Serial killers to gangsters, cold-blooded poisoners to crimes of passion, fictional or real, name songs about the act most foul
Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death, said the writer William Burroughs, nicely cooking up one explanation why murder is such a potent subject, not merely in books, or song, but in all media. The wilful killing of another person is about as extreme and profound a human activity as there is, and, only in theory of course, is within reach of everybody. Perhaps that is one reason why murder captures the imagination so powerfully. Among the famous, there are notorious mass killers, from most Roman emperors to Genghis Khan, the calculating Capone to the manipulative Manson, school attackers such as Andrew Kehoe or Adam Lanza, the wild west's rogue lawman and Pinkerton detective Tom Horn, serial killers from Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe to Butcher of Rostov Andrei Chikatilo, and lesser known Victorian arsenic poisoners such as Mary Ann Cotton, who was found guilty of killing up to 21 people including four husbands and her children.
This is only a small rogue's gallery of the many who have fascinated and appalled. And that doesn't even begin to cover all of the fictional murders in novels, film or TV, from Sherlock Holmes to The Sopranos, A Short Film About Killing to the incredible documentary The Act of Killing, Game of Thrones to Fargo. However, murder most foul is more often local and banal, or a crime of passion, and beyond that, murderous thoughts are as much fuel for song as the act itself, making these also ripe for song suggestions.
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by Peter Kimpton via Electronic music | The Guardian
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