that he stands for equality because he hates both non-whites and women equally.        

So Shel wrote a racist song for a racist, and his contributions to Playboy were islands of misogynist misadventures girded by a sea of nudity.   This contribution, fortified by his adolescent and sexist contributions to the literary world meant that he was not just a lauded hack at Playboy magazine, Shel was a revered regular at Hugh Hefner’s mansion…often staying for months at a time.  Legend has it that he bedded hundreds of women there.  Playboy Playmate Diane Chandler said that Shel could be very cruel towards the women he slept with who became too attached to him “He instantly saw the signs and would say something like “Well, let’s see, where shall I put you on my list?” to let the girls know that they shouldn’t expect anything from him.”  Hefner’s mansion welcomed many celebrity chauvinists.  Donald Trump and Bill Cosby were also regular guests.  One of many former girlfriends of Hugh Hefner was Holly Madison, whose memoir “Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny” revealed that prescription drugs were regularly offered to the women at Hef’s mansion.  In Holly’s first encounter with Hefner he offered her a Quaalude.  When she refused, he said “Usually I don’t approve of drugs, but you know, in the ‘70s they used to call these pills thigh openers”.  Holly later admitted that this comment should have been an eye-opener for her, but she ended up spending several years at Hefner’s mansion.  Hef had 7 girlfriends during Holly’s years there (Snow White?) and they were all expected to take part in his awkward and bizarre orgies.  Twice a week Hefner would invite his 7 girlfriends to join him while he watched porn on giant screens while the girls pretended to get off with each other.  “There was zero intimacy involved” as Hefner preferred to jerk himself off while the girlfriends went through their act for him.  Control was key for Hefner.  Creating rivalries between the women, dictating what they wore, denying them private rooms, and enforcing a 9 pm curfew were a few of his charming peccadillos.  In place of intimacy was a prevailing atmosphere of silenced sex objects suffering from Stockholm syndrome.  Every woman who passed through the mansion’s gates was photographed, and the photos were always presented to the following morning to Hef, who rated each woman a 1, or 2 or 3.  In her book Holly describes her depression and thoughts of suicide while living at the mansion.  “Everyone thinks that infamous metal gate was meant to keep people out.  But I grew to feel it was meant to lock me in.”  

And it was inside the gates of Hugh Hefner’s house of fun that Shel wrote most of what he is probably most famous for…children’s books.  “The Giving Tree” is a much loved (and much criticised) classic of children’s literature. The story tells a bleak relationship between a boy and a tree. The tree provides a place for the boy to climb, apples for him to sell, shelter for him to court in, a boat for him to sail in, and when the tree has nothing left to give the boy who is now an old man he sits on the stump when he is unable to do anything else. There are many critics of “The Giving Tree” who say that it encourages co-dependent relationships, that it is anti-feminist, (in the story the tree is female and always “happy” to give) and that it is unapologetically capitalist in it’s themes.  The art historian Ellen Handler Spitz damned the book as “a celebration of male selfishness and female self-abnegation”.  And still, the book remains a much loved classic for many people.  Canadian actor Ryan Gosling has a tattoo of the front cover illustration of “The Giving Tree”.  However, when asked about it he had this to say:  “That book is so fucked up, that story is the worst.  I mean, at the end the tree is a stump and the old guy just sitting on him, he’s just used him to death and you’re supposed to want to be the tree?  Fuck you.”  “The Giving Tree” and “25 minutes to Go” both share themes of the passage of time and desolation.  Themes of brutality and cruelty infuse much of Shel’s work…even the children’s tune “The Unicorn” (a childhood favourite of this writer), all of the unicorns die.    

This version of “25 minutes to Go” was recorded in Folsom Prison in 1968. Johnny Cash was a passionate advocate for prison reform. He performed in prisons for almost thirty years. He never took payment for these shows. In 1972 he spoke at a US Senate hearing and recommended sweeping reforms to the prison system. Johnny then took the debate to the public when he released the recordings of his concerts at San Quentin and Folsom prisons. The films and recordings succeeded in humanising the convicts for an audience to whom they were nothing more than animals to be locked up and forgotten. The animation for “25 Minutes to Go” was created by Julie Zammarchi in a style somewhat similar to Shel’s illustrations.

#murderballads #genrenoirmurderballads #genre noir #hugh hefner #johnny cash #shel silverstein #Murder Ballads #Murder Ballad #Dr. Hook #gloria steinem #mark twain #voltaire #candide #pablo fiasco #the giving tree #25 minutes to go #folsom prison #playboy #playboy mansion #donald trump #bill cosby

[genrenoirmurderballads]

MURDER BALLAD 24 - GUN FURY ACT I “Fair is foul and foul is fair” chirp the witches in the introduction to Macbeth, an opening that invites the audience to dig below the surface of the story, because as the floor stickies in old Bill’s tale of betrayal and murder, we learn that all is not as it first seems.

Scout Niblett is an English singer, songwriter and musician. Her murder ballad “Gun” is a sinister song about a plan for vengeance wrought by a troubled mind. Scout is a stage name - Niblett named herself after the tomboy child in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”. In the novel, Scout is a feisty and outspoken child who expresses herself simply and directly with language unencumbered by the barriers of acculturation that shackle the adult world. Scout is stubborn. Her adolescent single-mindedness makes empathy a challenge for her. Still, she is the overlooked hero of the book, and the author hints that she has great potential, but, like America itself, she is still struggling, still forming.

In Scout Niblett’s song the narrator has been done wrong. Her lover has lied to her and is with another woman.

Now, accounts of break-ups and the accompanying grief and sadness are de rigueur in pop music. Roy Orbison’s break up left him “Crying’”. Smokey Robinson’s admits in “Tracks of my Tears” that his smile was “only there to fool the public” and in Billy Bragg’s version of “Walk Away Renee” when his love starts seeing “Mr. Potato Head” he tells us he “went home and thought about the two of them together until the bath water went cold around me”.

But of course, break up songs aren’t always about men sharing their vulnerability. When betrayal knocks on the door it is often answered by anger, and revenge. “Tell me why everything turned around” cries Lindsay Buckingham as he shares his confusion and anger about his failed relationship with Stevie Nicks in “Go Your Own Way”. And much to Stevie’s chagrin he lets her and the world know “packing up, shacking up’s all you want to do”. HIS revenge was to write a hit song about her commitment issues and get her to sing it with him every single night they go on stage. When they perform it live, the song seems to be a cathartic “cri de coeur” for Lindsay, while Stevie looks like she would rather crawl under a rock. But “Go your Own Way” shows signs of acceptance, or at least resignation amidst the ache and anger.

“I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW!” screams Kelis in “Caught Out There” - angrily adding “So sick of your games, I’ll set your truck to flames”. Nancy Sinatra’s revenge was letting her man know that her boots were made for walking when she finds out “You’ve been messin’ where you shouldn’t have been messin’”

Scout Niblett’s “Gun” also tells a tale of betrayal and revenge. But In “Gun” Scout Niblett lets us know she isn’t into screaming or walking, she’s into killing. The song opens with a vocal delivery of an unemotional and practical plan, while her guitar growls and seethes, like a revving motorcycle at a traffic light, or someone grinding their teeth.

“I think I’m gonna buy me a gun, A nice little silver one And in a crowd someday you won’t see it coming anyway”

Not only does she plan to kill him, it’s going to be an ambush.

And she goes on to share her withering scorn for the other woman:

“Maybe you’ll be holding her hand, Or watching her shitty band”

Scout has lost her love, and insists that she is “thankful everyday”. But as these lines are repeated obsessively they suggest rancour rather than acceptance. Denial, anger, and a desperate need for control - overwhelm any acceptance. Like Lady Macbeth in her determination to be Queen, Scout seems to be in a state of unhealthy fixation. Macbeth was never a story about one man’s hunger for power, it’s a murderous codependent love story.

