Stigmatized
Posted by Skrud at Thursday, September 28th 2006 at 7:35pm
I saw Megadeth last night for the third time. It was an awesome show, because Megadeth is just so badass live.
But all day today people have been coming up to me and saying “I hear that’s what the Dawson guy was listening to before he went and shot everyone.” And that just pisses me off. By the end of the day I didn’t even feel like engaging anyone in conversation anymore and just said “Yeah, maybe I’ll shoot some place up, too.” Clearly, everyone who listens to Megadeth is obviously a serial killer to be. Until now, I’ve been pretty pleased with the mass media’s slew of articles warning against the stereotyping of goths and metalheads and various other subcultures. Unfortunately it seems people are much quicker to typecast than they are to sympathize.
After Columbine happened, for my remaining years of high school was constantly associated with the “trenchcoat mafia”. Because I wore black, had long hair and listened to heavy metal. (I’ve never worn a trenchcoat in my life). People used to stop me in the halls and point and be “what you’re gonna shoot up the place?”. It was basically adding insult to my already injured feelings of high school. Even in CEGEP, one of our economics profs looked at me in the first class and said “Hey, man in black! You don’t have a gun on you do you?”. I don’t care if he was kidding (it didn’t really sound like it). It’s not fucking funny.
The Megadeth song in question is none other than A Tout Le Monde, which coincidentally has part of its chorus sung in French. Before playing the song, Dave Mustaine told the audience how he heard about the Dawson shootings. You can read most of the speech in today’s Gazette but this is the part that counts:
Megadeth has a special relationship with Montreal, and we were pissed off. This is one of the most metal cities in the whole continent. That guy wasn’t worthy of being a Megadeth fan. For those of you who are living, this is your song. For those who are hurt, getter better soon. For those who were lost, we hope you’re looking down from heaven. He’ll be burning in hell for a long time.
Megadeth does have a special relationship with Montreal. They will play A Tout Le Monde every single show, even if they don’t play it on the rest of the tour. Here is just about the only city on the continent where every single person in the audience will sing along to the French part of the chorus, which goes:
A tout le monde
A tous mes amis
Je vous aime
Je dois partir
These are the last words
I’ll ever speak
Now set me free…
Out of context, people often assume that the song is a suicide note. That’s not at all what it is. From an interview in 1994, the year the song was released, Dave said:
It’s not a suicide song. What it is, it’s, you, it’s when people have a loved one that dies and they end on a bad note, you know, they wish that they could say something to them. So this is an opportunity for the deceased to say something before they go. And it was my impression of what I would like to say to people, if I had say, 3 seconds to do so in life before I died I’d say to the entire world, to all my friends, I love you all, and now I must go. These are the last words I’ll ever speak, and they’ll set me free. I don’t need to say I’m sorry, I don’t have to say I’m going to miss you, or I’ll wait for ya. You know, I’ll just say I loved you all, good, bad and different, I loved you all.
I’m always angry when people take some of my favourite songs, styles and things and lump them together as some great evil symbol because of what one idiot did. There are easily hundreds of thousands of people who listen to Megadeth in North America alone. Do all of them go on murderous rampages? Hell no. I bet they play “violent videogames,” too. For the elventy billionth time:
CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION
Do you really need a giant spaghetti monster to tell you that the decrease in the population of pirates is due to the general rise in temperatures over the last hundred years?
It’s just like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer starts the “Bear Patrol” to keep bears from roaming Springfield, and Lisa exclaims “but that’s just like saying that this rock keeps tigers away”!
People weren’t pointing their fingers at violent video games and heavy metal after the Polytechnique massacre happened. And no, it’s not different just because he was targeting “feminists”.
There are certainly other factors involved in these people’s lives other than the music they listen to. If all the things you’ve been hearing about Kimveer Gill and the Columbine massacre are true, then I would be a prime candidate for going haywire around the city with a gun because I listen to heavy metal, I play violent video games and I was picked on in high school.
Did you know I was suspended for a few days from high school pending psychiatric evaluation after Columbine happened? Maybe I’ll tell the story in detail sometime.
So please, next time you see a metalhead, goth, or otherwise subculturish person, think twice before you label them as a killer. They’re probably just as freaked out about everything as you are, and they’re the ones that are stuck with the unfortunate stigma.
