I really want to know – and I am being completely serious here, this is not a rhetorical question – do you know anyone whose faith was changed or otherwise influenced by unsolicited religious cartoons? Because it’s hard for me to fill in the dots between this interesting piece of mail we got during the summer and sincere religious awakening.
Behold these offerings from gospelpostcards.com, sent so that they might give us “the courage to trust in Jesus” (and click on each image to see the larger version): An arrogant man smoking a cigar is smugly expecting to get into heaven because his sins were fairly venal. God choinks that notion right out of his head because he hasn’t been saved but drops him back on Earth so he can try again because God’s cool like that. He reads the bible and is now ready to die and go to Heaven.
And that this lunatic piece of mail is laminated better than a Denny’s menu just makes sense. This won’t be biodegrading any time soon, which is a blessing in surprise. Truth like this needs to be preserved at least long enough after the eco-collapse so that the aliens tracking our progress as a species will understand what exactly went wrong.
As I considered these bizarrely flippant cartoons, I was reminded of a piece of my childhood. When I was a little girl, there was a woman on my street who gave out homemade treats for Halloween, like popcorn balls wrapped in wax paper. Because the whole “razors in apples” canard was getting its legs, of course no parent would let their kids eat those treats so eventually very few kids went to her house on Halloween. However, even though she tossed any treats I received from the neighbor, my mother always made me go trick or treat at her house, because in addition to the homemade treats the neighbor also gave out Jack Chick tracts, as well as a nickel or a dime, which I think was meant for kids to give to UNICEF.
If you are unfamiliar with Jack Chick and his tracts, they were small cartoon ‘zines with horribly exaggerated ideas about how evil society is and how doing any small thing – like participating in role playing games, smoking a cigarette, or watching horror movies – can lead directly to a life of absolute depravity and ensure permanent residence in Hell. The official Chick tract site still has tracts you can order to include with candy when innocent children come to your door on Halloween. Even the watered down tracts meant for children are terrifying, so really they are appropriate to give out on Halloween, the scariest of the scary days.
My mother loved those Chick tracts. She was a Christian, with a reasonable level of respect for Christian sects, but she found Chick tracts so hilarious that she made me go to that house even though I felt weird doing it. I was pretty much the only kid on the street who went. In retrospect, I bet it made the lady happy that at least one kid came to her door, and even though she was the sort of woman who gave Chick tracts to children, she still went through the motions of making nice treats. She was just stuck in the 1950s when giving out homemade fudge was acceptable and was blinded to the horror of those tracts because they were cartoons, like that lovable Charlie Brown and his well behaved coterie of friends.
Clearly the evilest baby since Damien.So, telling the “Johnny deeper” story can and will condemn you to hell. Good to know.
My mother cackled over those stupid tracts, absolutely grooving on how lunatic they were. Jenny took a toke and ended up strung out on heroine and a prostitute in under a week, or Johnny smiled too long at the quarterback during homeroom and found himself on the wrong end of a glory hole in a truck stop in Peoria. Of course that’s just an exaggerated paraphrase of the content in such tracts, because I can’t recall exactly what they all said, but I do recall one of the tracts’ content fairly clearly because it just added to my fear of being watched. “This Was Your Life” features a sinner getting mowed down by Death (complete with a scythe) and being taken to heaven where he was forced to watch as his entire life was played out, projected on a wall like a home movie. God had scenes from his life to show him the extraordinary amount of sin he had engaged in since birth. He played with a dragon plush rather than a sweet little doll. He told a dirty story in junior high. He glanced at a pretty woman once. He wondered who was winning the football game while he was supposed to be contemplating the sermon in church. He was summarily cast into Hell, and the tract helpfully gave humans a better path to follow to avoid eternal damnation.
And all of this reminds me of the infamous “Lisa” Chick tract. If you’ve managed to make it this far in life without knowing about “Lisa,” you’re truly blessed. It’s sickeningly awful, but I’ll paraphrase it for you anyway. You see, a little girl named Lisa had the misfortune of belonging to a working mother and alcoholic unemployed child molester father. Because his wife has to work to support the family, Dad feels emasculated and drinks even more and begins to have sex with his very young daughter, Lisa. His neighbor can hear him molesting Lisa through the shared wall of their townhouse and says he won’t tell if he gets a shot at Lisa, too. Then dad has to take Lisa to the doctor, where he learns she has a sexually transmitted disease. The doctor knows the dad is raping Lisa, but instead of calling the police or beating Dad to death with his bare hands, he preaches about Jesus and BOOM! Dad and Mom embrace the word of the Lord and promise Lisa she will no longer be forced to sexually service adults, hurray!