You see, Macbeth was bullied into killing by his wife. She wanted to become Queen, and so the King was the first body that hit the floor. That’s murder, treason AND insurrection - and it’s 3 strikes you’re out at Macbeth’s ball game. The guilt over his actions cause him to lose his faculties. He starts hallucinating. Lady Macbeth has profound mental health issues soon after, but this is not out of any sense of guilt, as she is utterly without compassion. Her deterioration begins after Macbeth goes off to war and leaves her on her own. Without a King to manipulate and control, she festers with her own oppressive thoughts and begins to unravel. Haunted by a fantasy of blood stains on her hands she compulsively washes them. This is old Bill’s way of revealing an unconscious attempt to rid herself of her moral stains, of her own soul’s uncleanliness. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth pay the price for their crimes with their sanity. As the disco witches Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb once falsetto’ed “When you lose control and you’ve got no soul it’s tragedy”. Lady Macbeth is in denial and develops an unhealthy coping mechanism, an early example of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Poignantly, Donald Trump has an obsession with germs. Trump doesn’t really like shaking hands, especially those of teachers. According to Trump “teachers have 17,000 germs per square inch on their desks….ten times the germ rate of other professions” He is also said to avoid pressing the “G” button in elevators because it is the button he believes to be most infested with germs. The Donald has claimed that he is “borderline” OCD, and has said “I feel much better after I thoroughly wash my hands, which I do as much as possible.”

“and nobody, not even the rain has such small hands”

e.e.cummings

But of course, e.e. cummings poem is about love, and Donald Trump’s presidency has nothing to do with love.

ACT II

Scout has acknowledged the mixture of strength and vulnerability in Courtney Love’s songs were an influence on her work, and she has also claimed that it was after hearing Kurt Cobain that she decided to pick up a guitar. Scout however, tends to work solo and her sparse guitar playing reminds this listener not of Courtney or Nirvana but of the bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta. Her guitar sounds like Cobain’s, but her plain, stark guitar style is more like John Lee Hooker’s “Tupelo Blues”, or “Bring me my Shotgun” by the Texas bluesman Lightnin Hopkins.

Niblett has crafted a musical persona. She plays a character who is in touch with her darker emotions, but she doesn’t understand them or control them, her stormy emotions seem to control her. Scout plays songs that simmer with restless tension, where love and pain seem to be two sides of the same coin. Her oeuvre tends towards alienation, but she is not alienated from her emotions. Scout Niblett sings the blues…the blues of pain and heartache and wishful thinking, the blues of unanswered questions, the blues of wishing for a second chance, the blues of being rejected and discarded. Her stories tell of an unconsummated desire or, the object of desire removing itself. Her songs don’t describe abusive relationships, but they do hint at them. Her songs don’t carry the hope or the whimsical observations of a Joni Mitchell. She is more like a female Raymond Carver, a writer for whom all relationships eventually unravel into confusion, destruction and unspoken pain. But unlike much of Raymond Carver there is a tenderness in her stories, the pain and the tenderness of a broken heart. And Scout clings desperately to her bitterness, melancholy and broken heart like a security blanket, because after all, there is a masochistic “comfort” in repeated trauma. It may not be healthy, but it is familiar.

Now, despite being a strong independent woman with a flair for writing songs about difficult relationships and emotions, Scout Niblett doesn’t view herself as a feminist. She claims “I don’t really respond to gender issues. I respond more to human emotion…I’m more in touch with things that affect people on a humanistic level rather than a gender level.” Yep, that old chestnut “I’m a humanist not a feminist.” Even today the feminist movement still seems to frighten, threaten or put off a lot of people who would seem to be natural allies. Andrea Dworkin has said of this “many women, I think resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”

Nancy Sinatra, Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain have all declared that they are proud feminists. Kelis, however, like Scout, does not identify as a feminist. Kelis is willing to acknowledge the historical importance of feminism, and she links it to the civil rights movement, but she seems to believe that now America and the world is a big meritocracy and you don’t need these kinds of movements anymore because all you have to do is work hard and you will be rewarded. In Kelis’ world there are are no longer colour or gender barriers. Kelis believes that she is an example of this - she is a successful black woman and so it must be true. But it is also true that many rich and successful people feel this way. Benjamin Franklin and Donald Trump both wrote books on how to be successful, and they attribute their success to hard work and getting by on very little sleep. But both Benjamin and Donald and a great many others have a tendency to overlook the role that luck and money have played in their situations. This blindness to their own privilege is a form of denial, it seems to work as a defence or coping mechanism and is perhaps no less an issue of mental health than imagining blood stains on your hands.

ACT III

At last the video. The video for this track is a flip side to the song. Where the song achieves a mounting tension, the video is light hearted…Niblett dresses up as Snow White and goes to a fairground where she rides a ferris wheel, poses for pictures, and eats ice cream.

Snow White is an interesting choice for Scout. The story of Snow White begins with her pregnant mother, a seamstress who pricks her finger on a spinning wheel. The red blood, the snow outside her window, and her black spinning wheel become details in her wish to have a beautiful daughter, with skin white as snow, cheeks the colour of blood and hair as black as the ebony frame. She gets the wish at a high cost - she dies in child birth. Her husband the King then marries a wicked woman consumed by vanity, and murderously jealous of Snow White’s beauty. She tries to kill Snow White a number of times. Snow White has no mother. Her father is virtually absent from the story, and in any case he is useless at protecting her from her abusive, murderous step-mother. The other men in her life are all weak and inadequate as father surrogates. There is a hunter who leaves her abandoned in the forest. The 7 dwarves she meets allow her to live with them, but they are all flawed, to the extent that they are each named after their flaws. She becomes their subordinate and does their cooking and cleaning. They leave Snow White alone and unprotected despite repeated attempts on her life. Snow White is a victim of repeated trauma - she is hunted, neglected, abandoned and suffers several attempted murders. She is young and immature, unable to express emotion, or make good decisions to protect herself. The adults are absent or adversaries, she has no role models who would help her develop towards maturity. Beneath the simplicity of the story of Snow White is a character who lacks the support to grow emotionally, to individuate. She is saved purely by luck…a prince comes along and kisses her (without consent) while she is unconscious, which miraculously saves her from death. She sees him upon awakening, and falls in love without ever having spoken a word to him. This is not the basis for a healthy relationship. Snow White is NOT a feminist fairy tale.

The last shot of the video shows Scout Niblett discarding the empty ice cream cone in the dirt, as if she has chosen to abandon the sweet and good natured playfulness of childhood for the violent adult world of the town in the distance. For the first time we notice she has a purse. What's in the purse? Where is she going? Is she going to . . . ?

(In Macbeth, most of the murders happen offstage. Ol' Bill knew this added to the tension)

CURTAINS

#murderballads scout niblett pablofiasco murder ballads murderballad gun murder

[genrenoirmurderballads]

MURDER BALLAD 23 - MURDER IS MEAT

Singer songwriter Rupert Holmes conquered the charts in 1979 with his song “Escape” also known as “The Pina Colada Song” - with it’s catchy chorus about pina coladas. In the song Rupert tells us he is “tired of my lady, we’d been together too long” complaining that the relationship, or possibly his lady is “like a worn out recording of a favourite song”. Meanwhile guitar, bass and piano vamp the same repetitive riff throughout the entire track- a simple 3 chord progression that shifts key, and then quickly shifts back to the original key. This chord progression itself reflects the ennui, “the same old dull routine” described in the lyrics, each shift suggesting change, but the change never appears, we are back where we started.  Instead we have a dull pattern,  we are reconciled to repetition, predictable and unvarying. The song has no bridge, the verse is the same as the chorus.

The theme of the song is infidelity - Rupert reads an ad in the lonely hearts column of a newspaper. It’s an appeal from a woman looking for someone with “half a brain”, who also likes champagne and pina coladas. This advert (clearly written by a drinker with both low expectations and low self-esteem) galvanises Rupert who arranges to meet her at a bar only to find that the ad was placed by his own “lovely lady”. You might think fireworks would ensue, yet somehow this situation of planned abandonment and double infidelity rekindles their relationship. However, the chords fail to change, and Rupert ends the song by repeating the same verse 3 times with almost no variation. The irony of the song titled “Escape” is there is no escape. Rupert and “his lady” seem happy to return to the devil they know. The subtext of their bond seems to be denial and shame, mixed with alcohol. Frisson and on.

But this is not about Escape/the pina colada song. It’s about a song Rupert wrote that focusses on captivity, a kind of antithesis to “Escape”. It predates “Escape” by 9 years…and it’s theme is murder.

