IS POP MUSIC PREMEDITATED MURDER?
She died at 11:22PM on a Sunday. It happened on the drive home. There were multiple suspects and they all shared some form of culpability so this case wasn’t going to be easy for me to crack. The victim’s mother, a flaxen haired, well to do, beautiful, arguably talented young woman was hunched over her slain child shedding crocodile tears like rain drops. Feign drops… There was money to be made in her daughter’s death.
I make a horrible crime novelist, unless you enjoy horrible crime novels. In that case I’m at least average, but in the interest of clarity I’ll provide a little reference before I continue.
I was driving home the other night before midnight and as I flipped through the monotony that makes its home on the FM dial I happened upon a local rap station that was playing a remix version of Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off”. I’d heard snippets of the tune several times before, but for some reason I stopped scanning the airwaves and listened to the song in its entirety for the second time in my life, the first being when I was hanging out with my nieces who are aged 7 and 5. The latter piece of information means nothing other than to put into context the only other instance I would ever listen to Taylor Swift, but the fact that I stopped on that station, on that night, loaded a proverbial gun in my head and before I even heard the fatal shot my mind had been cordoned off by crime scene tape.
Now, I’m not given to believing in conspiracy theories but to say that pop music is not formulaic is like saying the da Vinci code was a riddle on a cereal box. And just like the consumer buying that box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, the one purchasing Taylor Swift’s music expects it to taste the same every time… But this smacked of something different. Perhaps I should’ve prefaced by saying that this isn’t a hate piece about Taylor Swift, or pop music for that matter; they just both happened to be in the right place, at the wrong time, when this bullet came calling upon its path of destruction.
Back to the story.
A hollow voice called over the speaker for the first suspect to enter the room and stand in front of a wall that was meant to make note of one’s height: The Artist.
She casually sauntered in singing a cheerful song about dancing away the judgments others had cast on her. She playfully chided herself for not being able to hold down a boyfriend. It was partially obnoxious and equally infectious; perplexities abounded. She was impossible to read. In the back of my mind I was hearing her croon country tunes while she blatantly waved a crossover hit in my face, but the fact remained that a terrible crime had been committed. Had she created this song, this “child”, knowing full well that it would be played to death?
Duuh duuuh duuh duuuuuuh… (Theatrical music is a little difficult to convey in written form)
The authorities beckoned the second suspect into the room: The Record Exec.
He was preceded by flower bearers, only instead of rose petals they laid cash before his feet for him to walk upon. He had deep pockets that he’d happily turn out to invest in pretty things that sang songs like the one that was bludgeoned beyond recognition in this atrocity. He was no slouch, his cunning told him what would sell by looking at the hits that came before. He knew that good art was borrowed, but the best art was stolen, and he was ever more aware that if the needle was turning a profit you didn’t change the record. But did that make him a killer?
The suspense builds…
In walked the third person of interest to the line up: The Disc Jockey.
She could have easily been blamed for playing the same song over and over again. After all, she was the one cueing the music. And those radio DJs must have been in cahoots because I could flip the dial and hear the same song on multiple stations, often at the same time. But along with the one she used to press the play button, the DJ also had a finger to point with. She was told what to play by a shadowy boss who conducted backroom meetings giving secret handshakes to the ones who created, and funded, this mess I was listening to. The paper trail was evidenced by the simple fact that I was hearing Taylor Swift on a hip hop station. Money was exchanged and so was the blame.
The plot thickens…
Now the last of the would-be criminals stood in front of the one-way glass: The Remix DJ.
He stepped onto what he thought was a stage (but was really still the floor of the line up room), pulled up a playlist, pressed the return key on his laptop, and proceeded to fist pump while pretending to fiddle with knobs on the mixer. “Caught red handed,” I thought. But this DJ also had a buck to pass. The club promoter for his residency in Las Vegas said he had to keep the crowd happy by refurbishing songs that were currently skull fucking the masses all over the radio. There was a quota to fill; the VIP section needed to be packed full of dumb-dumbs night after night who wanted only to hear top 40 songs set to a repetitive beat overlaid with air raid sirens.
The plot lightens your wallet to the tune of $500 for a mid-shelf bottle of vodka…
I stood looking at each of these people trying to figure out who the guilty party was. It was a dizzying circle of blame going round and round. The artist and the record executive (along with the producers/engineers on their payroll) aligned their motives to make this song. It can be argued that it was done for the sake of the art form, or for the sake of money, but in all likelihood it was a mixture of both and some of that money was filtered to the radio stations in exchange for airplay because, as any good businessperson knows, you have to spend it to make it. The re-mix DJ may have been in someone’s pocket too, though I doubted it because he was just reinterpreting what was already lying on the ground writhing from being spun to death. Perhaps the hints were there all along, after all how many times had I heard about a “hit” song with a sick “beat” and a “killer hook”? Those terms seemed the language of some homicidal sociopath, “but that’s all part of the formula for popular music,” I thought to myself. And just when that thought crossed my mind the final clue slipped into place unlocking the true nature of this gruesome event… “Popular” music. How does something become popular, and who is responsible for making it so? It was then that I awoke to realize, as if coming out of a sickening dream, that I was the one on the floor of the line up room and these people, who moments ago had been the prime suspects, now stood as witnesses with accusatory looks awash on their faces. I had unwittingly been their primary alibi, their co-conspirator, the patsy. Me, the listener.
As I was led off in the handcuffs of a song that I didn’t even particularly care for, and the rest of these industry darlings walked free, I couldn’t help but believe that this murder had indeed been premeditated with the parties responsible for its creation and circulation knowing it would be played to death, and knowing with even more certainty that they were going to get away with it. Me, and so many others like myself, held the smoking gun. Pop music’s power lay in the hands of those who’d made it popular, as did the guilt for its being consumed to the point of decimation. It was the perfect crime.