I share all of this because it means I can also share Alice Donut’s take on the Lisa tract in their video, “Lisa’s Father.”
If you need me, I’ll be playing Dungeons and Dragons and smoking a cigarette while watching The Craft.
Continuing on the topic of yesterday’s discussion about murder ballads that deal with femicide or star-crossed lovers, let’s talk about murder ballads that celebrate killers as folk heroes. When I think of murder ballads, one of the first names I think of is “Stagger Lee,” which is based on a genuine crime that took place on the day after Christmas, 1895. Evidently a man named Sheldon “Stack” Lee shot to death a man named William Lyon. The two were friends, but they had a conversation about politics that led to ill-will and culminating with Bill Lyon snatching Lee’s hat from his head and when Lyon refused to give it back, Lee shot him. The number of people who have performed variations on this song are numerous, among them Elvis, The Ventures, and, incredibly, even a disco-country hybrid by Dr. Hook. The adulation of Stagger Lee seems to be based on his general badassery and the fact that the ladies evidently loved him. I’m including Nick Cave’s take on “Stagger Lee” because I won’t have enough time to discuss his Murder Ballads album in the depth it deserves and feel conflicted about it. I really do need to revisit this topic when I’m not doing Oddtober entries and and spend more time down the murder ballads rabbit hole.
Another criminal as folk hero song I immediately thought of is all the variations on “Tom Dooley.” I include it in the folk hero category because even though the titular Tom shot a woman to death, the focus of the song was less on why it is men need to kill women and more on how Tom handled the death sentence he received. The most famous version of “Tom Dooley” is performed by the band Kingston Trio and it never explains why old Tom killed a lady but instead focuses on how it was he would have gotten away with it had a lawman named Grayson not found him and how very sad it was that the “poor boy” Tom was going to meet his end at the gallows. It straddles the line but since the more famous variations really do focus on how unfortunate it was that Tom was going to hang, it seems more folk-hero-ish to me.
Murder ballads in the United States, when not borrowed from the “boy knocks up girl and kills her” tradition from northern Europe that influenced the songs from the old South and the Appalachians, often focus on rogues associated with the western frontier. You can’t shake a stick at all the songs written about Jesse James, variations of which were performed by Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, The Kingston Trio and many others. One of the more famous versions of the folk hero murder ballad considers Jesse James a sort of dogpatch Robin Hood, lauding him for stealing from train barons and giving it to the poor (which is a very interesting way of looking at his crimes), and excoriating Robert Ford as the coward who shot him. Similarly you’d have a hard time pinning down all the versions of murder ballads praising Robin Hood, either mourning his death (generally by bloodletting to cure an illness) or celebrating Robin Hood’s aim as he killed by bow and arrow those sent to put an end to his generous ways.
And all of that is well and good, but the most interesting folk hero murder ballads I found were in the rap and hip hop genres. “97 Bonnie and Clyde” by Eminem is an autobiographical folk hero murder ballad. He is Clyde, his daughter is Bonnie, and is by his side, an innocent witness, as he disposes of his wife’s body. He’s his own hero, invoking the memory of a beloved but fairly awful couple, likening his actions to those of the duo who robbed and killed their way across Texas and Oklahoma, dying in a shoot-out in Louisiana. Bonnie and Clyde show up in a fair number of folk hero murder ballads in bluegrass and country music, as they too had the appearance of being Robin Hood-style thieves whose deaths at the hands of law enforcement was seen as heroes going down in a blaze of glory. One song in particular sung by Merle Haggard insists that some may see Bonnie as a victim of Clyde’s, forced to do what he told her to do, but that she was the real hero in that rampaging duo, rehabilitating her image in a way.
The most puzzling folk hero murder ballads I’ve come across are by a band called SKYND, a two-person effort wherein the band members have somehow remained anonymous. I suspect fourteen-year-old me would have loved this music but in my current incarnation I have questions. SKYND performs original songs named after killers or their victims and it can be hard to pin down what exactly the band wants to convey, especially when the videos are considered alongside the songs themselves. This is music made for the digital age and the videos are the vehicles that first reach listeners so they seem pretty important in sussing out what this band is trying to do.