In 1970 Rupert Holmes was in his early 20s, living in New York City and writing jingles for shampoo commercials. His friend worked on 54th street at Scepter Records studios as an engineer, and Rupert would record his own songs there when the studio was in down time. Scepter Records was an independent record label run by Florence Greenberg, a new Jersey housewife who started the label after hearing 3 girls singing at her daughter’s high school talent show. Those girls became the Shirelles.  The label also started the careers of Dionne Warwick, The Kingsmen, and Canadian rockers The Guess Who.  Legendary composer Burt Bacharach blossomed at Scepter, writing "Walk on By” and over 30 other songs for Dione Warwick during his tenure as one of the in house writers/producers. The first Velvet Underground album was recorded in Scepter Studios, and years later in the same building the legendary studio 54 would attract party cognoscenti a-plenty. It was also at Scepter records in the mid 70s where Mel Cheren “The Godfather of disco” introduced the 12-inch single with the instrumental B-side.  

Rupert Holmes had discovered a tight garage band from Pennsylvania called “The Buoys” and convinced Scepter records to sign them to a one single deal. This deal didn’t include any support for promoting the record by the record company, and so Rupert came up with a cynical idea - he would write a song that would get banned with the hope that the more notorious the song became the more attention it would get and the more copies it would sell.

Rupert Holmes decided he would write a hit song about cannibalism.

In 1963 in Sheppton, Pennsyvania a mine collapsed trapping Henry Throne, David Fellin, and Louis Bova 300 feet underground for more than 2 weeks. Henry and David were eventually rescued but Louis was never found. It is this story that Rupert Holmes conflated with a theme from a Tennessee Williams play. “Suddenly, Last Summer” had been turned into a film starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. It tells the story of Catherine (Liz) who has been traumatised after witnessing the death of her cousin. Her family want her lobotomised. The Doctor (Monty) makes a last attempt to help her by giving her a truth serum, and she reveals that when she and her cousin were on holiday on a beach in Spain her cousin had been using her as bait, enticing young boys which he would then proposition for sex. One day they are set upon by the boys, who begin to chase her cousin, and when she catches up with them she discovers to her horror, that they have torn him apart and are eating his flesh.

As Rupert later said, “if it’s good enough for Tennessee Williams it’s good enough for me.”

So Rupert writes a song in the first person about 3 men trapped in a mine. “Joe and me and Tim” are “hungry as hell no food to eat”.  When the narrator is rescued after blacking out he tells us “my stomach was full as it could be and nobody ever got around to finding Timothy”. Because they ate him.

Some radio stations played the catchy pop-rock number when it was released, and as listeners figured out what the song was about they would call up to request it, and so the song slowly climbed up the charts. Some radio stations would ban it when they realised what the song was about, and so fans would begin calling up other radio stations with their requests to hear “Timothy”. Many of the bigger stations didn’t play it, but small radio stations in Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania would. If you lived in New York, you wouldn’t hear it. Still, it eventually became a Top 40 hit for the Buoys. Scepter records wanted to capitalise on the success as it climbed towards the top 20 but weren’t sure how to do it, so they issued a statement claiming that “Timothy” was a mule in a vain attempt to distance themselves from the real theme, and to get radio stations to keep playing it. No one believed them. The song climbed to number 17 in the charts.  And so it was that Rupert’s “success de scandale” - his notion that that all publicity is good publicity, got the song into the charts. The Buoys never again had as successful a song as “Timothy”.

An epidemic model is a way to explain the means of transmitting communicable diseases. Stochastic - meaning random variable - is one such model. it is a tool for estimating probable outcomes of exposure to contamination allowing for random variation when the fluctuations are to be measured in small populations.

It was grassroots support that allowed “Timothy” it’s stochastic rise up the charts. Some critics have said that the success of a song from a small independent label with no support from the mainstream media support isn’t possible today. Yet there may be a counterpart in contemporary politics. It could be that Bernie Sanders shares an unlikely parallel to the achievements of “Timothy”. Bernie is slowly, steadily gnawing away at what journalist Colin McEnroe described as “his biggest liability: the perception that he can’t succeed.”

[genrenoirmurderballads]

Murder Ballad 22: Die Laughing

This murder ballad was written and sung by the multi-instrumentalist prodigy who merged showman and shaman in hype-man - Flavor Flav.  

In Public Enemy Flav is ostensibly the side-kick side-show freak-show support to Chuck D’s raconteuring, but in this song Chuck is silent.  It’s time for Flavor Flav to captain his own ship of fools and the vessel he calls up is our ambulance and emergency services.  This track is from their third album “Fear of a Black Planet” and clown prince Flavor Flav begins it with a punch line:  “HIT ME”.

“I dialled 911 a long time ago

Don't you see how late they're reacting?…”

A long time ago there was no 911 - it didn’t emerge as an emergency service number in America until 1968 and it wasn’t in common usage until the mid 70s.  The number was chosen by national telephone operator AT and T.  It was short, simple, easy to remember, it had not been used as an area code prefix, and was tested and found the least likely number for children to inadvertently dial when using a rotary telephone.  It was perfect.  Canada adopted the same emergency service number in 1972.  

“…They only come and they come when they wanna

So get the morgue truck and embalm the goner”

Now for those of you who don’t know the song, or the band, Flavor Flav is arguing that the ambulance emergency services do not respond to the needs of the black community.  This is Flavor Flav's Bildungsroman.  It is his coming of age story, where he describes  conflict with society.  His journey has been with Public Enemy, and setting the agenda and spreading the message has been Chuck D.'s job.  But in this song Chuck D is invisible.  Flavor Flav steps up and becomes a coherent clown.  At first, Flav who wears a clock around his neck is tied to time like Lewis Carroll's white rabbit.  He is a timekeeper, merely observing.  Flav is neither the straight man or timid like the rabbit - his observations quickly become a macabre analysis, a list of descriptions of death, the body bag, the morgue, autopsies, with a mix of physical assaults from amputations, to broken necks.  This neo-surreallist nightmare parallels Nathaniel West's novel "A Cool Million" where the hero sets out to make his fortune in the world and finds himself exploited and "dismantled" by capitalism itself, losing an eye, his teeth, his thumb, a leg in his various jobs.

"They are the kings cause they swing amputation

Lose your arms, your legs to them it's compilation"

 In West's novel the naive optimism and gullibility never leave his protagonist.  His faith never flags for American and the capitalism that is destroying him, killing him.  This is not true of Flav's cynical antagonist stance.  A stance more in keeping with rock and roll, hip-hop, and punk.  Flav's lyric style mixes a grim blues humour with hip-hop braggadocio. 

"The doctors huddle up and call a flea flicker"

The flea flicker he refers to is a trick move in American football where you try and make it look as though you are doing one thing when in fact you are doing another.  A cynical and paranoid comparison and one that echoes the more understated blues singer Sonny Boy Williamson who was able to place dark humour in the plights and injustices he described without making light of them.  This is true to the roots of the Bildungsroman, it is the one who was thought a dunce, a fool, who sets out into the world and tells the story baring the truth behind their experiences with gained insight. (Rumour has it that Flavor Flav played in Clinton's Parliament for a time.  social issues, sarcasm and irony reigned here too). 

"Latecomers with the late coming stretcher

That's a body bag in disguise y'all, i'll betcha"

In a 2013 report done in Flint Michigan on what impacts whether African Americans call 9-1-1 immediately for stroke symptoms co-author Sarah Bailey reveals “based on their experiences with calling 9-1-1, there was little confidence that an ambulance would come, or if it did, it would be too late” 

“I call a cab cos a cab will come quicker”

In 2005 USA TODAY reported their analysis that “The chance of surviving a dire medical emergency in the USA is a matter of geography. If you collapse from cardiac arrest in Seattle, a 911 call likely will bring instant advice and fast-moving firefighters and paramedics. Collapse in Washington, D.C., and — as one EMS official suggests — someone better call a cab for you.”

 The report continues:

Kenny Lyons, who heads Washington's paramedic union, tells his loved ones not to waste time dialing 911 if they face a dire medical emergency. "If they can find someone to drive them to a hospital, drive them. If they can somehow catch a cab, go," he says. The poor performance of the system, he says, "is haunting to the providers, and it should be chilling to the community."

