i’m not much of a music person (although i was voted “most musically inclined” by my peers in middle school for singing and playing the saxomophone), so it’s not every day that i really sit down to examine music. this weekend, however, spending over sixteen hours in the car on our trip up to Vermont allowed me to really zero in on some very interesting songs. and with Andy, a fairly musically inclined person, sitting next to me, we had a great time dissecting some of the albums we brought on the trip, the new albums of Kanye West and Death Cab for Cutie among others. i’ll pick one in particular (not of those two albums) to discuss briefly.

John Wayne Gacy, Jr. by Sufjan Stevens in his album Illinois (2005)
what sounds like a pretty song with some sad overtones is actually a really chilling one with a very ambiguous message once you pay attention to the lyrics. the subject of the song is the life of Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr., who murdered (tortured and raped) almost thirty young men in a three-year span and kept their bodies under his floorboards. Stevens focuses on Gacy’s childhood experiences (the alcoholic father, the loving neighbors) and puts a soft lense over the brutality of the murders — what was undoubtedly a deranged act is transformed into the poetic: “He took of all their clothes for them / He put a cloth on their lips / Quiet hands, quiet kiss /On the mouth” Stevens goes on to romanticize the secrecy of Gacy’s murders with his last lines in which he feels that he is in many ways no better than the serial killer: “in my best behavior / i am just like him / just look beneath the floorboards / for the secrets i have hid” it’s a tough song to really take in, and it’s sometimes unfathomable how someone can even make a sympathetic song about a figure such as Gacy. and yet, the originality and the boldness of it really did evoke certain feelings for me personally. we so often automatically associate serial killers with an inherent maliciousness and evil which we ourselves are so sure we’re lacking. but Stevens’s attempt to project humanity into the life of a killer is a challenge to our conventional thinking, and one that deserves some attention, if not applause.

note: the Weekend section for Vermont is currently in the works. i put up a few pics already. it’s a great state. Sufjan should make an album about Vermont some day.