SKYND performed two very sympathetic songs, “Bianca Devins” and “Elisa Lam,” about two doomed young women, but their songs about serial killers are not as clear to me. For example, the song about Gary Heidnik, a psychopath who kidnapped prostitutes to keep in his basement as sex slaves, is told from Heidnik’s perspective that is also mixed with a bit of third person narration. The song itself is basically a recitation of Heidnik’s terrible crimes with punchy lines like “the dog food looked good enough, good enough to eat,” making light of the kidnap of one victim on Thanksgiving, and that’s all factual – Heidnik fed the women dog food when he wasn’t forcing them into cannibalizing one of their dead basement-mates, and one victim was indeed taken on Thanksgiving. It could be considered an edgy song about a serial killer until you see the video. The video seems to be painting Heidnik as a some sort of playboy, the white, leggy models he kidnapped looking nothing like the poor drug-addicted minorities he preyed on. He dances with the victims, showing them hanging off of his arm like starlets next to male leads, arriving at a movie premiere.
The video itself is unsettling to the point of parody, and I wondered if the singer was mocking Heidnik by showing what might be considered his point of view – a handsome lothario with women clamoring to worship at his feet – but that was not Heidnik’s goal. He wanted sex slaves who could bear his children, and though he felt that he could create a perfect race of mixed-race children (his victims were all women of color), there did not seem to be a religious element to it that justifies showing the women clamoring for their captor. There is something to the idea that Heidnik saw himself as a messianic figure, as he founded a cult that was so loyal that they continued to meet after his arrest (it was a very small cult, around 50 members). The song has lines like “God, He would be amused to see you at my feet,” and “God has a sense of humor,” which leans toward assigning Heidnik a messianic goal, but given all the bizarre choices in the video, I have no idea why the band decided to show his victims as fawning over him.
Heidik’s crimes were actually so horrible that I wonder if that is one of the reasons I have had such a kneejerk reaction to this campy video. He inflicted some of the worst torture imaginable on the women he kidnapped. Heidnik himself was a cretin. Even if SKYND is approaching the song as a parody of the mind of a demented killer, they miss the mark.
Their other videos are similarly head-scratching. I’m all the more uneasy because the people in the comments for these videos seem to understand what SKYND is trying to accomplish yet do not evince any positive emotions for the killers, though the stranger elements of the videos, like Gary Heidnik trying to run human limbs through a blender, cause commenters to praise the loony gore.
Perhaps part of my puzzlement is that I know way too much about some of the people SKYND discusses in their songs, and have known about them in some cases for decades, and immediately can smell bullshit or shallow research into these killers. The lyrics demonstrate a shallow dive, indicating either the worst was tamped down to accommodate a weird hero narrative or were the result of a jaded songwriter who is in on a joke many of us don’t get. But whatever the intention, SKYND’s catalog is mostly looks at socially relevant killers or those who still have online cache, like Jim Jones, the Columbine mass shooting, the suicide whisperer Michelle Carter, Richard Ramirez and more, and are beyond a doubt murder ballads. Some may belong more in the “boy kills girl” category, like the song “Bianca Devins,” but most of the band’s catalogue presents such uneven or odd looks at some foul human beings that I feel comfortable placing the band’s songs in the folk hero murder ballad classification.
Narcocorridos are murder ballads that make more sense to me, and like most gringos, I was unaware of them until Breaking Bad let us know about these songs.
Narcocorridos are songs about Mexican criminals, often cartel members, whose acts of violence and lavish lifestyles fuel folk hero murder ballads about them. The stories of absolutely frightening (mostly) men who distribute drugs, torture and kill their enemies, control the police and live lavish lives are presented in a folk hero manner. Songs praising Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and El Chapo present them as badasses whose lives are enviable, but these songs have also led to the murders of band members who perform these songs. You piss off one cartel boss by praising his enemy, you could very well end up killed yourself. Valentín Elizalde Valencia found this out the hard way. He had written a song that antagonized the Los Zetas cartel and actually received a note during his last performance asking him not to perform the song as a Zetas member was in the audience. Not willing to be controlled, as well as knowing that the note was also a tacit death notice, Valencia played the song twice and met his fate after the show. In fact, the actions Valencia took to play his music and the price he paid are themselves excellent fodder for a murder ballad.
Even more upsetting was the death of Chalino Sanchez. Not as famous as Valentín Elizalde, his story is no less epic and deserving of its own murder ballad. He was killed in 1992 and is considered one of the most influential narcocorrido singers. He too received a note, while on stage, and what it said no one knows, but it’s clear from his body language that it was not a letter wishing him well. Despite this, Sanchez performed his set as usual, and after was shot to death by killers unknown. It was the second time he had been shot that year – his songs clearly rattled some cages – and it is largely believed that narcos killed him.