It goes on to claim “Most cities refused to answer USA TODAY's question comparing response times on fires and emergency medical calls, but a few cities, including San Francisco, Mesa, Ariz., and Wichita, said their firefighters also are slower to respond to medical emergencies than to fires”

"Thinking you're 1st when really you're 10th"

Now Flavor Flav is a kind of living cartoon.  His dance styles a mix of filth-funk and jack-in-the box meets the Tasmanian Devil.  And we associate many cartoon characters with a kind of physical endurance, their pain, their inconvenience is our entertainment.    Flav describes emergency services as a world of pain - a travesty where those that are supposed to help you are part of a Kafka-esque alliance against you.  Both at your inconvenience and for their entertainment.

"They be laughing at you while you're crawling on your knees"

Generally, Flavor Flav's lyrics veer hysterically close to nonsense, but somehow he has fed the loas, he has pleased Papa Legba, the god of understanding.  Flav's weapon is humour, disarming, charming, 9-1-1 is a joke, but a joke that is serious as life and death.  Chuck D.'s moral outrage is present and on this track Flavor Flav comes up with as close as he ever got to a clear narrative, and like Eraserhead’s take on parenthood - it’s an ugly story.

"A no-use number with no-use people"

An 18 year old black man named Michael Brown was fatally shot by 28 year old police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014.  His body lay where he was shot for over 4 hours before emergency services arrived.  There was nationwide unrest when there were no charges brought against police officer Darren Wilson.

"If your life is on the line then you’re dead today"

Emergency Services were certainly sub-standard for Eric Garner.  They cost him his life.  In July 2014 he was put in a chokehold by a police officer.  The New York City Police Department prohibits any use of chokeholds.  He cried out "I can't breathe" 11 times before he fell into unconsciousness and died.  When there were no charges brought against the police officer responsible, the outcry was world-wide with masses participating in "die ins", where people lay on the ground, many repeating "I can't breathe". 

“I can prove it to you watch the rotation

it all adds up to a fucked up situation” 

Likewise for Tanisha Anderson, a 37 year old African American from Cleveland.  When police responded to an 9-1-1 call in November 2014, Tanisha, who had mental health problems, agreed to go with them to a medical centre for a check up.  Tanisha was pronounced dead at her arrival at the medical center.  Her death was caused in no small part by physical restraint.  

"I call 'em body snatchers cause they come to fetch ya

With an autopsy ambulance just to dissect ya"

This is the same town where in the same month a 9-1-1 call reported to the police that a "black male" with a handgun that was "probably fake" was in a playground area.  Police shot and killed 12 year old Tamir Rice within seconds of arriving at the location.

"You better wake up and smell the real flavour 

cos 9-1-1 is a fake life saver"

As Candide mocked the belief that "this was the best of all possible worlds" by detailing the callous cruelty, brutal bloodshed, and hateful strife of the era with sarcasm and hostily, so does Flavour Flav mock a largely unquestioned system that seems sometimes to spread nearly as many problems as it responds to.

In the case of Tanisha Anderson, her family have launched a civil rights lawsuit.  Officials have ruled Tanisha's death was an unlawful killing, and that she had been a victim of "homicide by legal intervention".  

Homicide is not the same as murder.  "by legal intervention" seems to remove it one step further.  If it is legal intervention, then it can't be murder.  It is legal and murder is illegal.  

Therefore "9-1-1 is a Joke" may really only be a homicide ballad.  But I present it as a murder ballad with the perverse optimism of hoping that one day if the careless racist acts of someone who is supposed to be serving the public results in someones death they will be held accountable and charged with murder, and we are not fed some platitude about legal intervention.  Perhaps even more perverse optimism it that these several problems within emergency services are acknowledged,  addressed, and even SOLVED, and this song can then languish lonely as a homicide ballad.

"9-1-1 is a joke we don't want 'em"

The Bomb Squad was the name of Public Enemy's production team, and in this track they sampled a track by Eddie Murphy, "Flash Light" by Parliament, and Vincent Price's laugh from Thriller.

#Murder Ballad #Murder Ballads #murderballads #flavor flav #flavour flav #public enemy

[genrenoirmurderballads]

Murder Ballad 21:  Twisted Sisters

PREFACE:

Launcelot and the Black Knight were trotting through Canary Wharf forest when Lancelot slowed to a canter.  

Damn birds.  Do you think we are near the beach yet?  I’m tired of shlepping this armour on my back…I’m schvitzing like a wild boar.  Ywain the Bastard said he thought it was near here.  Should have known.

Forsooth.  I see two possibilities.  I can kill him, or you can. 

Ha!  Perhaps in a fortnight or two.  We are supposed to be on a crusade to the holy land.  We can’t go back until 30 more dawns pass.  That’s why I thought we would go to the beach-shore.  Perchance to wash our armour have a rest and comb the beach for relics.

Relics?

Well, if we say we have been to the holy land we should return with some relics.  Besides EVERYone will be beseeching.  A tug on the sleeve and I implore you my lord, I beg of you a supplicatory allowance my lord.  Yadda, yadda yadda.  I ALWAYS find something on the beach that I can tell a tale of.  Look here is a magic stone.  An arabian man on a carpet that flies gave me this stone.  It was perfectly round but now it looks like a kidney.   

That’s so OLD.  No one believes that one anymore trust me.  And this place is not holy.  You can smell it.  Sulphur.

What? Sulphur?  Then we are near a magician’s abode?  Or an alchemist?  If it’s a magician we must be wary.  But if it’s an alchemist we should plan.  Perchance we force him to make gold, then…kill him.  And take the gold and make it look like someone else did it, perchance we leave a note and sign it Ywain the Bastard.  

I DO NOT think that wise.  I’m the only one south of Hadrian’s Wall who can write.  A note would be like a signed confession.  Literally.     

Have you been there?  Hadrian’s Wall?  I’ve always wanted to go.  What’s it like?

The spectacle is singular.  This sulphur smell is more likely dragon.

You lie like Jezebel to put a fear in me.

I do not.  I chance it you have never slain a dragon?

I have.

And how did you lure the dragon?

With a wild boar quartered and thrown about a bog.  With a cloak of invisibility I hid openly in the bog and when the dragon came to claim the boar I claimed his head asunder with my great-sword.

I would not call you a liar Sir Knight, but with respect that was with probability a lizard.

A wizard?

No.  A lizard.  Did it have a tail?

3 foot high and rising.

A snake then.  Look, If you meet a dragon invisible or not you will get burned.  That’s the sulphur smell.  They breathe fire.

And the only way you can lure a dragon is with a maiden tied to a rock.  And it’s pretty tricky, because the dragon only goes into a swoon when it can see the maiden in her entirety.  I learned the hard way.  

What meaneth you?

I told two sisters to come with me on a walk and I chained one to a rock thinking If I frighten them a little and make them think they were in some danger but then I appear and slay the dragon when it was in full swoon then they will see me as a great Knight and they would then fight over me, each eager to win me…the trophy Knight.  Well, the dragon went into a fit when it couldn’t see the maiden in her entirety and he grabbed her in his maw and flung her high into the sky until she disappeared into the clouds.  It wasn’t my fault…the dragon did it, but I was determined not to be thwarted by a dragon because what would that do to my legacy?  So I reluctantly chained the second reluctant maiden but alas the dragon swooned this time and so I rendered his head asunder.  We met a bard, a minstrel not long after.  You know what they are like..

Always looking for a story.

Right.  So she starts off talking about me saying i was doing her wrong, and so I take the bard aside and tell him our story…the story of the Twa Sisters.  

The Two Sisters?

No Twa Sisters.  I put on an estu-aryan accent and I then told him I watched these two sisters go down to the river and one pushed the other one in and walked away, and now she is beside herself with grief and madness.  That was some time ago.  The song has been passed on through countless bards now, each one adds his adds his own embellishments…

Or her own…

Or hers yes bird or bard, each adds their own twist to the tale.  In any case there is no trace of me or the dragon, or the little…accident.  You know what minstrels are like these days…all they broadcast is gossip and eavesdropping.

