Case Study #19: The Case of a Nation Deaf to What It’s Singing About

1. “Frankie and Johnny,” 1912, recorded by Gene Greene, in the first known recording of a popular American murder ballad that likely traced back to a real murder in St. Louis in 1899[1]

2. “Stack O’Lee Blues,” 1928, recorded by Mississippi John Hurt, the definitive earliest version of another popular American murder ballad dating back to at least the 1890s (and recorded first as an instrumental in 1923 by Waring’s Pennsylvanians and then, in the first recording with lyrics, in 1924 by Lovie Austin as “Skeeg-a-Lee Blues,” though her version’s narrative has nothing to do with the others, beyond the title and the theme of quarreling lovers[2] — interestingly, in 1925 Ma Rainey, with Louis Armstrong on cornet, recorded a version of “Stack O’Lee Blues” based on the melody and words of “Frankie and Johnny”)[3]

3. “Folsom Prison Blues,” 1955, written and recorded by Johnny Cash (based on material composed by Gordon Jenkins), originally released as a standalone single[4]

4. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” 1966, recorded by Cher and written by her husband Sonny Bono, from her album “The Sonny Side of Cher”[5]

5. “I Don’t Like Mondays,” 1979, written by Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers for their band the Boomtown Rats, from their album “The Fine Art of Surfacing”[6]

6. “Add It Up,” 1983, written by Gordon Gano for his band Violent Femmes, from their self-titled debut album[7]

7. “Jeremy,” 1992, written by Eddie Vedder and Jeff Ament for their band Pearl Jam, from their album “Ten”[8]

8. “American Skin (41 Shots),” 2001, written by Bruce Springsteen, originally released as a single from the Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band “Live in New York City” album[9]

9. “Don’t Shoot Me, Santa,” 2007, written by Brandon Flowers, Dave Keuning, Mark Stoermer, and Ronnie Vannucci, Jr., for their band The Killers[10], originally released as a charity single[11]

10. “Pumped Up Kicks,” 2010,” written by Mark Foster for his band Foster the People, from their self-titled first EP[12]

The other week when I was listening to the discussion about the new Ari Aster film “Eddington” on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast[13], I was intrigued when one of the panelists mentioned this is the first major work of art to deal with the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic directly, because that has been a point I have been making myself for the last five years: Why has our collective processing of this massively disruptive, historic event been so absent from all mediums of popular art and culture?

But, of course, the word historic there is confusing (and, in this case, I only meant having few precedents), since the pandemic isn’t over. (Just last week, a 30 year old, previous coworker of mine got Covid at a wedding). For sure, unfortunately, most of society has too quickly snapped back to the pre-pandemic status quo — but maybe under that, there has still been a subconscious sense that it’s an ongoing issue and thus is too formless and unwieldy to be properly processed through art.

After all, soon after 9/11 — a finite collective trauma — we did get a spattering of art about it (e.g., the 2002 Bruce Springsteen album “The Rising”; the 2004 Beastie Boys song “An Open Letter to NYC” with the lyrics “Since 9/11, we’re still livin’/And lovin’, life we’ve been given” and “Dear New York, I know a lot has changed/2 towers down, but you’re still in the game”[14]; the 2005 Jonathan Safran Foer novel “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”; the 2006 Nicholas Cage movie “World Trade Center”; the 2007 Don DeLillo novel “Falling Man”; and, of course, many tv shows and films about the resulting war on terror). So I began to conclude that that’s what it takes for the artistic processing floodgates to open: a clear dividing line, past which we can look back and assess the impacts of what we went through without the murkiness of still being immersed in it all.

But then an example from the other side of the coin popped into my head and blew me away (no pun intended): the epidemic of gun violence in America is not only a collective trauma that hasn’t wrapped up, but it’s also one of the oldest and most enduring blights on our country’s soul — yet it’s inspired a veritable cornucopia of artistic responses, especially in the medium of popular songs.

Certainly, our films and tv shows and even occasionally stage plays depict gun violence with the kind of humdrum regularity otherwise reserved for scenes of people spooning food into their mouths — but those mediums by nature are such a mishmash of narrative threads and buckets of significance that the topicality of the gun elements often gets lost in the noise. Songs, on the other hand, have such precision that when their subject matter includes gun violence (or potential gun violence), they stand out like stalagmites poking up across the long floor of popular music history.

Now, despite having only been a nation for just under 250 years, the United States of America right away became a white hot crucible for turning disparate cultural trends and tropes and styles of communication from all over the world into the steel needed to make music so popular even the oddest songs and genres pinned down the palates of tastemakers beyond our shores — and this is especially evident in how we took the centuries-old folk tradition of the murder ballad and made it our own; then, with the common possession and usage of revolvers from the 19th century forward, furthermore honed it down into a pointed projectile striking popular music listeners with lyrics about the fatal impacts of guns in society with such regularity that it’s hard not to nod toward the metaphor here of a people becoming inured, over time, to a real world hail of bullets outside and inside their homes.

From the many incarnations of “Frankie and Johnny” and “Stack O’Lee Blues” (AKA “Stagger Lee”) and all their 19th to 20th century crossover ilk to “Folsom Prison Blues” (in which Johnny Cash’s narrator tells us he “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”)[15] to “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” and on and on — it just seemed more and more that gun homicide, often in the context of domestic violence, related in a blasé manner, was becoming such a staple of the airways that subject matter wise it might be a not-too-distant second to the behemoth of love itself.

