My old friend Abe Chappelle once wrote a song, probably inspired by the bluegrass and country music we grew up with in Oklahoma, called “Pieces of You.” The chorus goes, “Now you’re dead, and I guess I miss you, but not as much when I’m with my new girlfriend.” He explained to me then, “When you love someone so much and that person breaks up with you, you have to pretend she or he is dead just so you can go on living.”
In the same vein, another close friend of mine in high school, a metal-loving skater boy who had been a victim of many violent crimes in his life, explained that he wrote poems about killing people, not because he wanted them dead as much as it helped him deal with his frustrations in a non-violent way. Instead of, say, punching his hand through a door.
The Starry Plough‘s annual Murder Ballad Bash, held for nine years now, explores that shadow that everyone has, but keeps hidden in polite company. In the ghoulish spirit of Halloween, songwriters of all stripes let their inner monsters out through “murder ballads and songs of misery and despair.”
“Those songs come from thinking about that element of the human condition, where people have a very dark side,” says Valerie Esway, the event’s hostess. “Or thinking about a person who’s so passionate about an unrequited love, they can’t live without them. Sometimes it’s inspired by some story you might have heard in passing on the news, or a movie.”
For all the outrage over rock’n’roll and gangtsa rap, in the past 20 years, you’d think that violence in music is a new phenomenon. But long before Eminem wrote “Kim” or “Stan,” long before Marilyn Manson became a scapegoat, long before Tipper Gore formed the Parents Music Resource Center, people were singing sordid tales of murder.