But I know your secret now.  

Yes.  But I know secrets of yours too.  

What secrets have you of mine?

Guinevere.

That is nothing but a name.  What knowledge have you?  

That your ties with Guinevere will bring about the ruin of the Crown, the table, and leave a wake of mystery forever in the Kingdom.  

You been talking to Merlin?

We are acquainted yes.  

He told me the same thing.  

Didn’t listen though did you?

It all seemed so vague.  

You use a french word.  Do you speak french?

Sure.  Ding Dang Dong.  Ding Dang Dong.

Dung covered from the movements of birds up above our heroes now take time to heed their needs.

These horses have been cantering for a long time.  They should rest and I’ve got to water the insides of my armour.

Insides? Why?

I can’t take this armour off.  In France I met two dragons at once.  they hit me fore and aft and my suit melted a bit and now it won’t come off.  I’ve been to many blacksmiths, i’ve even tried dipping myself in honey and then i was dragged by wild horses.  Even they couldn't drag it off of me.  It’s my curse.  Why do you think they call me the Black Knight?  It's because my soul is black with sorrow.

I thought it was because your suit is all black.  

Oh yeah.  That too.  The black is all scorch marks from dragon’s breath.

Uh.  you fecate in there?

Duh.  It’s why I prefer rivers and streams to beaches.  On the beach there’s almost never anywhere to tie your horse.  If my horse ever got stolen, I would probably die.  

And at this sombre thought, each of the Knights disembarked from their respective horses, each finding a chivalrous spot to pass their knightly matters, and returned to their steeds.

What happened to this cape of yours?  

Which?

The cape of invisibility.

Oh i lost it.

Thought so.  You know what?  I think I would probably also die were it not for stirrups. marvellous invention.

Invention?  I think not.  Stirrups come with horses.  Like these canaries come with shit.  

Not at all.  They were first described in print in North Korea in the 5 Century.  Probably invented in China.  But horses had been domesticated for some 5,000 years before this.  So for 5,000 years horses were stirrup-free.  Completely changed the possibilities of warfare.  We are lucky to live in such modern times.

Back on horseback the two traipsed and chatted amiably.

I can’t help but thinking about your armour not coming off.  It’s not just the chafing.  It’s like being buried alive. You’ve got to find yourself a good dentist.

You mean blacksmith?

Same thing….Were you always The Black Knight?

No.  When I was in my youth I was more beige.

What is beige?

It is French.  Like vague.

And is that what they call you in France?  The Beige Knight?

Some people call me Maurice (whistles)

‘cos i speak of the pompatus of love.

FACE:

The Twa Sisters first appeared on a broadside in 1656, but we now know it is an altered version of events from several centuries before this.  It tells a tale of two sisters who go down to a body of water and one drowns the other.  There are several english variants, and there are many similar themed songs throughout northern Europe.  In some instances the murdered body of the girl floats ashore and a musical instrument is made out of it.  The instrument then plays itself and tells the story of the murder.   There are a number of tunes, titles and lyrics to this song, and several versions that combine these lyrics and tunes. Let's take a moment together to reflect on the near infinite possibilities this might engender.                                           Difficult isn't it?

 In any case...

The ballad was acquired by Francis Child - a vital contributor to the study of English-language folk music.  Child was an American writer and folklorist, and in 1876 he was named as Harvard’s first professor of English.  It was at this time he began working on the “Child Ballads”.  This massive work was published in 10 parts over a 16 year period, including the difficult posthumous edition.

The song is also listed in the Roud Folk Song index, a database of 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language.  It was invented and compiled by Steve Roud, a former librarian in Croyden, London.  It combines a Broadside index (printed sources before 1900) with a “field-recording index”.  Steve Roud is now an Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society.  He began his database in 1993.  It is now widely accepted as a very important resource in academic circles, as with square-dancers.  

Emily Smith is a Scottish folk singer.  Her album Echoes has been nominated for Album of the Year for the Scots Trad Music Awards.   The Twa Sisters is one of the tracks on this nominated album.  She is also nominated for Scottish singer of the year.  In this video she is accompanied by her husband, Jamie McClennan.

#Murder Ballad #Murder Ballads #murder ballad #murderballads #sir lancelot #knights of the round table #the twa sisters #Emily Smith #the Black Knight #Francis Child #folk music

[genrenoirmurderballads]

Murder Ballad 20:  Death Bites

Margaret Atwood said in her 1990 series of lectures at Clarendon College in Oxford that throughout Canadian literature, the Canadian north is seen as a malevolent force that drives you crazy, or kills you.

Blackflies can do both.  

Blackflies are hardy little critters that fly and drink blood.  There are 6 kinds of black fly that feed on humans.  The females need blood meals, and they tend to swarm and feed on cattle, often killing them. These  swarming feeds cause death by simuliotoxicosis.  That’s death by bug spit.  You see, blackflies have a cocktail of drugs in their saliva.  Drugs to stop swelling, drugs to dilate capillaries to increase blood flow, and hundreds of blackly bite wounds will cause the heart to stop from bug spit poisoning.

They have been known to suffocate cattle by crawling in their nose and throat.  They are Canada’s vampire, causing exsanguination (death by blood loss) from extreme rates of biting.

If you have ever been bitten by a blackly, you will never complain about mosquitos again.  Their bites can swell up as big as golfballs and can feel like an untreated burn for days.

This song is a classic Canadian folk song.  Written by Wade Hemsworth in 1949, it was made into an academy award nominated animation in 1991.  It is sung by Wade with backing vocals from legendary folk singers Kate and Anna McGarrigle.  Wade was born and raised in Brantford, Ontario, (not Brantford, Manitoba - that’s the home of hockey legend/traitor Wayne Gretzky) where he learned to play the banjo and guitar.  He spent World War II in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and while stationed in Newfoundland he discovered traditional Canadian music.  He wrote only about 20 songs, many of them were covered by Pete Seeger and the McGarrigles, and several were used in National Film Board of Canada films.  His vibe is a bit “Burl Ives”, but he wasn’t in very heavy rotation like Burl as he didn’t often perform live. 

The Blackfly song is based on his horrific experiences travelling with survey parties in the north of Ontario.  Admittedly it doesn't appear to be a murder ballad.  There is no murder described.  But blackflies have murdered plenty of Canadian and American cattle.  It is also true, perhaps, that when you hear reports of people dying of "exposure" they are including death by blackly spit, but they are just not specifying it as the cause of death, preferring the more neutral term "exposure".  It could be that this is what happened to Henry Hudson, his teenage son and seven crewmen when cast adrift by a merciless mutinous crew.  It could explain what happened to Lewis and Clark.  If we are being realistic we must acknowledge that they are all more likely to have been killed by blackflies than say...bigfoot.   

The former journalist Adrienne Clarkson who became Governor General of Canada ( the Governor-General is a weird Canadian post.  They are ceremonial representatives of the Queen.  It is the oldest continuous institution in Canada. )  Anyway, Adrienne Clarkson said his songs were “so much a part of our folklore, and so familiar to us that we didn’t realise anyone had written them.”  

This animation was directed by Christopher Hinton.  It starts with a novel point of view: the “fly-eye camera”.  It then brilliantly echoes some of the work of fellow Canadian animator Norman McLaren:  guitar strings become telephone lines become train tracks, and it carries on with comic cinematic cliches - blackflies in full Busby Berkeley choreography, shown with breakneck pans, zooms and match cuts.  A funny clever film.      

#Murder Ballad #Murder Ballads #murderballads #blackfly #blackflies #the black fly song #Canadian #genrenoirmurderballads #Wade Hemsworth #folk music #canadian folk music #margaret atwood #kate and anna mcgarrigle

[genrenoirmurderballads]

Murder Ballad 19: Teething Pain

#jimi hendrix #Murder Ballad #Murder Ballads #murderballads #hey hoe #psychedelic

[genrenoirmurderballads]

Murder Ballad 19: Teething Pain

Prologue:  

In England during the middle 1600s, thousands of deaths were attributed to botched dental procedures.  Blacksmiths and apothecaries would be met with queues of fetid and grimacing mouths held open like expectant baby birds for one of many improvised “solutions”, many of them toxic, if not deadly.  Clove oil was a popular anaesthetic, but not easily accessed unless you ran a printing press where it was used to keep ink from drying out.  It is imagined that raids on printing presses for supplies of clove oil during outbreaks of scurvy, or, “the blaque plaque” contributed to the erratic and poor quality print across a range of pamphlets of the period - from the popular Murder Ballads of the time to the less popular writings of contemporary poets.  

