Yesterday a horrible school shooting, today Jerry Lee Lewis

(May 24)

Eenie meenie miney matkins,

It's time for an album from Mr. Chet Atkins. 

I've got 6 more of 'em, but i think in the interest of everyone's sanity i'm going to lump 5 of them together as essentially various collections of random guitar pieces. The last one we'll save for later because it's a real album. No spoilers, though, tonight it's a total buffet from 1964 to 1972. 

But you know what? I can't. I can't just put on the headphones and ignore that Elementary School teachers and children were murdered. I can't flip on any device without somebody being more concerned with a teenager's legal citizenship status than the fact that murdering teachers and children is even a thing that happens ever, at all, for any reason. 

America has a serious gun violence problem. The loudest broadcast voices in this country say the solution is more guns everywhere at all times so we can shoot more bad guys without ever firing up the brain cells responsible for figuring out how to make school, theater, post office, the Capitol, anywhere shootings a thing that doesn't happen anymore. It didn't magically start in 2012 either. You all listened to the Fine Art of Surfacing with me, right? Let's take a gander at the elementary school shooting that created the song I Don't Like Mondays way back in 1979. 

"In December [1978], a psychiatric evaluation arranged by her probation officer recommended that Spencer be admitted to a mental hospital for depression, but her father refused to give permission. For Christmas 1978, he gave her a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic .22 caliber rifle with a telescopic sight and 500 rounds of ammunition.[5][7] Spencer later said, "I asked for a radio and he bought me a gun." Asked why he had done that, she answered, "I felt like he wanted me to kill myself." 

Now, you're absolutely right that the guns didn't make today's subject shoot anybody either, but the fact remains that he was mad/insane/delusional/depressed/any other adjective you choose enough to take the guns he had free access to and murder children. 

Do you feel that you need to carry a firearm with you at all times to be safe? That's a gun problem. Do you truly believe that if we don't have immediate access to firearms you'll be attacked by magically appearing criminals who have been waiting around the corner to be sure you don't have a gun strapped to your person? That's a gun problem. Can we do anything to try to understand the long series of experiences that led to this particular 18 year old murdering innocent children by talking to him or seriously observing his psychological state first-hand? No, the officers on the scene "probably" swiss cheesed him to death. That's also a gun problem. "Gun problem" is a fairly simple and intuitive way of stating that we have a serious problem in this country with the marginalized, isolated, and frequently poverty level population picking up easily accessible weapons and murdering as many people around them as they possibly can a couple days before graduation. 

Don't play cute and don't play stupid. He's already just another forgotten bad guy statistic on your 24-hour news reel of reasons why we should dig a 90-foot moat around castle America and inbreed until we have a tooth to people ratio of 1:90,000. 

If that offends you, good. I said it in an offensive manner. Say something actually intelligent and i'll respond in what i consider an equally intelligent manner. I have a rifle, my children do not have unguarded access to it, and i can see with my own eyes and ears by talking to them that they have no interest or intention or need to access it. 

Look, i have seen someone get shot and die on the sidewalk in real life and there was nothing i could do about it except desperately hope that i didn't get shot as well. Not a fun topic for daily conversation, but the ability to kill that guy back wouldn't have helped at all. You may not understand it, and the people who commit these horrible acts may never be able to properly articulate why, but all of these tragedies are personal and motivated just like Brenda's. Salvador Ramos needed help long before it got to this point, but the one thing i can almost guarantee is that all he ever got was empty, self-righteous animosity from people who either treated him like he would never be good enough, or simply didn't care about him at all. Reality is obviously more complicated than that, but that's what any investigative findings will boil down to. 

I am of course known for taking these horrible topics and expressing them in somewhat absurd ways, but this isn't funny. We can't keep doing this broadcast television farce of an existence inside Schrodinger's Arsenal Box. Society doesn't magically play nice because everyone may or may not be able to defend themselves with firearms. Just because George Zimmerman was exonerated under a "stand your ground law" doesn't mean he didn't wrongfully murder Trayvon Martin, but it also doesn't mean whoever attempted to murder him after the acquittal was justified either. Bottle says an eye for an eye is just about the most toxic mentality humans ever invented. 

