Loughner Explanation Watch: Bad Metal Music

Over at Salon, the headline for a Sarah Hepola essays says that the early 90s '00s grim metal song "Bodies" by Drowning Pool had its "encore" in Jared Loughner's murder spree, because he seems to have liked the song–his "favorite" YouTube video being one that featured the tune, which because of its grinding unpleasantness has also been used by the army to torture and unnerve people.

The tune has, you see, "a troubled past," that is to say, that various people who the author seems to disapprove of have liked or used it in ways that trouble her. She notes, "It's a sign of the shifting culture wars that little attention has been paid to Drowning Pool since the Arizona shooting on Saturday." Perhaps more a sign of the utter intellectual emptiness of any premise that connects a song on a soundtrack of a video someone liked with his committing murder.

Her last paragraph almost sounds as if she is pointing out the very absurdity of this entire article's premise, yet there is no sign of wit or irony in the rest of it. While this article is the silliest attempt to shift blame for the killings I've seen yet, I won't mark it as a sign of an intellectual or political culture gone mad with its attempts to deny the reality of individual evil choices–it's more a sign of a media culture in an age of abundance that has, at times, just far more space to fill than interesting or entertaining observations to fill it.