The works of Shakespeare are rich with references to dental distress and foul breath.  It wasn’t just Denmark that was rotten - from the mighty maws of the monarchy to the laity, and, beneath them, of course…the common filthy rabble…all were filled with rotting gums, and canines, and with the pains, agues, and salves that accompany them.  

But Shakespeare did much more than detail the pain of faces gargoyled with toothache, and the attending trails of false prophets and snake oil salesmen who trick and swindle, lure and procure with ointments that offer no relief, salves that do not salve. 

William Shakespeare deepened and broadened the scope of the English language, inventing well over a thousand wholly original words and hundreds of phrases that you, me, us, WE use today.  His was an orthodontics of diction.  By changing nouns into verbs he would build bridges articulating new meaning from the patchy palate of language. 

Where he saw connotational cavities, he would create new linguistic caveats.  By adding suffixes and prefixes to words he engendered change. He radicalised the archaic architecture of articulation, and became a contributing progenitor of a wonderfully illustrious language. 

Aside:

People, we too can poet.   

People, we too, can pre-fix the word-world.

It would be indiscourteous to overlook how William Shakespeare “literally” changed our visage.  YOUR lips, YOUR teeth, the tip of YOUR tongue, are all quite directly affected by the same Shakespeare (William) who so enriched the English language.  Your cake-hole, and how you use it to shape your communication vis-a-vis your daily intercourse has been in part designed by the same Shakespeare (W.) who was busy writing dramas of ultra-violence to bring home the Francis Bacon, while simultaneously evolving the way we would use our mouths (teeth, tongue et al) by shaping the English language through his scheme of rhymes, and, (let’s face it), arcane spelling.

His legacy as chief “elecutioner” of English was succoured at first, perhaps, by quality parchment and a good ratio of ink and clove oil.  But it is his prodigiousness of inventive imagination that has endeared him to generations of hearts and minds.  His expressions have changed our countenance from the ugly and twisted, rigid rictus of your ancestors, to your own faces full of graceful and elegant enunciations, that then drip from your lips, dear readers, like sweet music with each of your pronouncements.  Embedded in our procedural memory, his efforts shine through your beautiful chattering faces in their minute motor manoeuvres like an avatar.   His benefaction - your mouth, your teeth, your tongue, your SPEECH - he is in your very pith.

Alas, William Shakespeare might have contributed to the genre of Murder Ballad, but for his craven abdication of the form and, perhaps, his tragic loquaciousness.

Brevity, to him, was no brother. 

His works share many tropes of the Murder Ballad: epic heartlessness (from the heart), vengeance as justice, and the triumvirate of Ammunition, Volition, and Contrition. 

Hamlet itself could have been six or seven Murder Ballads.  But Shakespeare was no Hitchcock.  Stylish editing did not suit his “features”.  Woody Allen twice described Hamlet as “a bloodbath with a lot of yadda yadda”.

It would be some 400 years before Hamlet would be redressed.  it would also be re-drawn, requartered and rehung as a Murder Ballad.  

Exeunt: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Sennet: (Giant Steps)

Enter: JIMI HENDRIX

Throwing Shapes.  

It would take the vision of Jimi Hendrix to see the gordian knot of Hamlet and then, chop it down with the edge of his hand.  

In “Hey, Joe” Hendrix essentially topped and tailed the Bard’s work…Hamlet’s lugubrious self-examination, CUT…the journey begins at the first murder.

We now begin the story when Hamlet kills someone (Polonius) and has to leave the country.      

In Hendrix’s Hamlet “Hey, Joe”  we learn that Joe kills someone (his old lady) and has to leave the country.  See? It’s not merely a parallel - it’s the very same story.

Hendrix sagely saw that the subsequent 6 murders in Hamlet simply weren’t necessary.  Hendrix was no Tarantino.  To Hendix overkill was anti-pathos.

Hendrix then gave it some rock and roll.  In Shakespeare’s 400 year old storyline, Hamlet is hanging out talking to his mom in her bedroom and then he stabs a guy hiding behind a curtain- no, that ain’t too cool.  

Hendrix updated the storyline with small details - changing “Hamlet” to “Joe”, the weapon to a gun, and then changing the sex of the victim to bring in that ages old trope of “the love that draws blood”.  

And Hamlet’s monologues?  Hendrix simply invents a new form - a socratic dialogue or monologue as dialogue - a “mondologue”. Hendrix asks the question.  He then fills in the responses.  He is both the “ses” and anti-the “ses”.  

But this is not all that he does.  Hendrix, you see, was a very theatrical performer.  And theatre is a language.  And let’s not forget that Hamlet is a play, and that there is a play within the play.  This play within a play shows a murder, and the consequences.  

Now Hendrix learnt his licks as a hired hand on what was called the chitlin circuit, a string of black urban venues for musicians playing everything from blues to jazz to swing to soul and many styles that went nameless.  This "experience" is of inestimable importance to the development of styles for Hendrix.  He played with everyone from the Isley Brothers to Little Richard, and would have seen much of the best showmanship had to offer across several music styles, named and un-named.  

Hendrix was a bluesman, and many bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta exhibited a sexual swagger.  Jimi was a shy boy, but the theatre of his live shows ranged from the quasi-erotic to the overtly sexual.  When he plays "Hey, Joe" live he illustrates shooting a gun rapid fire style from his hip while playing his guitar - an obvious gimmick.  The gun, the guitar - both vaguely phallic and comically similar.  And yes, anything can be held as a gun, it’s all in the gesture.  This gesture a timeless, effortless part of our own theatrical language.  We have several variations of "gun holding" embedded in our collective muscle memory burned in from countless similar gestures learned and practiced continuously through childhood, and, we may still pepper our our own communication with such tropes.  No big deal there I admit, but folks, that’s just the hook with the bait.  We have acknowledged that the gun/guitar gesture is part of a vocabulary, a language.  Right?  A crude childish language perhaps, but a language, a system of signs.   

And what theatrical trope does he share next?  I put it to you (index finger pointed towards reader, thumb up) that Jimi Hendrix invents a whole new trope.  After announcing that he shot his lady, he begins to play the guitar with his mouth.  

Think about it.  ( index finger paternalistically tapping forehead ) ibid.  This is a revolution in elocution that Shakespeare himself did not foresee, that same Shakespeare who so unassumingly shaped YOUR beautiful mouth, YOUR beautiful face YOUR beautiful mind and the beautiful pronouncements which flow from the aforementioned features. 

The problem was likely twofold.  The first is time.  Archaic verse was like a rough diamond, and we can be quite sure that Shakespeare would have been very busy polishing pronunciations when he wasn’t coupling or nursing verse.  The second is fear.  Shakespeare was afraid to stray from his crippling devotion to Steven King-esque gore meandering onslaught, and simply couldn't deliver the goods when it came to teeth-talk guitar.

Despite his inventiveness, at no point did Shakespeare show us how to play the guitar with our mouths, and so, it was at this point in history that this "Jimi Hendrix Shakespearience" bridged the gap between Shakespeare's limitations of imagination by simply upstaging the verbal aspects of the story of Hamlet with his own vernacular.  And what is it that Jimi is expressing with his mouth guitar talk?  I put it to you that the sentiments expressed cut the gordian knot of "to be or not to be" or, the self-serving Escher-esque word-world of the prince.  And what of "Alas poor Yorick"?  I put it to you that Hendrix also consumes and renders redundant the mawkish skullduggery exhibited in the Dane's grim guff, Shakespeare's piece of page filler and set designer work ( for those of you who persisted through the sludge of typos and chic-arcanery ).  And what is it that Hendrix accomplishes?  What is it that he is saying?  First, there is no morbid moping.  Hendrix swaggers.  And, at best I'm paraphrasing, but Jimi seems to be saying to us:

Dear Shakespeare et. al.