Frankly I hope a murder ballad has been written to make Sanchez a folk hero. It takes some huevos to read a death threat, choke down the fear, and perform as usual.
There are so many narcocorridos that I have no hope of discussing even a small sampling beyond what I have already presented here, but it is a rabbit hole in and of itself, a reawakening of a story-telling form that began to wane elsewhere in North America in the 1980s because, as a whole, I think society began to find it hard to praise men who killed women because they had sex with them or to avoid marriage, or find much value in such messages. But the hero worship element lends itself better to the modern ear when the murderers are local boys who made good through crime and stayed in power via violence against enemies and law enforcement. They may have been terrible killers but the perception of their roles as badass heroes comes from people who see their narco heroes as people who are self-made and willing to kill corrupt government stooges to remain strong. The notion of the narcos discussed in such songs as heroes is also bolstered by the fact the narco gangs have begun to police themselves, eliminating members who do not abide by certain codes. But like Robin Hood, if you have men in an economically depressed country fighting back against ruthless powers that prefer for the poor to remain poor, the worst and violent narco’s actions can be seen as a blow for the common man. Plus young men really just like to listen to songs about men who do what they want and win at it (until they don’t).
One day I will definitely revisit this topic. I was just looking for some interesting Oddtober topics online and did not expect that a Norah Jones song would lead me down this cavernous rabbit hole that stretches back over 400 years and has spread into numerous musical genres. If you have a favorite murder ballad, share it with me. Your suggestions may well be my next rabbit hole.
Murder ballads. What better time than Oddtober to consider music created to memorialize (or aggrandize) terrible murderers, unfortunate victims or horrible crimes in general. Though these days murder ballads cross into multiple music genres, they are still a popular story-telling vehicle and far more common in contemporary music than I expected when I began looking into them. Specifically, I stumbled across a Norah Jones video for a song called “Miriam” and it caused me to start looking into similarly unexpected songs from fairly anodyne singers and before you knew it, I was down the murder ballad rabbit hole.
Like so many art forms that deal with murder and death, murder ballads are probably Germanic in origin, though such songs were contemporaneous in Scandinavia and the British Isles. Evidently some musicologists and historians disagree, mostly Americans, because when you research murder ballads, you inevitably find arguments between those who feel that murder ballads are a very Appalachian thing and those who feel that murder ballads were a staple of black culture and that whites yet again have taken credit for something they didn’t do. It’s not a theory without merit, as arguments about the origins of jazz and the blues continue to this day even though gadflies have a very hard time justifying their point of view. But it has to be said that neither the Appalachians nor the black communities in North America created murder ballads, though they certainly put their own spin on the traditional songs.
The first known (or at least the first known recorded) murder ballads are “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” or “Matty Groves” from the late seventeenth century, and the “Berkshire Tragedy” from early eighteenth century. The former is a corker of a song, likely from England, telling the story of a young wastrel who goes to church merely to gawk at the pretty ladies and manages to catch the eye of one Lady Barnard, who fancies him and decides to have an affair. When Lord Barnard finds them in bed, he challenges the naked Matty to a duel, killing him but not after being wounded himself. When he returns to his good Lady she tells him she’d rather have the dead commoner as her lover than him and Lord Barnard kills her too. He eventually feels deep remorse for what he did and buries the lovers in the same grave, placing Lady Barnard’s body atop that of Matty, which is more fitting given her noble birth and I think we can all agree makes perfect sense.
“The Berkshire Tragedy,” which some far more learned than I am think is a variation on an earlier song called “The Bloody Miller,” relates the story of a miller who comes across a pretty girl and tells her he will marry her if she sleeps with him. Believing him, the girl sleeps with the miller only to find out he had no intention of marrying her when he begins beating her with a stick. She begs for her life but he cuts her throat from ear to ear (as the story-teller in “Miriam” did to her unfaithful beau, punishing him “from ear to ear”). He dumps her body in the river and when he returns home covered in her blood, he is captured and sentenced to death.
Before he is hanged he hopes his story will prevent any other gross young men from committing rape and then killing their victims, because presumably in the late 1600s, men committing rape by fraud and then murdering the tragic woman was a common enough problem that this song served as a public service announcement of sorts. “This is your brain on drugs, also don’t rape and murder women you promised to marry.”
