I wrote about this to Ben a few days ago but I feel like I want to dig deeper into it. Or maybe even just show it to a few more people, because of how wack I think it is.
The other week, I overheard a podcast Jenn was listening to about Ed Gein. It was great. He was nuts. It got me thinking about all the serial killer stuff that adorned Cannibal Corpse’s Butchered at Birth and Tomb of the Mutilated albums, so I went down a small rabbit hole on that stuff. I found that the sample on Tomb of the Mutilated of the guy talking about cutting out a vagina and eating it is Arthur Shawcross, an American serial killer and rapist I had never heard of before. Here is the song with his admission at the start.
Now look at this picture of Shawcross in prison in 2002.
That’s his daughter on the left and granddaughter on the right. First off, I can’t imagine smiling and hugging a man who killed and raped women and children. If they were men, mad respect. Jk. Anyway, I just don’t understand how anyone could be like “yeah but that’s my DAD.” To me, he’s not really human. He lacks some of the critical components that make us human. He’s a malfunctioning robot that is stuck on ‘kill’ mode. How could his family trust him not to rape and kill them and eat their genitals too? I don’t think I can believe that a broken human like Shawcross is able to draw those kinds of lines anywhere — I feel like him smiling and holding these women in this photo is a purposeful facade, just a way of looking like a normal human, just him trying to fit in so it looks good on a parole application and maybe he can one day be freed and be able to kill again.
The other aspect that bothers me here is that his granddaughter is wearing a Burzum shirt. For the uninitiated, Burzum is a one man Norwegian black metal band consisting of a guy who stabbed another Norwegian musician to death and to this day espouses white supremacist ideology. Burzum is basically unlistenable trash, and dog whistle of a band that I don’t think anyone actually enjoys — I think Burzum’s “fans” are actually just thirsty edge lords.
But Burzum is an extreme metal band nonetheless, so I assume that Shawcross’ granddaughter is aware of more common extreme metal like Cannibal Corpse, and is likely aware of the sample of Shawcross found on the aforementioned Cannibal Corpse song.
So when this young woman wears a Burzum shirt to go visit and take pictures with her serial killer rapist grandfather in prison, I feel like she is basically saying, “I think it’s super neat that my grandad is a monster and prominently featured on a death metal album dedicated to rape and murder, and I’m such an extreme edge lord that I’m also into supporting white nationalism (but only in a semi-covert way by wearing the shirt of a band that only a few people are aware of as being white nationalist).” I feel like she is just a small step away from wearing a Tomb of the Mutilated shirt to visit him, and outright celebrating her grandfather’s atrocities. It’s right on the precipice of being beyond crass and tasteless, of being utterly offensive. And I hate saying that because I feel like I’m offensive a lot of the time — I feel like a hypocrite when I say someone else is offensive. I’m not sure how to reconcile that but that’s probably a whole other blog post.
Basically, seeing that picture of a serial killer smiling and hugging his child and grandchild, who may be totally okay with the monstrous things he has done, just made me really sad about the malevolence, ignorance, childishness, and stupidity humans are capable of.
crimson highway 