Fix the real problem, or stop pretending you can fix the problem. What's the problem? Pretending you've got magic beans for sale to the highest bidder while insinuating that everyone who wasn't the highest bidder deserves to suffer. 

Maybe we'll get back to enjoying albums at some point, but there's no escapist fantasy tonight. I'm appalled by some of the things that pass for decency and humanity on the nation's airwaves, coincidentally voiced by the exact same pundits of pestilence who decry diversity, compassion, and progress. This is what lack of progress looks like, kids killing kids because what possible future is there to work hard for? 

Think really hard about how miserably hopeless or full of hate you would have to be to walk into an elementary school and murder everyone, then acknowledge that's where Salvador ended up. Yes, he's very much the bad guy today and what he did is beyond horrifying, but he didn't start out that way, no one does. My heart bleeds and my tears fall just as hard for him as every one of his victims. Whatever the circumstances of his life turn out to have been, he certainly didn't deserve it, and we can't keep pretending that these aren't preventable tragedies.

---

(May 25)

Ok, now that yesterday is out of my system, we return you to our feature presentation already in progress. 

Soon i discovered this rock thing was true; Jerry Lee Lewis was the Devil...

... i found myself in love with the world,

So there was only one thing i could do... 

Paraphrase the Gibby Haynes intro to Ministry's Jesus Built My Hotrod while listening to volume 1 of the Devil's golden balls of fire [snap] i mean hits. Not gonna lie, Madam Coincidence chose the ultra low blow of me saying inbreeding, J-LeeL marrying his 13 year old cousin, and his actual nickname being The Killer. I refuse the path that ends with some kind of Archie Bunker reference, so bifurcating realities, we're intentionally choosing to focus solely on JL'l being a wild man at the Piano. 

After the scandal he reignited his career by switching to Country. What a U-turn this project has taken. This week is seriously trying to be worse than the entire Summer of 2020, and i'm about to call ollie ollie oxen free and zap the empire back together without even bothering to chronicle how it happened. But first, Jerry. 

I can't argue, these are his hits. This is serious old-school Rock'n'Roll. The boogie-woogie, 12-bar blues, Little Richard/Elvis kind. Not gonna lie, there's some real cringe moments hiding in here, but that's not what confuses me. Half the time you can barely hear his piano playing. Obviously, i'm not expecting killer mixes and nuance, but half these tracks sound like the whole band is standing in front of the room mic with Jerry straight-jacketed in the back corner. 

Also, for you modern music listeners who might not know, there is no variety. You have your one thing, and you write as many variations of the same song as people will tolerate. It's the AC/DC approach to brand longevity. 

What's more eclectic is the 90s alt-rock rabbit hole i went down afterward. I somehow started with Metric and Goldfrapp and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, passed through Veruca Salt and Elastica and Breeders (yay for the Deal sisters), and ended up at the David Bowie/Trent Reznor version of I'm Afraid of Americans. You guessed it, that video is a critique of gun culture. 

You could be all "it's goooooogle spying on you," but it's all stuff i watch/listen to anyway, America has a pretty terrible reputation for doing its Eric Cartman "i do what i wan!" impression at every imaginable inappropriate place and time. As i've pointed out, these things are all coincidental. Sure, i have a great deal of flexibility when it comes to choosing which parts of my experience i bring to these nightly album phenomenologies, but they are all part of a much larger and interconnected structural tapestry, and to a large extent it's impossible to unhear the sound of marrying your own pubescent cousin then turning to Country when your Rock'n'Roll fanbase reached for their barf buckets. Fair or unfair, that phenomenon is a big part of my hypercritical skepticism about Country music as a genre. But we're gonna keep going, because i'm a completionist.

Finale