Murder ballads generally have one of only a few story lines:
–A man defiles a woman in some manner, be it rape or murder or both, and meets a brutal end himself.
–A doomed couple pair up in defiance of marriage or other social constraint, like parental disapproval or class markers, and one or both meet a brutal end at the hands of a jealous spouse or outraged community.
–A paean to rakish or exciting criminals like Robin Hood or stylish highwaymen who often meet a terrible end but are remembered fondly by the common man.
The traditional categories are seen over and over again, with a lot of crossover, and for this first part, I’m going to talk about the “kill loose women” and “doomed lovers” categories. The themes from “The Berkshire Tragedy” and “The Bloody Miller” show up in American murder ballads from the nineteenth century to current day. “The Knoxville Girl” was first released on record in 1925, and was already well-known by then. The song borrows heavily from its source. A man named Willard is courting an unnamed American girl from Tennessee and pressures her to sleep with him. She does, and, eventually, one evening on a romantic walk, Willard brandishes a stick and begins to beat her to death as she pleads for her life.
A version of this song was recorded by The Louvin Brothers in the 1950s in a bluegrass style, and in their version, Willard evidently justifies his actions because he believed she had a “dark and roving eye” that made it impossible for him to marry her.
In short, she slept with him before marriage so she was probably a slut and you can’t turn a ho into a housewife so best to beat her to death and toss her in the river. Don’t worry, though, Willard does go to jail for life. His unnamed victim is almost meaningless in this song, with the focus being on Willard’s desire to be rid of a woman who lacks virtue, and it depends on the listener’s reaction as to whether or not she is being truly villainized in this song, but her lack of a name and that Willard was not executed points in the direction of this song being a cautionary tale for young men who have extramarital sex and then regret it. Best not to sleep with young women or you’ll have to kill them and who has time for that, am I right?
Yeah, I have the jaded eye of a modern woman but it is interesting how seldom these femicide ballads are told from the perspective of the woman on the other end of the beating stick. Still, the element of punishment also helps the modern listener, even if the punishment is seen as little more than the natural end to trusting a loose woman. However, in another murder ballad that is directly based on an actual, verifiable murder, the male aggressor does not receive much sympathy.
I first learned about the story of the 1828 murder of Maria Marten in my early days in the true crime rabbit warren, as well as seeing it mentioned in paranormal books. Maria was an English woman in Suffolk who succumbed to the libidinous charms of one William Corder, a conman and rakish rogue. He was not her first dalliance, as she already had two children born out of wedlock. Maria predictably became pregnant and gave birth to Corder’s child and, you’ll never see this plot twist coming, he agrees to marry her to shut her up. When she pressured him too much he tried to handle the situation in a novel manner – he told Maria they had to leave town quickly and elope because the police were about to arrest Maria for bearing so many children out of wedlock. He spoke of his plan in front of her family, but of course Maria never made it out of Suffolk as Corder took her to a red barn and shot her. He then went on with his life, writing letters claiming he and Maria were happy in London.
However, Maria’s family were uneasy, and her stepmother most of all. She claimed that Maria’s ghost appeared to her and told her that William had killed her and where to find her body. Her stepmother finally got authorities to listen to her and Maria’s body was found exactly where her stepmother said it would be. William Corder was arrested and later executed for her murder. Interestingly, he comes up in my (excruciatingly long) essay about anthropodermic bibilopegy – books bound with human skin – because his court proceedings were bound in his skin and placed on display in a museum in Bury St. Edmond. Corder’s reputation took a harder hit, even though the woman he killed was of loose virtues, because he had behaved as a complete asshole his entire life. One would wonder how much better he would have done had the balladeers been presented with a man with less theft and fraud on his record. This story appears in several ballads, two of which are named “The Murder of Maria Marten” and “The Red Barn Murder.”
Murder ballads of the “romantic variety” fairly infest country music. Waylon Jennings’ “Cedartown, Georgia,” Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone” and “Kate” come to mind but most notable to me is Willie Nelson’s The Red Headed Stranger album. It’s a concept album devoted to the idea of the titular stranger as a murderous drifter with a gun. The album’s killer may or may not have murdered his wife but he definitely killed the woman who tried to steal his horse. “El Paso” by Marty Robbins flips the script a bit, as the killer takes out the man who was his rival for his lovely Felina, but is shot down by vigilantes, only to die in Felina’s arms. Still killed a man but this time the woman survived so that’s something and I’m clinging to it.
