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.

Heather wrote:

Okay…onwards to the actual point. After the shooting yesterday, the media has decided to find out about the shooter by accessing some of the stuff he posted online (you can access the CBC online article here):

In his profile on vampirefreaks.com, a website devoted to Goth culture, Gill called himself “Trench,” and wrote: “You will come to know him as the Angel of Death.”

“Work sucks … School sucks … Life sucks … What else can I say?” he wrote. “Metal and Goth kick ass. Life is like a video game, you gotta die sometime.”

Now, quite obviously the guy was disturbed…i mean, he went on a shooting rampage, but this isn’t the first time that someone’s livejournal, wordpress, xanga or whatever other interface writings have been used to corroborate the media’s depiction of a killer. I wonder about this as a techinque…i can definitely see the sensational appeal, but how much does the average individual’s blog reflect their true thoughts?

The problem with the blog quotes that the media reported on is quite simply that they aren’t necessarily distinguishable from what any angsty teen would post on the internet. I’m pretty sure I used to write the same way when I was 16 and morbidly depressed. I wouldn’t be surprised if I found an uncannily similar anecdote buried whatever I used to scribble on in high school.

The only thing that makes it creepy is the fact that this guy did turn out to be a psycho killer. If he never went to Dawson yesterday and still wrote all that stuff, nobody would think anything of it. The posts are given “retroactive” creepiness.

Maybe the real warning sign was the fact that he was 25 years old and still writing like that.

And the worst part is that this kind of incident only provokes stereotypes related to gamers, music fans, goths and various other subcultures.

Maybe potential murderous rampagers are metal fans, but according to a study conducted recently, so are IT workers. So if you’re a metalhead, you might be a serial killer – but you might just be a computer programmer. Can you tell the difference?

It’s important that the media and general public in general realize that while violent games and movies and music might appeal to psychotic killer types, they also appeal to perfectly normal human beings who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Saying that someone went and shot up a school because he was influenced by some videogame is like saying he did it because he wears clothes. The “influence” was surely already there long before he picked up a controller.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/09/13/shots-dawson.html

Either way, it’s certainly an interesting way to spend the morning… sitting there, reading my e-mail, hearing this loud doorbell and staring at a strobe light (with the emitter clearly labeled “F I R E”) trying to figure out if I should, well, move. But then the ringing stopped. So I went back to work. And then finally we got the voice message on the loudspeaker.

It’s amazing how many people went straight for the escalators. That’s a pretty silly thing to do. The escalators are jam-packed when people are just getting of out of class let alone when they’re evacuating the whole freakin’ building. I took the sparsely populated stairwell and upon getting out noticed that de Maisonneuve was armed to the gills with fire trucks. Does that mean classes are cancelled for the day? I have a tutorial to give at 10:15. It’ll be weird if no one shows up.