Songs of Brutality

I’m sure I wasn’t the only NewMusicBox regular to recoil at the extraordinarily sad and bloody story of Richard McCroskey, a would-be horrorcore rapper who murdered four acquaintances in Farmville, Virginia. News outlets have been quick to associate McCroskey’s abhorrent acts of violence with the music that brought him and two of the victims together: In a recent Washington Post article, Chris Richards asks “could music really have driven McCroskey to kill his girlfriend, her parents and her friend?” but finds few answers. Predictably, representatives of the horrorcore genre have been unfailingly remorseful about the quadruple homicide while maintaining that their subculture is actually very peaceful—and I don’t doubt that both sentiments are genuine. It’s cliché by now to assert that profiling social misfits is an exercise in futility, a novel variety of harassment toward oft-harassed teenage outcasts.

But whether goths, metalheads, or horrorcore rap enthusiasts are or are not likelier to brutalize others is a question for the criminologists. What’s at stake for musicians is the role of music in identity construction and its potential behavioral ramifications. This is, as far as I know, a property that music—specifically, recorded music that can be engaged at home—has acquired only over the last half-century (I suspect it’s to some extent a side effect of suburbanization, whose characteristic pattern of cultural consumption promotes the veneration of culture-objects high in fixity, like recorded music): Because different kinds of music can on some level be construed as props in different (sub-)cultural tableaux with costumes, affected social postures, and so on, young people can define their dress, behavior, and language outward from the kind of music they listen to—a definition in which, by the way, the substance itself of the music is mostly immaterial except in its social context.

Strictly speaking, then, it seems unlikely that “music” per se can make someone kill someone else—but the fact that (despite the protestations of horrorcore’s defenders) its lyrics are often about killing people, it’s hard to argue that the tableau for which horrorcore provides a soundtrack doesn’t have a prominent place for violence. On the other hand, lots and lots of young people listen to music that accompanies this and similar tableaux—mainstream hip-hop has certainly faced this kind of criticism more than once over the years—without acting out its scripts. And let’s not forget that any one of the characteristics of a subcultural tableau might catch the eye or ear of an adolescent in search of self-definition: the clothes, the attitude, the lingo—these may be as attractive as the much-maligned music, although it’s likely that the music’s verbal component allows it to transmit potentially controversial ideas in a much more overt way than fashion or slang might.

Linking the deplorable murders in Virginia to horrorcore rap is too great a temptation for many journalists to resist, apparently. However, as a musician with no particular opinion about horrorcore one way or the other, let me suggest that we go easy on the Twiztids and Insane Clown Posses of the world. They’re just meeting a need—a need dissonant with mainstream society, a need for extremely morbid rap-rock. Getting to the bottom of what it is in our society that produces that need is a much more worthwhile pastime than damning its consequences.