We get to see the perspective of the female murderer in some country songs. The trio formerly known as the Dixie Chicks sang a song called “Goodbye to Earl,” explaining why Earl had to die. He was a vicious abuser and deserved the murder the three twangy Furies inflicted on him. Martina McBride’s “Independence Day” tells the story of a woman who burned down the house to kill her abusive husband, told from the perspective of the daughter who understands why her mother did what she did. Interesting how murder ballads wherein the female is the killer are generally killing to avenge or prevent abuse. It kind of reminds me of the now-adage that men fear women will humiliate them while women fear men will kill them. That quote is attributed to many women, but most notably Margaret Atwood, who interestingly features in a short story a doomed woman who sings a murder ballad from the perspective of the woman being murdered. It seems fairly likely that “The Knoxville Girl” influenced this story, as one of the lyrics is:
Oh Willy Willy, don’t you murder me,
I’m not prepared for eternity.
Willie, Willard, the end is the same – a gal upset a man and he had to kill her.
I think Norah Jones’s “Miriam” is very interesting because the murderess is singing to her friend Miriam who slept with her husband. One day when I have more time for research than Oddtober permits, I’d love to pick this topic back up again and see how many murder ballads are from the perspective of a female killer, and then subsection that into the number of times a woman kills a woman. In fact, this is a topic that requires the sort of deep dive that I would need to devote a month of research to handle properly so please know this discussion is wildly incomplete. I couldn’t begin to catalog all the “boy sleeps with girl then kills her for being such a whore” or “boy loves girl and kills his rival for her hand” songs in folk or country music. And god help me if I try to venture into rock music. Nick Cave’s album Murder Ballads is worth an entry all on its own. But then “I Used to Love Her” by Guns ‘n Roses immediately comes to mind and I sort of hate that song so I sense any further attempts in this vein will spiral into another fifty thousand word OTC entry.
Still, it was interesting finding hip hop and rap murder ballads. One unexpected gem was Plan B’s song about a fictionalized murder victim who fell at the hands of the very real Camden Ripper. “Suzanne,” the woman in the song, was a prostitute who was savagely murdered, and the tone of the song is one wherein Suzanne is a mourned victim, not a nasty girl who got what was coming to her. She was a savaged woman whose screams permeate the song.
This also makes me wonder how many songs there are out there that focus on serial killers. I stumbled across one such musician and her body of work and plan to discuss it in the part two of this discussion because it straddles the line between just serial killer storytelling and borderline hero worship of such killers. Frankly, the “killer as a folk hero” strain of murder ballads is also heavy with femicide but ultimately is a bit more entertaining. Come back tomorrow and see what I dug up, and until then, if you have a favorite murder ballad that falls into the “kill her because she’s a slut” and “star-crossed lovers doomed to die” categories, or subverts them as the Plan B song above does, please share in the comments.
Much of what happens on OTC is the result of me falling down a rabbit hole and writing about it, and often if there isn’t a rabbit hole, I’ll dig one, just to cover all the bases. But if you’re new here, hi, sometimes when I consume media, a brain switch gets tripped and I end up worrying the piece of media like a dog with a bone, obsessively gnawing on details until I wear myself out and move on to the next little or sometimes massive obsession. It’s hard to predict what will flip the switch but when it happens I just have to roll with it until the obsession ends and I can move on to something else. My most recent obsession is with a song, and it seems fitting to share it during Odd-tober because while it isn’t wholly Halloweenish, the more I looked into it, the creepier it was. An Odd-session, as it were.
I have to assume that most of you have encountered the often wretched and frequently bizarre recommendations that happen when YouTube algorithms try to predict your tastes. You listen to, say, an acoustic set from a Finnish doom metal band, and helpful YouTube suggests you follow it up with a Halsey video wherein she both spits blood and features Debbie Harry in a random but charming cameo. It’s baffling, and I have no clue what I watched that caused YouTube to throw up the video for “Evil in Your Eye” by a band called Church of the Cosmic Skull. Not complaining – it was a righteous recommendation, and I liked the song enough to look into the band, which led me to a solo project the guitarist and lead male vocalist, Bill Fisher, recently released. (As an aside, this is the golden age of the solo project. All these bands, unable to tour due to Covid-19, restless and waiting…)
I watched the video for Bill Fisher’s song, “Celador,” at three or so in the morning on Saturday and am beginning this entry three days later, having thought about it in my usual spiral of insomnia-laced (un)focus. As soon as I realized I was going to write about Bill Fisher, I stopped opening the emails I got after joining his site. The emails are fun invitations to try and understand the mission behind the album. I almost wish I hadn’t signed up before posting this discussion because just knowing the title of the album Fisher released has probably colored how I look at this video, though I like to think I’d have reached the same conclusions regardless. I really hate knowing too much before diving into a rabbit hole but sometimes you get in your own way, I guess.
