“Die Young”: On Pop Music, Social Violence, Self-Censorship, and Apology Rituals

Abstract

This article examines the response of musicians to social violence, focusing specifically on the phenomenon of hybridized corporate/self-censorship by pop musicians in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, at the end of 2012. Immediately following the shooting, several popular songs with putatively inflammatory titles and lyrics—most notably, Ke$ha’s “Die Young” and Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks”—were pulled from the airwaves, largely in the name of a generalized sensitivity to the emotional needs of the listening public. This action received the vociferous support of the artists themselves, who issued concomitant pro forma apologies for their work. The tacit acknowledgment of the connections between music and acts of violence, the complicity of artists in the censorship or suppression of their own work, and their a posteriori participation in apology rituals are the focus here, with comparisons also drawn between similar acts of social violence—the Columbine school shooting of 1999 in particular—and the calls for and responses to the music censorship that followed.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Researching Music Censorship conference at the University of Copenhagen, 8 June 2013. The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge Dr Jérôme Melançon and Dr Achilles Ziakris for their willingness to read and critique this paper, and also Spencer Kryzanowski for assistance with the preparation of the manuscript.

Notes

1. The Sandy Hook shooting has the dubious distinction of being the deadliest public school shooting in the US. It was not, however, the deadliest school-related shooting: over 30 college students were shot and killed at Virginia Tech in 2007.

2. While the Columbine shooters were clearly fans of heavy industrial rock groups—including Rammstein and KMFDM—they do not appear to have been Manson fans, nor were they members of a so-called “trenchcoat mafia,” nor were they overt racists, as the mainstream media had reported (see Kayyem; Burns).

3. Lyrics reprinted by permission (Foster the People/Monotone Inc./LBI Entertainment).

4. To be truthful, the sound of the song, in tandem with the lyrics, can also be a little unsettling, particularly in the verses, which feature distant and disembodied-sounding vocals (using a “radio” vocal effect), and the deep reverb and torpid delivery in the choruses. Arguably, it is the song’s music, and not the lyrics as such, that carries a more problematic and emotionally ambivalent message.

5. This euphemistic language exemplifies the concept of “blurring the agent,” a function of public apologetic speech in which the apology becomes, in effect, a non-apology when the offender uses vague or obfuscatory language that distances himself from the offence (Kampf 2268–69).

6. It is not at all clear that “Pumped Up Kicks” really is about school shootings. Foster has suggested that, among other things, the song is in part a would-be hip-hop track: “I wanted to write the chorus like the lyrics to a hip-hop song.…Like, ‘Here’s who I am, I’m tougher than you and I’ll fuck you up.’ I think a lot of people want to feel that way” (qtd in Anderson). Foster has also asserted that the song came about as an exercise in self-discipline: “I really didn’t have anything to do that day.…I was standing there in the studio, and this thought came in my mind like, ‘I’m going to write a song,’ which I did all the time. I just kind of built a song from the ground up…and then I was like, ‘I don't feel like writing. I don’t want to write a song.’ I was a block away from the beach, and it was a beautiful day. I kind of just wanted to just be lazy and go hang out at the beach or whatever. But I just forced myself to write a song. I was like, ‘Nope, I want to write a song.’ By that time the next day, the song was finished” (qtd in Sculley).

7. Lyrics reprinted by permission. DIE YOUNG. Words and Music by NATE RUESS, BENNY BLANCO, LUKASZ GOTTWALD, KESHA SEBERT and HENRY WALTER © 2012 WB MUSIC CORP., FBR MUSIC, BEARVON MUSIC, DYNAMITE CORP. MUSIC, WHERE DA KASZ AT?, MATZA BALLZACK MUSIC, LOTZAH MATZAH SONGS, KASZ MONEY PUBLISHING, ONEIROLOGY PUBLISHING, DREAM MACHINE CORPORATION and PRESCRIPTION SONGS All Rights on behalf of itself, FBR MUSIC and BEARVON MUSIC Administered by WB MUSIC CORP. All Rights for DYNAMITE CORP. MUSIC, WHERE DA KASZ AT?, MATZA BALLZACK MUSIC and LOTZAH MATZAH SONGS Administered by SONGS OF KOBALT MUSIC PUBLISHING All Rights for KASZ MONEY PUBLISHING, ONEIROLOGY PUBLISHING, DREAM MACHINE CORPORATION and PRESCRIPTION SONGS Administered by KOBALT SONGS MUSIC PUBLISHING All Rights Reserved.