Killer Music?
The notion that aggressive music and homicide correlate, has been considered with increasing interest lately. Take for instance, the recent case of Jodi Jones, murdered by her boyfriend Luke Mitchell. Mitchell, like other teenage killers, was found to be a passionate afficionado of Marilyn Manson. Jodi’s injuries showed a striking resemblance to those in Manson’s painting of Black Dahlia murder victim and Hollywood starlet, Elizabeth Short.
Judge Lord Nimmo Smith told Mitchell: “I believe that in the way you went, with deliberation, about killing Jodi and mutilating her body, you were acting out a scene which you had previously formed in your mind.” Mitchell bought Manson’s album Golden Age of Grotesque two days after he murdered Jodi in woods near her home. The CD came with a DVD which the jury were privy to, depicting a naked young girl lying on the ground surrounded by areas of foliage and undergrowth.
Also, two women, bound together, were seen being hooded and molested and forced into a car. Manson could be heard saying: "Kill me, kill everyone, let them all die... Stop rehearsing alcohol and start performing narcotics.
While this case and a dozen similar ones show a correspondence between the murder and the murderer’s obsession with a particular artist or genre, can we really prove that there is a link between homicide and music? That is, would Jodi still be alive if it wasn’t for Marilyn Manson? The idea that Mitchell would be a perfectly normal teenager without the influence of the bat-consuming god of punk metal seems absurd; surely if someone is pathologically unstable their homicidal nature will show
ith or without music. Stanley Kubrick’s vastly controversial A Clockwork Orange provides an interesting contention to this widely held notion. Alex, the film’s sadistic teenage protagonist, has two pet loves above all else; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and ‘ultra-violence’. The film is characterised by its constant juxtaposition of music with violence, and Alex’s disturbing fantasies about rape and murder are always triggered by classical music.
When Alex and his select group of similarly disenchanted underlings, aka his ‘droogs’, beat up the writer F. Alexander and gang-rape his wife, it is to the tune of Singing in the Rain. When one of the ‘droogs’, Dim, interrupts a woman singing a piece from an opera, Alex lashes out at him, breaking his hand. When Alex is eventually caught, he undergoes Pavlovian style aversion therapy, associating his favourite music and violence with sickness.
Alex is free, but now he physically cannot bring himself to commit violence or listen to classical music without feeling powerful nausea. When he is forced to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth at full volume by former victim, F. Alexander, Alex throws himself out of a third-floor window, breaking every bone in his body. Fortunately for him, when he wakes up in hospital, the government have reversed the effects of the treatment, in order to denounce the anti-totalitarian F. Alexander.
The last scene shows Alex grinning manically, cured of his curing, surrounded by huge speakers belting out Beethoven’s Ninth. And we don’t need to be told what he’s thinking about. Burgess seems to suggest that by removing the love of music, the trigger for violence, Alex, as a metaphor for the generation of vandals, is debilitated. When the love of music returns, so does his passion for violence and he once again poses a menace to the streets of London.
This is a fairly simplistic angle on the equation, and the argument that music should provide the fundamental cause of murder is highly disputable. But clearly music plays an important part in the minds of psychopaths that commit horrific crimes, like those of Alex LeGrand or, indeed, Luke Mitchell. It has been proven beyond doubt that when the body is subjected to loud, overwhelming sounds, the brain releases endorphins.
As a result, the listener experiences a sensation of euphoria, similar to a ‘runner's high’. Endorphins cause addiction just like any other drug, and when the music is stopped, and the drug removed, the listener can become irritable and irrational. This irritability can lead to a requirement for an even greater adrenalin rush, achieved by violence and ultimately murder. Every day, people are violently assaulted after complaining about loud music coming from houses or cars.
In June 2002, for instance, a man from Covington, USA, complained about a loud car stereo to the driver. The driver temporarily left the area, retrieved a .25 calibre pistol from his house and returned, shooting and killing the complainant, because he attempt- ed to impede the adrenalin kick his loud music gave him. Stanley Kubrick captures the quintessence of this manic control over music and the high it brings, as Alex wallops Dim when he interrupts the opera singing in the milk-bar.
It would be unwise to argue that music directly causes violence. But loud music undoubtedly mobilises humans to action; soldiers in the WW2 listened to loud music before they went into battle to “psyche” themselves up for the fight. While people with homici dal tendencies may never ordinarily gain the impetus to actually kill someone, they may draw their motivation from the images transmitted through music and the adrenalin rush it gives.
So think twice before you go and tell your weird neighbour to turn down the screams of Slipknot coming from his room. It’s not always the quiet ones.
28th Apr 2005