Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

The significance of lyrics in pop music is not overrated; in fact, it’s probably under-rated. And this is what people overlook about modern country music. They fail to see that it’s a word-based idiom, and words are far more effective than pianos or guitars. The manipulation of sonics makes someone like Moby a genius, but he’ll never have the middle-class importance of someone like Toby Keith.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking that this is a profoundly depressing argument, because it implies that the only things that can be culturally important are things that appeal to the lowest common denominator. But that’s not what I’m suggesting. I realize that Toby Keith seems like a troglodyte, especially when he appears in those long-distance commercials with Terry Bradshaw and ALF—but it’s not his simplicity that makes him vital. It’s his clarity. Keith writes songs like 1993’s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” and what’s compelling is that you can’t deconstruct its message. “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” is not like Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive,” where Jon Bon Jovi claimed to live like a cowboy; Toby Keith wants to be a cowboy for real. “I should have been a cowboy,” he sings. “I should have learned to rope and ride.” Somewhat amusingly, the cowboys Toby references in his songs are all fake cowboys (Gunsmoke’s Marshal Dillon, cinematic crooners Gene Autry and Roy Rogers), but fake cowboys are the only kind that Keith—and most of America—ever wanted to embody. When I was fourteen, I liked Bon Jovi, and part of the reason why was because I liked the idea of riding a steel horse and using whiskey bottles as wall calendars. I aspired to turn my life into that of a modern-day cowboy,[61] and that always seemed vaguely possible. But whenever I go back to my hometown and see the people I grew up with—many of whom are still living the same life we all had twelve years ago as high school seniors—I realize that I was very much the exception. Lots of people (in fact, most people) do not dream about morphing their current life into something dramatic and cool and metaphoric. Most people see their life as a job that they have to finish; if anything, they want their life to be less complicated than it already is. They want their life to only have one meaning. So when they imagine a better existence, it’s either completely imaginary (i.e., Toby’s nineteenth-century Lone Ranger fantasy) or staunchly practical (i.e., Yearwood’s description of the girl who just wants to get married without catching static from her old man). The reason Garth Brooks and Shania Twain have sold roughly 120 million more albums than Bob Dylan and Liz Phair is not because record buyers are all a bunch of blithering idiots; it’s because Garth and Shania are simply better at expressing the human condition. They’re less talented, but they understand more people.

The paradox, of course, is that I’m writing this essay while staring at my CD rack, which currently holds seventeen Dylan and Phair records and exactly three country records released after 1974. And in a weird way, that makes me happy. I have at least one thing in common with Bob Dylan: Neither one of us understands how the world works. When push comes to shove, we’re both Reba’s bitch.

(Johnny Cash interlude)

Here is the easiest way to explain the genius of Johnny Cash: Singing from the perspective of a convicted murderer in the song “Folsom Prison Blues,” Cash is struck by pangs of regret when he sits in his cell and hears a distant train whistle. This is because people on that train are “probably drinkin’ coffee.” And this is also why Cash seems completely credible as a felon: He doesn’t want freedom or friendship or Jesus or a new lawyer. He wants coffee.

Within the mind of a killer, complex feelings are eerily simple.

This is why killers can shoot men in Reno just to watch them die, and the rest of us usually can’t.

15 This Is Zodiac Speaking 1:79

The killing machine wore a cowboy hat, and he was a real sweetheart.

Let me drag you back to the summer of 2001. I was in a karaoke bar in a Washington town called Lacey, a little place outside Olympia, which is a little place outside Seattle. That’s when my friend Sarah appears to have danced with a serial killer. Sarah spent ten minutes twirling and whirling to Brooks & Dunn with an (allegedly) fucked-up weirdo who may have killed at least five women throughout the Pacific Northwest. I suppose this fella did seem a tad creepy (at least to me), but not in a “I’m gonna drag you home to rape you and kill you and defile your corpse” sort of way. That would be an exaggeration on the behalf of my memory. He just seemed like the kind of person who aspired to buy a used Trans Am and possibly wore Brut cologne.

