Still image from the video for Chad Van Gaalen’s “Molten Light.” Artwork by Chad Van Gaalen

Prologue

Ken recently introduced me to Chad Van Gaalen’s “Molten Light,” a song that had earlier been introduced to him by Chicago-based visual artist Ellen Greene. While we could probably do an extended post about all that is going on in “Molten Light,” and someday we might, today I’ll use it as a stepping off point for thinking about some of our recent discussion about the relationship between violent imagery and violent music.

“Molten Light” may be as well known for its video as for the song itself. While the song tells a supernatural, female victim revenge story. the video illustrates the song’s story with grotesque and violent, but animated imagery. The interplay of the song, the violent images, and the cartoon-like animation makes me wonder why Van Gaalen’s presentation pulls some punches and not others.

As a songwriter and a performer, I’ve spent a good bit of time trying to understand why I gravitate to the grisly in some mediums, but not others. I’m also trying to understand how to push the boundaries of an audience’s comfort, and what we achieve together — artist and audience — when I do.

Lost in a not-so-fun-house

In today’s post, I want to report back to you on a brief field trip I took to explore this very theme, and offer a few thoughts and a few songs by other artists that have helped me figure out at least part of these questions. I visited the Museum of Death in Los Angeles. I thought it would hold a few new clues to understanding a female revenge murderer, or interesting details about various cultural treatments of death.

It had more of a funhouse feel than the word museum would imply. Like entering a dusty home filled to the brim with ephemera from famous serial killers, newspaper clippings of various atrocities, and an area devoted to GG Allin. My friends and I mentioned being moved by the sweet smile of a mortician posing over a corpse, and by specific tools of the mortician (like eye caps, various paints, and tiny caskets). What affected me most was all of the graphic photographs of crime scenes and car accidents. One exhibit displayed an incredibly graphic murder scene laid out in pictures. A woman and her boyfriend had killed her ex-boyfriend, and had proceeded to pose the dead body in all manner of positions. If I had only heard that story, I would be just as disgusted, and maybe more interested. Seeing those images, I was grossed out and curious about another’s capacity for blind cruelty. But I can’t honestly say that it moved me or changed me for the better.

I left disappointed, angry, and a bit ill. The Museum of Death felt like pornography: part Coney Island freak show (where you’re not sure what’s real), and part dirty old man showing you an off-color toy. It was exploitative and provocative without reflection. The shock left me no space for empathy or even sympathy as I moved stunned, onto the next gruesome image.

While I considered the museum pornographic, I enjoy listening to, writing about, and writing murder ballads. What is the difference? Shaleane recently asked me why a song about an “actual” murder is less graphic than an image of an “actual” murder. For me, I think it boils down to which one moves me more to compassion, and perhaps action, and which leaves me paralyzed with fear? But let’s break it down a bit.

Technically, it is just different to listen to a murder ballad than look at a still documentary image. We are not staring into an open wound, but instead into emotional viscera. Murder ballads have the capacity to touch us deeply, profoundly, even creepily or violently, but more full bodied than graphic images. Oliver Sacks’ beautiful description of the power of music elaborates on this capacity:

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. One does not have to know anything about Dido and Aeneas [listen on Spotify] to be moved by her lament for him; anyone who has ever lost someone knows what Dido is expressing. And there is, finally, a deep and mysterious paradox here, for while such music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time.

Perhaps I can stomach ballads about murder better than photographic evidence because I can ignore the gore and get lost in pretty sounds, the harmonies softening each blow by effectively soothing my brain with a kind of lullaby.

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