You may want to watch the video for “Celador” before I begin.
This particular rabbit hole led me to three small warrens, wherein I considered the reason behind the video concept, Fisher’s use of euphonia and dual meaning, and how I think this song is, in a way, an updated fairy tale. Join me beneath the cut, and let’s gnaw this bone together.
Hi, if you’re arriving at this entry via a link from others interested in this recording, I’ve done more research on the names and created a “master post” with all the data I’ve collected. If any of this data is helpful in figuring out the intent of the speaker in the tape, please share. This is a weird and loose collaborative effort, solving this 4chan mystery, with people building on the research others have done. It would delight me if anything I’ve done helps figure out the link between all the names in the audio or the person behind the tape.
And if you’re here just to enjoy the weirdness, both entries are hopefully still readable for those who just want to read something fun and creepy and move on to the next unsolved mystery.
It’s Halloween, so what better time to talk to you all about the masks or mask-like uses of make-up that annoy, upset or absolutely terrify me.
One of my earliest memories is of a television commercial promoting an Alice Cooper concert in Dallas. I must have been three or four at the time. I was absolutely terrified by his appearance, with the heavy eyeliner that appeared to be running down his face, the wild hair, the marks around his mouth that might have been blood for all I knew – our old television was in black and white.
Seriously, fuck this guy.
My parents decided that the best way to help me overcome my fear of this horrible man on the TV was to force me to watch it every time it came on. My father would prevent me from running from the room when it aired, holding me there and telling me over and over that it was just a television commercial, it was just a man in make-up, that none of it could hurt me. It didn’t work. I screamed and cried and still he and my mother persisted, convinced they could reason with a frightened child. I had similar reactions to KISS, mostly Gene Simmons.
Interestingly, I am not particularly unnerved by clowns. I look at a clown, and I know it’s some asshole wearing a bunch of make-up and a wig and maybe some stupid clothes. I know what the intent is behind clown make-up – to delight or terrify. When I know the intent, it’s hard to be afraid, and that is where my parents, as well meaning as they were at the time, missed the mark. I didn’t need to know that it was a commercial and couldn’t hurt me. I needed to know why the man was dressed that way, what his intent was, what he planned to do in that get-up. And of course I could not express this so young and of course my parents had no idea what was at play in my terror. Variations of not knowing the reason behind the disguise fuels my adult uneasiness around masks, I think, though surely there are other explanations, from Jungian collective unconsciousness ruling my response to just plain jitters.
There are a lot of explanations as to why it is that people wear masks and costumes at Halloween and I am loath to discuss them because to do so means I have to cover every potential reason going back to early recorded history or someone will show up and leave a very long comment schooling me on Samhain-this and Pope-Boniface-that and how it’s racist for a white woman even to say Dia de los Muertos, let alone discuss the purpose behind sugar skull make-up. But this is a time of the year that makes a woman who finds the purpose behind masks very important somewhat uneasy. And perversely, because it makes me uneasy, I expose myself to it in ways that make me even more unnerved. But I can’t seem to avoid it, and since I can’t stop poking at this canker sore in my psyche, I’ve decided to drag you all down with me.
She’s also linked to two other accounts associated with her videos that may be serving as back-up in case she ever loses content on YouTube again. Over on Vimeo, she’s Atrocity Exhibition (a suitably Oddbookian name to be sure) and she’s MrsMisanthropy on Google+. Several people had found a Google+ account for “MrsMisanthropy” but there was not enough content to know if it was her or not (and again, no idea if MrsMisanthropy is really female but I think of her as a women and will until told otherwise). Bookmark the other links in case she leaves again. I will update my links to her videos sometime today.
While she was gone, I spent time looking for other fan video makers whose musical and cinematic tastes were interesting and I found several. For now I feel I must share one specific video-maker and the films behind his fan videos because one of his videos triggered a month long endeavor that I feared was going to be a godless one. I feared I would not be able to find the originals behind the clips used in Piperbrigadista’s fan video for “Synthetic Potion” by a band called Noir for Rachel.