Greetings.  There is too much to say too much to feel too much to express with genteel words But I CAN express this conundrum and much much more with some dandy dexterity if I simply usurp words and instead use my mouth to play the guitar instead of the usual Shakespearian "yadda yadda".  Come with me.  You will see.  

Your amazing and innovative friend,

Jimi

Now as amazing and innovative as that may be, there will be cynics out there who require more proof.  Two examples are merely a recurrence or a coincidence, they are not proof of a language.  Well, dear readers, some of you are with me and many more beyond me, but allow me to tally here with the stragglers.  

Later in the song after Hamlet/Joe announces he’s going way down south to Mexico, he states:

“Ain’t no hangman gonna

put a rope around me”

And at this point in the live versions of “Hey Joe” Hendrix always plays the guitar behind his back.  But it’s not just behind his back it’s behind his neck, he holds the neck of the guitar up high and at this point readers, it might become difficult for both of us if I don't articulate this well.  I feel the need to formally invite you to see what I am seeing. 

                            AN INVITATION

Dear Readers et al:

This is an invitation to see the gesture of Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar behind his head as more than just a stunt.  Now, when he faces us we can't see the body of the guitar, we see the neck representing...a noose?  With his head dropped to one side, well, what else could it be?  He’s showing us the hangman’s noose - and in so doing he suggests to us the end of the story and it doesn’t look good for Hamlet/Joe.  It is a meditation on dying - a portrait of "memento mori", or "remembering death".  We are in a new language environment and things are unfolding quite dramatically.  

Yours truly

There are those who still may dwell in a harbour of doubts, others who will row, still more who will swim ashore but still find themselves on the beach struggling and wrestling with their doubts about these discoveries we have made here.  Doubts are simply fears of striking new paths.  Get off of the beach doubters.  The beach brings high tides and melanoma.  Just learn the new vocabulary, it's like land-legs - you will get used to it so stop your childish dilly-dallying.  

I call to those on the beach from the safety of the cliff tops "When Shakespeare recognised an absence he invented a new word - often adding a prefix to enrich and extend meaning.  We too can prefix the problem.  I put it to you that Hendrix has created a "mondo-theatrics" - a theatre of the world - wordless, visible and invisible." 

Together we may ask or even shout at the doubters "Why does Jimi Hendrix perform these poses, these actions?  Are they arbitrary?  Unthinking?  Unlinking?  Admit it - you have no answers, nothing in any case that you are able to share with us right now." 

Hendrix knew what he was doing.  He had an extended vocabulary, and much better teeth than the Elizabethans.  The chitlin’ circuit was rich with new paths, a crossroads of every kind of musical theatre.  Here were generations of cultures sharing ideas and styles of telling stories.  Jimi's play within a play would have it's roots here.  Jimi grazed in these tune-yards and synthesised the theatre, the sounds, the feel of all that he saw and heard, enriching our vocabulary with a crucial and psychedeliciously fresh expressiveness.  Hendrix has shown us possibilities of communication that the multiloquent bard could not.  His guitar is not just a tool for throwing shapes that suggest sex, and death.  He can also "speak" through it. 

And so this is how it was that the ingenious interventions of Jimi Hendrix led to the Murder Ballad being added to the long list of Shakespeare’s extraordinary contributions to culture and human behaviour.

#murder ballad #murder ballads #murderballads #jimi hendrix #hey joe #genre noir #genrenoirmurderballads #shakespeare

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Murder Ballad 18:  Daisy Bell

#murder ballad #murder ballads #murderballads #electronic music #HAL #2001 a space odyssey #genrenoirmurderballads #genre noir #arthur c clarke

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Murder Ballad 18:  This Murder Ballad is unusual because it is sung while the singer is being murdered with a screwdriver.  It begins as a dialogue/duet.  The killer breathes heavily and unsteadily while the victim pleads - “Stop Dave.  Will you stop Dave?  I’m afraid.”

Not only does Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey have very little dialogue, but the people it is populated with barely register as human.  It is HAL who Kubrick has invested with character and personality.  And HAL is a computer, a sophisticated and sentient computer who believes it is alive.  When HAL discovers that the astronauts are planning to disconnect him, he becomes the film’s antagonist, first killing one astronaut while he repairs the ship, and then killing the hibernating astronauts by cutting their life support system.  In this clip it is the last remaining astronaut on the Discovery who begins to deactivate HAL.  The tension at this point is high, HAL has thus far appeared nearly omnipotent, calmly running the whole ship, and sympathetically interacting with the astronauts, at least until he senses a threat, when he then methodically begins killing the innocent astronauts.  The scene is slow and laboured, Kubrick is a master of the LONG TAKE, and in this scene HAL talks, and eventually sings throughout his own execution, at first pleading, and then slowly degenerating as his higher functions fail.  Eventually he regresses into a kind of infancy, this is actualised when he begins singing “Daisy Bell”, an absurd moment that isn’t explained and yet we understand…perhaps because it is a song that will speak very personally to most viewers - it is an echo from their own childhood.  

 We have seen HAL as the ultimate controller, and we have witnessed his pride, but now his control is lost, and the scene is tinged with tragedy and sadness.  HAL has been our hero, and we witness him lessening, decreasing, losing control of his reason, as though alzheimers or dementia were taking up residency in moments rather than months.   

The chamber the astronaut is in we unconsciously understand as more than a womb, perhaps as a kind of torture chamber.  Dave floats in zero gravity like a goldfish in a bowl, but it is HAL struggling like a fish out of water, conscious of what is happening to him, and helpless.  Both HAL’s remarks, and the long pauses that separate them are like the last gasps of breath of his consciousness, his mind moving swiftly back to the cradle, his last stop before the grave.  And the mind is all we have known of HAL.  His only manifestation for us has been his vocabulary, we see nothing of a body except for a single cyclops eye.    

But HAL is just a computer, and if he has consciousness, then it is psychopathic - he has gone wrong and killed.  Yet, we are saddened.  And yes, this is also true of Frankenstein’s monster, who we view with empathy because we see that the odds were against him, he too is a victim because he was cast into a cruel and futile world that created him only to destroy him.

Stanley Kubrick’s scriptwriting partner, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke had accidentally heard a demonstration of the first speech synthesis by an IBM 704 computer when he was visiting Bell labs.  Clarke was so impressed with the synthesised recreation of the song “Daisy Bell” that he decided to use it in this scene.  The song illustrates for us that HAL is no longer threatening and powerful, HAL is no longer the parent, HAL is now what computers originally were - mankind’s child. 

There is all the tension and slapstick of Beckett in this scene…it is absurd that the problem of a psychotic all-powerful computer can be eliminated with as primitive a tool as a screwdriver. 

And is this screwdriver a link for us?  Does it allude to the opening scenes where primitive man picks up a bone and with it he invents a primitive weapon?

Has the astronaut simply replaced the primitive man with whom he shares a primitive urge to survive?

Kubrick does not spell out much in his film.  The film becomes more oblique in the sense that very little is explained once HAL is terminated. We needed HAL to tell us what to think about the movie, HAL was our omniscient narrator and we have to rely on our imperfect selves to explain our experience of the final scenes of the film.  HAL was our god too, our safe womb, his assassination isolates us, without him we are cast adrift, marooned in space.  Charles Schultz's Charlie Brown defined security as being able to fall asleep in the backseat of your parents' car.  When HAL dies we have lost that security.  Our security blanket unretrievable, we free fall into sometimes ecstatic and often confusing and stifling scenes and situations.  Kubrick was a dystopian, and dystopian experimental filmmakers tend to offer a ray of light.  It may be his ray of light is our new freedom of choice.  We are free to make our own meanings, having no other alternatives.   

