Thursday, October 27, 2011

Best Crime Songs - Arson

"April 29, 1992," Sublime. I was a skinny white kid living in suburban Canada during the Rodney King riots, and was only in 9th grade, so participating in them wouldn’t exactly have been feasible, but when I first heard this song, their knowing taunt about how “You were sittin’ home watching your T.V. while we were participating in some anarchy” amplified my sense of suburban geekiness and made me feel like I’d missed out on something really really awesome. “Red lights flashing, time to retire, and then we turned that liquor store into a structure fire” makes the arson seem both completely unnecessary and gleefully cool. (This song could have also won in the Riot and Robbery categories, but I wanted to give someone else a shot.)

Monday, October 10, 2011

Best Crime Songs - Murder

So I wrote a column for The Deadline, my friend's resolutely non-online newspaper, about the best crime songs ever written. And since I want to keep the blog going without writing new stuff just yet, I'm gonna go back through and post them all, one by one. First up: murder.

Best Crime Song - Murder

There was a time I would have said “Folsom Prison Blues” hands down; “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” is pretty hard to top, lyrically. But this song has a sleeping flaw. Namely, even though said homicide apparently took place in Nevada, Johnny’s narrator’s singing from Folsom Prison, which is, of course, in California. So there are clear jurisdictional issues here, which lead me to question the narrator’s veracity. Not that I believe a lot of other narrators—as much as I love staples of gangsta rap like Ice Cube and Dr. Dre’s “Natural Born Killers” (and Cash-esque murder ballads like Nick Cave’s “Mercy Seat”), they’re more like cartoons than documentaries. And while Eminem can get every bit as far over the top, he at least convinced me in “‘97 Bonnie & Clyde” that he’d thought long and hard about the murder in question. Key to this is that he’s sick enough to actually imagine his cutesy explanations of everything to his young daughter. “Maybe when you’re old enough to understand it better I’ll explain it to you. But for now let’s say mama was real real bad, was being mean to dad and made him real real mad. But I still feel sad that I put her on time-out,” he raps to her before making a series of googoo baby noises to distract her, and then dumping her mother’s corpse off the end of a dock. It almost doesn't matter whether or not you like the song—you believe it, and that's much more important.