As I was sifting through the videos on this channel, I was immediately drawn into this one because there is something about the woman’s face that makes me want to keep looking at her. She appears as if she was confronting a voyeur, or maybe just a run of the mill Peeping Tom. Her face is so serious and beautiful in a manner that reminds me of Ingrid Bergman and Sophia Lauren. So I watched and listened and became entranced by the song and even more so by the video.
The song reminds me of what would happen if you crossed early Duran Duran with early Cure and made it all instrumental. I loved the song “Synthetic Potion” so much that I did something I’ve never done before – I bought an album off Band Camp. The album, entitled Witches, is a righteous purchase.
The video created a strange obsession in me to run to ground the movie these clips were taken from. The scene beginning at 1:05, ending at 1:48, was incredibly compelling. The woman was not confronting a voyeur, but if she was, the experience became something else entirely for her. She sees this disheveled looking man standing outside the window of her home as she is wearing a dressing gown and underwear. After looking at him for a moment, she reveals her lingerie-clad body to him and waits for his reaction.
The woman in this scene conveys so much with her eyes, mouth and a simple tilt of her head. Before she opens her dressing gown, she steels herself up. She raises her chin and takes a small step back, never taking her eyes off the man. She waits for his response. Seconds pass, and you see a bit of trepidation pass over her face and she begins to list very slightly as she stands. She takes another small step back and tilts her head in what looks the beginning of a shrug, an expression of disappointment and rejection. Then before she completes the dismissal, he steps forward and she does too, leaning toward him. Her expression only changes a bit but that bit is expansive in its depth. Her lips show a minor, almost imperceptible sneer of power, her eyes focus on him with even more intensity as he touches the glass. She’s received the reaction she wants and she wanted this reaction because she wants him at least as much as he may want her.
It was so compelling that I spent a month trying to find this film. And I finally ran it to ground but only after hours spent searching.
I’ve been consuming a lot of media on YouTube lately, mainly in the form of various “creepypasta” channels. Various people with good or interesting voices read short stories and vignettes written for online readers – Reddit’s nosleep is a good source of creepypastas – and sometimes put in appropriate sound effects. I listen to hours and hours of such readings as I sew or iron or do repetitive tasks that don’t need my full attention to perform. It reminds me a bit of old radio serials – I wonder if my grandmother did the same, listening to assorted radio dramas as she ironed or cleaned the bathroom.
Creepypastas are fun but ultimately most are pleasant diversions as opposed to something that inspires me to write about them, but the last few months I’ve found myself combing through a couple of accounts that have proven to be far creepier than story recitations that have creepiness as an actual goal. Of course, both accounts aren’t shying away from presenting unpleasant, upsetting or gross content but when it’s not the goal and it happens sort of organically, it’s all the more interesting, I think.
I used to have dreams about Lemmy Kilmister that were Christ-like in nature. In the dreams he was always a force of moral and chaotic good, leading me to sound decisions and peace of mind. I can’t really explain why I assigned to him this sort of leadership role in my subconscious and it probably doesn’t matter. He and Christopher Walken have both been Jesus-like figures to me, Christ mixed with Loki. We all have our personal gods, and, if we dont, we should.
It seems impossible that this cigarette-cured, whiskey-soaked, womanizing rock god could possibly be dead. Surely he will rise again in some way. Until he does, check out this documentary about him, worth watching not only because it’s about Lemmy but also because the scene with Scott Ian’s reaction to Lemmy going commando in cut-off Daisy Dukes is the sort of thing you need to see. He was larger than life, badder than bad, yet had no problem with his balls falling out of his shorts. It’s hilarious, but it’s also a sign of a man who was so badass he couldn’t be bothered with social niceties like underpants. Such matters were beneath him. As well they should have been. Better to live balls-out than to become neutered and self-conscious.
God, I really loved him. “That’s the way I like it baby, I don’t wanna live forever!”
Behold these offerings from gospelpostcards.com, sent so that they might give us “the courage to trust in Jesus” (and click on each image to see the larger version): An arrogant man smoking a cigar is smugly expecting to get into heaven because his sins were fairly venal. God choinks that notion right out of his head because he hasn’t been saved but drops him back on Earth so he can try again because God’s cool like that. He reads the bible and is now ready to die and go to Heaven.
And that this lunatic piece of mail is laminated better than a Denny’s menu just makes sense. This won’t be biodegrading any time soon, which is a blessing in surprise. Truth like this needs to be preserved at least long enough after the eco-collapse so that the aliens tracking our progress as a species will understand what exactly went wrong.