Then, almost audaciously, this genre of the gun song grew more expansive (and I’m not even talking about popular oddities like the 1968 Beatles song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”), when, in 1979, the Boomtown Rats struck a surprise hit with “I Don’t Like Mondays.” Sure, they were actually an Irish band, but singer-songwriter Bob Geldof and his bandmate Johnnie Fingers wrote it after Geldof read a news release that came into a Georgia radio station where he was being interviewed that detailed a deadly shooting that happened at an elementary school in San Diego, California[16]. It was as if the muse reached him through the news to encapsulate in a catchy few minute tune the malady that cinched this entire country from coast to coast like a tapeworm strangling its host from the inside. And, while it surely seemed like a novelty song at the time, “I Don’t Like Mondays” turned out to be just the first in a decades-spanning pattern of this school shooting song genre.

In 1992, Pearl Jam reached number 5 on both the Album and Modern Rock charts[17] with “Jeremy,” the third single off their debut album “Ten,” which took inspiration from two different real life school shootings: a 15 year-old boy who shot himself in front of his teacher and his English class in Texas in 1991 and another boy singer-songwriter Eddie Vedder knew in junior high school in San Diego who shot up his oceanography classroom[18]. Once again, at the time, it was probably just thought to be a fluke or, at most, simply another great song riding on the coattails of the album’s first two hit singles, “Alive” and “Even Flow.” But, not long before this on 1986’s “The Boy in the Bubble,” Paul Simon sang, “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts”[19] — and I would paraphrase that to say: “Every generation needs a new school shooting anthem, to underline anew the self-destructive status quo in our country.”

Thus, it was that in 2010, “Pumped Up Kicks,” the debut single by Foster the People, hit number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States and stayed there for eight consecutive weeks[20]. It’s very telling that the second part of the band’s name, after the singer-songwriter’s last name, points toward exactly who’s been responsible all along for this trend I’m talking about: it’s the people who have been glomming onto these songs and elevating them above other listening options at the time. Sure, once again, the song in question was catchy (after all Mark Foster wrote it in between working as a commercial jingle writer)[21], but, even if listeners didn’t fully grok what it was about the first time around, they’d definitely know the chorus “You better run, better run, outrun my gun” by the second time around. Just as the references and echoes in the first two songs in this pattern multiplied (TWO real world school shootings at San Diego schools documented in two different songs!), here things fracture again — like the jagged cracks in a supposedly safe window shot by a bullet. When he wrote “Pumped Up Kicks,” Mark Foster was not thinking of a specific news story, just of the frail mental health of contemporary teens in general. HOWEVER, in an uncanny coincidence, Cubby Fink, the bassist for Foster the People, is cousins with a survivor of the most notorious school shooting in U.S. history: the Columbine massacre. She was able to survive by hiding in the library while shots and screams rang out — and the next day, Fink flew out to Colorado to comfort her as her lifetime of trauma was just beginning[22]. And I’d say isn’t that the case for all of us, our country as a whole, that the problem is that overall our collective trauma over gun deaths is perpetually just beginning — except that I actually think that, unfortunately, it’s much worse than that.

Look at these 10 songs on this topic I’ve highlighted at the top — which, of course, I’m sure you’re already adding to in your mind. (If you’re wondering why “Add It Up” by the Violent Femmes is there, it’s because of the part in the song where the proto-incel main character fantasizes about himself in the third person: “So mo-my-mama, mama-mo-my-mum/Take a look now, look what your boy has done/He’s walking around like he’s number one/Cause he went downtown and he got him a gun” — then Gordon Gano switches perspective: “So don’t shoot, shoot, shoot that thing at me/Don’t shoot, shoot, shoot that thing at me/You know you got my sympathy”)[23]. Of all of these, “American Skin (41 Shots)” by Bruce Springsteen (about the 1999 killing of Guinean student Amadou Diallo in New York City as he was reaching for his wallet by four police officers who mistook him for a suspected rapist)[24] is the only song that takes a solemn, condemning tone toward a chronicle of fatal gunfire. It’s the exception that proves the rule — a rule that, of course, the very prolific songwriter Springsteen himself has upheld in many other songs, such as the title song to his 1982 album “Nebraska,” about the 1958 Charles Starkweather/Caril Ann Fugate murder spree (as filtered through the 1973 Terrence Malick film “Badlands” interpreting those events, which Springsteen caught on tv)[25]. The rule being that in America — just as is the case with the mercurial tone of most of these songs — our actual attitude toward gun violence is one of ambiguity and ambivalence.

I would even venture to say that we’ve been looking through the wrong end of the telescope entirely on this topic. I think the reason why art and culture — such as all these songs — have matched each era of our country with all their nonstop, overlapping gun tragedies, even though that trauma isn’t wrapped up and in the rear view mirror yet, is simply because as a society we really don’t view it AS trauma, in any individual case or collectively as two and a half centuries of unnecessary gun deaths.

Many of these songs (through no bad intent of their authors) contain veins of gloating, of glorifying, of pride and contempt, and it’s that empathy for the worst inclinations in all of us that is the blood that runs shamelessly through these veins that we Americans share too.

[1] https://beforethebigbang.com/tracklist/track-77/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTDznrGGRd8

[3] https://www.staggerlee.com/history/1921-1930.php

[4] https://folsomcasharttrail.com/the-trail/blog/the-real-story-behind-johnny-cash-folsom-prison-blues

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang_Bang_(My_Baby_Shot_Me_Down)#/media/File:Cher_Bang_Bang_cover_7_inch.png

[6] https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/geldof-and-fingers-reach-settlement-over-i-don-t-like-mondays-1.3772052

[7] https://lifeoftherecord.com/violent-femmes-notes

[8] https://genius.com/Pearl-jam-jeremy-lyrics

[9] https://www.songfacts.com/facts/bruce-springsteen/american-skin-41-shots

[10] https://genius.com/The-killers-dont-shoot-me-santa-lyrics

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Waste_Your_Wishes

[12] https://genius.com/Foster-the-people-pumped-up-kicks-lyrics