Best Crime Songs - Murder

So I wrote a column for The Deadline, my friend's resolutely non-online newspaper, about the best crime songs ever written. And since I want to keep the blog going without writing new stuff just yet, I'm gonna go back through and post them all, one by one. First up: murder.

Best Crime Song - Murder

There was a time I would have said “Folsom Prison Blues” hands down; “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” is pretty hard to top, lyrically. But this song has a sleeping flaw. Namely, even though said homicide apparently took place in Nevada, Johnny’s narrator’s singing from Folsom Prison, which is, of course, in California. So there are clear jurisdictional issues here, which lead me to question the narrator’s veracity. Not that I believe a lot of other narrators—as much as I love staples of gangsta rap like Ice Cube and Dr. Dre’s “Natural Born Killers” (and Cash-esque murder ballads like Nick Cave’s “Mercy Seat”), they’re more like cartoons than documentaries. And while Eminem can get every bit as far over the top, he at least convinced me in “‘97 Bonnie & Clyde” that he’d thought long and hard about the murder in question. Key to this is that he’s sick enough to actually imagine his cutesy explanations of everything to his young daughter. “Maybe when you’re old enough to understand it better I’ll explain it to you. But for now let’s say mama was real real bad, was being mean to dad and made him real real mad. But I still feel sad that I put her on time-out,” he raps to her before making a series of googoo baby noises to distract her, and then dumping her mother’s corpse off the end of a dock. It almost doesn't matter whether or not you like the song—you believe it, and that's much more important.