Plato was right. If, as Congreve wrote, music has charms that can soothe the savage breast, then it also has the power to enrage and pervert. The slayings in Farmville are immensely sad. Sadder still is the world in which the principal suspect, Richard Samuel Alden McCroskey III, spent much of his life.
McCroskey styled himself Syko Sam and was affiliated with Serial Killin Records, a label of -- fortunately -- little renown. He was an aficionado of horrorcore, a genre of music (we use that term loosely) that dwells on sadism and brutality. Mario Delgado, one of the horrorcore artists (we use that term loosely as well) McCroskey enjoyed listening to, focuses on rape and murder.
If horrorcore were merely a minute piece of contemporary culture it would be dismaying enough. But it represents just one band on a broad spectrum that also includes grindcore, death metal, industrial noise, deathgrind, pornogrind, and various interpolations thereof. The words don't fully convey the degeneracy. If you want a taste, spend a few minutes online with Slipknot or Brutal Truth -- if you have the stomach to withstand the assault.
Defenders will say Shakespeare wrote of brutal subjects in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece and elsewhere, and that is so. It has to be conceded that many great works of art address unpleasant themes. But facile comparisons obscure essential differences. A surgeon cuts human flesh, and so does a man who slits open his pregnant wife's belly in an argument. That does not mean the two actions are even remotely the same.
Most young people who listen to death metal and horrorcore do not go on to commit murder. But it is hard to spend more than a few minutes in their universe without concluding that they are doing great harm nonetheless. Small comfort that it is confined within the boundaries of their own bleak interior lives.
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