The bar was a joint strangely called Mehfil, and—for some odd reason—it’s attached to an Indian restaurant; you could kind of smell curry fused with warm Budweiser, assuming that’s possible (perhaps it was just the scent of lumberjack sweat). The reason we were in Mehfil was because certain friends of mine think karaoke is “fabulously ironic,” apparently because stupid, white-trash divorcees often sing Linda Ronstadt’s “It’s So Easy” in public. What honestly seemed more ironic was that the vast majority of people in this particular bar were semi-intellectual twenty-two-year-old hippies from the nearby fake college of Evergreen, all of whom were trying to feel superior by mocking the (maybe) eight or nine buck-toothed regulars who earnestly sing at Mehfil as an extension of their actual life. In places like Olympia, coolness and condescension are pretty much the same thing.

However, one of those sincere regulars at Mehfil was a man named Michael Braae, and he was getting the last laugh, mostly by (allegedly) killing local girls at random. But we didn’t know that at the time, of course; we were just getting hammered on Maker’s Mark and Pepsi when Braae sauntered up to my friend Sarah and politely asked her to dance.

Now, Sarah is not exactly Giselle; I can recall that there was at least one other woman at the bar that night who was more striking than she. But Sarah is definitely attractive, and she’s a good drinker, and she has luxurious red hair that smells like papayas. Moreover, Sarah just looks nice; she is the kind of person who makes you want to tell your secrets. Her eyes are guileless and enthusiastic at the same time. And part of me suspects that’s why Michael Braae thought she’d be a perfect girl to dance with, and—at least in theory— shoot in the skull, which is what some investigators believe he did to a girl named Marchelle Morgan a month before he was arrested.

Fortunately, Sarah’s brush with Braae did not end with any skull shooting. “Cowboy Mike” (that’s what everyone called him at the bar) merely danced with her twice (and he was a pretty nifty dancer). We all watched them from across the room. When they finished, Sarah sheepishly ditched him and returned to our table of well- acquainted drunks; later that night, we teased her about having a new boyfriend while picking up some relatively terrible food at a Jack in the Box restaurant. And we never thought about Cowboy Mike again…until the Olympia cops apprehended him four weeks later. Sarah got to see his charming face on the front page of her newspaper. It seems he had jumped off a bridge into Evel Knievel’s Snake River, fleeing from local authorities who didn’t want him to kill any more of his guileless, enthusiastic, red-haired dance partners.

Somehow, I seem to have acquired three friends who have known serial killers. I find Sarah’s encounter especially intriguing, mostly because I happened to witness it firsthand; by total coincidence, I was visiting the very night Braae tried to flirt with her. However, the reason I find that encounter so interesting is not because I sat five feet from an alleged monster, nor is it because I’ve casually looked into the eyes of evil, nor is it that I feel like I’ve vicariously brushed against some twisted version of celebrity. It’s mostly because something now seems different about Sarah, even though she’s exactly the same. There’s a sexy residue to the whole Serial Killer Experience; somehow, it morphs the way I look at all the people who simply happened to collide with them (either by choice or by accident). There’s something amazingly modern about meeting a man who kills innocent strangers arbitrarily. It has a way of making someone’s personality abstractly sophisticated.

This is probably because serial killing is the most modern of high crimes, even though it’s not new in any official sense (Jack the Ripper’s 1888 London spree is the most obvious proof of this, but there are certainly others). The metaphoric newness of serial killing has nothing to do with chronology; it has to do with its meaning. At least culturally, there is something accelerated about the notion of killing strangers for no valid reason. It’s one of those nightmare situations we collectively try to rationalize into nonexistence, almost as if it’s entirely fictional. And most of the time, that rationalization makes sense: If a man is trying to kill you, his reasons—though flawed—are still