Five Song Friday: Homicide and Chill
This Week: Loud Ladies, Fleeting Beauty and Gastropod Mysteries
We need to talk about a dirty little secret in millions of American homes.
It’s hiding inside that flat black rectangle in your living room.
All those bright colors and big smiles in high-definition? Behind them lurks death, blood and unspeakable carnage.
Look, television is pretty full of itself right now.
Everyone in the industry has let this “Golden Age of TV” nonsense go to their head. Suddenly, every damn show is the greatest thing ever made and if you’re not watching it what the hell is wrong with you.
Don’t believe it.
Television is as base and dumb as ever.
Just look at the wild popularity of reality romance shows, home renovation shows, British baking shows and any program where people sing, dance or pull quarters from Heidi Klum’s ear.
While “prestige” shows get all the critical praise and awards, most of what comes across the airwaves is beamed directly at our lizard brains.
And none of those goofy genres come close to our collective obsession with true crime TV.
Americans are addicted to murder. Killing is our jam.
We love it so much it’s scary.
And I’m big enough to cop to my own blood lust.
Like many couples, my wife and I occasionally enjoy passing time with televised entertainment.
We’ll settle into our comfortable seats and gaze out upon the vast universe of choice at our fingertips. There are conservatively hundreds of thousands of ways we can fill our eyes and brains in the short window before bedtime.
But sometimes the cognitive pressure is too great. We want to unwind and don’t want to take too much time weighing our options. God forbid we make a bad choice. So we mitigate our risk by embracing the familiar.
At some point, when we cannot decide, one of us will ask THE QUESTION.
Do you just want to DO A MURDER?
To be clear, it is not a proposal that we pass the time snuffing out the life light of another human being. We don’t have a secret closet stocked with ski masks, duct tape and stabby things.
This is simply a suggestion that we entertain ourselves with the slow, dramatic retelling of something horrible that happened to strangers.
A mother in Virginia killed by a crossbow. A couple gunned down in their car in Boston. A dentist stabbed in a parking lot in Texas.
Young women gone missing. Dream vacations gone horribly wrong.
Terrible things happening in places where terrible things never happen.
These are the stories that relax us. News footage of crime scenes and caution tape. People in extreme close-up recounting the exact moments that their lives were torn apart.
I understand how messed up all of this sounds. I’m not proud. But I’m also not alone.
Murder-tainment is big business.
I understand that there are psychological buttons being pushed. I have a remedial understanding that humans are attracted to tragic stories and use them as a survival and learning mechanism.
We also secretly enjoy when the big bad things don’t happen to us.
Right now there are hundreds of shows and dozens of channels dedicated to retelling true tales of homicide. On its own, NBC’s Dateline has produced close to 3,000 episodes over 31 seasons.
People love this stuff so much that Dateline just rolled out its own 24/7 channel. All Dateline, all the time.
Back to back deaths and disappearances. Rapes and rampages. Morbid details narrated with equal parts gloom and glee by Keith Morrison, the broadcasting love child of the Crypt Keeper and Rod Serling.
I honestly don’t know what took Dateline so long.
It’s not like they lack material. And thanks to our country’s general love for doing violence to each other, they’ll never run out.
More than 22,000 Americans are murdered every year.
That number lingered in the teens for decades, but shot back up after the pandemic.
So the sad story factory is back to cranking out at full capacity.
We can look forward to years and years of gorging ourselves on gory details. Episode after episode of wondering “who done it?”(when we all know goddamn well it was the husband).
If you love watching these shows, the good news is that the killings will continue and we’ll keep on watching.
The bad news?
The killings will continue and we’ll keep on watching.
Sincerely,
DJ CrankyPete
Five Song Friday 054
“Sing to Me” - Mr. Dinkles
You get two young women together and it’s bound to be loud. I speak from experience. I have a teenage daughter and if you put her in a room (or on the phone) with one friend, you better get ready. There will be shrieking and screaming and fits of hoary laughter that will rattle the foundations. There will be Taylor Swift karaoke delivered with the same energy as primal scream therapy. Some frequencies will be too high to hear with an adult ear. Other outbursts will spook the dogs.
If you take that vibe and add raw punk talent, drums and electric guitar, you get Mr. Dinkles. And it’s downright delightful.
“Cherry Lips” - Loon Lake
Sometimes things aren’t supposed to last forever. Like blanket forts and butter sculptures. Or the Australian band Loon Lake. They only made music for a couple of years before calling it quits. You could get sad about it, or you could just listen to this song and appreciate that it exists as a moment of beauty that wasn’t meant to last. Like a flower or a firework. Or an open jar of mayonnaise left in the sun.
“Love Like Laughter” - Beth Orton
Believe it or not, I have a soft and tender emotional underbelly. I enjoy the occasional wistful love song. Especially ones tinged with melancholy and longing from the late 1990s. You probably want more context, but I’m not comfortable discussing it right now. I’m not saying never, but I’m going to need some time.
“Lights Out” - Angry Samoans
Angry Samoans were way ahead of their time. They foresaw the great dwindling of American attention spans back in 1984 and did what they could to pack everything they wanted to say in under a minute. I respect their energy and their economy. I dig what they are laying down. I’m not going to “put a pen in my hand and poke my eyes out,” but I appreciate where they are coming from.
“Haters Be Learners (Respect My Snail Style)” - The Snails
No idea what this song is about. You will get no clues from the low-budget, slow-motion video either. Go ahead and search out a live performance online and you’ll see grown ass men wearing slug outfits, complete with anatomically correct eye-stalks. It’s all part of the mystery that is The Snails. And some mysteries just weren’t meant to be solved. Like the OJ Simpson murders or Prince William’s hair.
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That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
“Hell is full of musical amateurs.” ― George Bernard Shaw