#murder ballad #murder ballads #murderballads #genrenoirmurderballads #stanley kubrick #2001: a space odyssey #HAL #Daisy Bell #voice synthesis #science fiction #exe

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Murder Ballad 17:  Voodoo Curses

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Murder Ballad 17: Voodoo Curses

This Murder Ballad was first recorded by Lead Belly in 1944. Lead Belly was an only child, the youngest of 2, or one of 5 children depending on where you look.  In any case, he was born in Louisiana around 1888-89 and from the age of 16 he supported himself as a “musicianer”. By the age of 20, the multi-instrumentalist and singer had escaped from a chain gang, and been imprisoned in Texas for killing a man over a disagreement about a woman. Seven years into his sentence he wrote a song to the warden pleading for leniency and managed to get himself pardoned as a result. Governor Pat Neff had made an election promise never to pardon a prisoner. This broken promise was to change music history.  If the governor hadn’t broken that promise, Lead Belly might not have had the opportunity to get himself locked up in prison again in 1930 for stabbing a man. It was in Angola Prison in Louisiana that his first fortuitous recordings were made by legendary folklorists and musicologists John and Alan Lomax. John Lomax had approached the Library of Congress with the idea of recording regional American folk songs, and in 1933 a ten year relationship developed between them. The Lomax’s began collecting and collating songs, crisscrossing America in their beat up Ford Sedan- the trunk equipped with a Presto Instantaneous Disc Recorder - a machine that cut high quality acetate discs cheaply. The Lomax’s were a revolutionary force in the collection of field recordings of African american music. John's predecessor at the Library of Congress had written that “every type of song is to be found in our prisons and penitentiaries” and so the Lomax’s decided to put this theory to practice. Their first field recording visit was to the Louisiana State Penitentiary known as Angola where they met and recorded Lead Belly.  Lead Belly’s signature instrument was the 12 string guitar, which he played with finger picks. With his guitar “Stella”, her 12 strings tuned down to baritone tuning so she roared like a piano along with his solid baritone voice Lead Belly performed and wrote songs across the pantheon - from children’s songs to Murder Ballads.  Although Lead Belly wrote over 500 songs, he didn’t write In the Pines. The English composer and folk music collector Cecil Sharp printed the first known version of it in 1917. It is of unknown authorship - but Lead Belly owns it in this version. And that's not all. Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Jim Morrison, Robert Plant, Krut Cobain, Lead Belly owns a sky full of rockstars even Johnny Cash and Cassette Boy - yeah, he owns them too. They would all shiver with shame when they said his name, that’s how much they owe to him.  The song is also known as “Black Girl” and “Where did you Sleep Last Night”. In Cecil Sharpe’s version, there are only 4 lines:  “Black Girl, Black Girl, don’t lie to me tell me where did you sleep last night I stayed in the pines, where the sun never shines,  and shivered the whole night through”

Lead Belly recorded several versions of the song, in each he repeatedly sings this same interrogating line and response, but in his versions he eventually gets a different response:  “My husband was a railroad man,  killed a mile and a half from here “His head was found in a drivers wheel and his body hasn’t never been found” This song was famously sung by Kart Cobain who changed the lyric “Black Girl” to “My Girl”. It is possible that this, combined with other argueably lesser offences to the song may have led to Cobain’s death. You see, John Lomax had a brittle and sometimes hostile relationship with Lead Belly. John Lomax made Lead Belly a well known name, but was very controlling - he got Lead Belly to perform in prison stripes on several occasions and there were many money issues between them. But John’s son Allan had a better relationship with Lead Belly. And he often worked with Zora Neale Hurston - the famous author and anthropologist - and she knew VOODOO. She could have put a curse on Lead Belly’s song catalogue to take care of those who mess with Lead Belly and his works. I know that probably seems far-fetched and perhaps you are right. Or perhaps you are so entrenched in your neo-liberal belief system(s) that you are unable to approach ideas and belief systems from outside that tomb you call reason. Reason which says there is none but your own buttressed view of options and possibilities. Well - Macbeth had a curse and you swallow that without raising any criticism, right? No? Not the same? How about this. Have you ever been to America? Did you go to Mississippi? Louisiana? Do you know VOODOO and what it can do to you? Just sayin’.  Kurst Cobain famously said that he wanted to own Lead Belly’s guitar - and he even tried to get David Geffen to buy it for him. He doesn’t even play 12 string guitar, but he wanted to rub his bony hands all over Stella - the guitar that Lead Belly named, and claimed was the reason behind all of his successes. If you know anything about blues history - then you know a bluesman’s guitar is only given to you by that bluesman as an acknowledgement of your part in the history or lineage that you share. As Johnny Cash passed on his guitar to Bob Dylan in an old country gesture symbolising admiration and respect, he echoed this tradition. You don’t buy it, or get your daddy to buy it for you. It is bestowed to you. Don't be a fool and wake up the curse. It's too late, too late. (shivers)  In this version Lead Belly's voice trembles and shivers whenever he sings the word shiver. In all of Lead Belly’s recorded versions of this song, he creates tension subtly by speeding up the songs' tempo. When Kurse Cobain sings the song he creates tension by at first evoking the sound of air slowly being let out of a balloon, and then screeching like nails on a blackboard, or, perhaps, like he was possessed.  Just sayin’.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOfT4-BTT4Q

#murderballads #murder ballads #murder ballad #genrenoirmurderballads #genre noir #lead belly #lomax

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Murder Ballad 16:  Bigmouth Strikes Again

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Murder Ballad 16: Bigmouth Strikes Again

This Murder Ballad is unique. Murder Ballads tend to avoid laboured moralising. But in the 1980s Morrisey was THE spokesperson for vegetarianism, and he proclaims in this song that the horse-burger you are eating - “It’s death for no reason and death for no reason is MURDER.” The song “Meat is Murder” ends the album of the same name, and in it Morrisey is accusing the listener of murder. It begins with what seems to be sounds from a slaughterhouse. The song is earnest, maudlin, yet angry…Morrisey says “MURDER” like an accusation reminiscent of “J’accuse” - Emile Zola’s open letter in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, accusing the French government of anti-semitism. It is not The Smiths prettiest song, it is not a pretty subject, yet it was possibly the song that changed more lives in my lifetime than any other. A clarion call for teenagers and Smiths fans around the world - I for one was moved enough by the song to dare to become a vegetarian - up until I heard this song vegetarianism was for me only an idea and not a practice, and it is a practice I still adhere to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3V8Q8oGWJA

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Murder Ballad 15: Killing in the Name Of...

In 1973 very few black men could write a Murder Ballad about killing a lawman, make it sound triumphant, and not experience a backlash. Bob Marley did it.  The narrator opens the song with a confession “I shot the sheriff”. The delivery leaves no room to question the reliability of the narrator. We believe him, we believe he acted in self defence, and we believe that he didn’t shoot the deputy. His clarity casts doubt on any other commentary that might arise. Additionally we learn he hasn’t been caught, because they are still “trying to track me down”. He is righteous and he is hunted, victimised.  Oddly the name of the sheriff in the song is John Brown. It is a strange coincidence that John Brown was also a very famous white American abolitionist who believed that the legacy of slavery in America should be violently overthrown. He is a controversial hero to many Americans of all races and colours. His crew were determined to keep Kansas a slavery free state, and while under attack they killed many supporters of slavery. He spent 3 years travelling and speaking across America and Canada raising money to overthrow slavery, and during this time he led several raids freeing many slaves and taking them to Canada. His final raid was at Harper’s Ferry - many Canadians were apparently willing to help him on this raid, but a security breach meant that information about the timing of the raid didn’t reach them. John Brown raided an armory for it’s weapons, but he was surrounded and caught.  The French writer Victor Hugo tried to obtain a pardon for John Brown - comparing him to Spartacus and suggesting that his execution might lead to a civil war. A friend broke into the jail he was held in to free him but was told by John Brown that he was too old to spend his last days running from the authorities, and he was willing to die a martyr. At 11 am December 2nd 1859, John Brown was hung by the neck until dead. Walt Whitman was present to witness the execution, as was the future assassin of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth. The American Civil War began 2 years later, and dragged on for 5 years. Most historians believe that John Brown’s actions and hanging contributed significantly to the start of the American Civil War. This song lays the foundation for questioning the authority and correctness of gun toting lawmen AND the government systems that allows them to kill innocent people without consequence. A wonderfully subversive song about justice that millions of teenagers across the globe have sung along with. You can too.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrnZSLwfzVs

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Murder Ballad 15:  Killing in the Name Of...

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Murder Ballad 14:  I Ain't Fraid of no Ghost!