the year's best murder ballads

but first: the Rot

Apologies for the lack of regular posts lately: I’ve been a little depressed, mostly due to what I call the Rot. I probably cribbed the word from Ed Zitron’s “Rot Economy,” a term he uses for the way that the current economic system—not quite capitalism but its mutated descendant—is composed of different grifts vying like snake heads to sustain themselves above all else, even above the traditional goals of profit. In a more general sense though, I think of “the Rot” as the way in which the Rot Economy has infested every moment of everyday life, so that even the simplest actions and reactions have become economic microtransactions and all human relations are transformed into exploiter and exploited (so you’d better get exploiting, lest you be the one who’s fucked.)¹ The Rot is the active hatred of all good things: the contempt for kindness, the brusque disregard of reality, the envious mockery of art. It’s the Twitter asshole sitting on top of his steaming nostalgic AI pixels that depict a white mom and dad stuffing their babies full of spaghetti or whatever and bragging that he can do anything an artist can do, you’re all going to be out of work. It’s the transformation of ordinary lifestyle choices into public-facing content-creation that’s effectively an MLM (I mean does something as ordinary as motherhood etc even count if you aren’t trying to recruit other women into it, as fast as possible, and subscribe and share your momfluencer channel???) It’s a society of individuals who have no connection to each other except as bleeding cash cows, who look up at the stars and see only spying machines—obsessed with looking down at me, me personally!—and run to their screens to soak up the terror.

As you can probably tell, I don’t care for the Rot. I try to avoid it, but it’s everywhere. I see it in every story about AI—the blissful articles talking about how great it is that AI is replacing lesson planning, legal research, the hiring process; coupled always with desperate social media posts from teachers whose students think ChatGPT is a real search engine, or from injured parties who were given fake legal advice, or from the unemployed who can’t get a job because a mindless and often racist hiring AI ignores their resume. It always takes a longer to explain the second part, that this shit is dumb is hell and outside a few reasonable applications almost never fucking works. And few people have time for anything that takes a few seconds longer, that isn’t instant gratification of exactly what they want to hear.

I’m old enough to remember the Bush era, and how Stephen Colbert identified the prevalent lazy disinterest in reality as “truthiness.” You could say “truthiness” at the time because it was a noticeable shift in the public conversation, how so much of our discourse was skewing rapidly toward bullshit. You can’t say it anymore, however, because now everything is truthiness, everything is the Rot.² What’s actually true and really happened isn’t as important anymore as which narrative wins. And that’s why Trump is the appropriate apotheosis and divine punishment of this era, because so many Americans think he’s a winner, and that they’ll win reality alongside him. I’m not sure they’ll even notice when they don’t.

Speaking of fawning all over a perceived winner, Substack embarrassed the hell out of itself on Tuesday by announcing a partnership with Bari Weiss’ publication The Free Press. Marisa Kabas has a great writeup of why this is such a problem: basically, Substack already tolerated the presence of Nazis on this platform under the guise of freedom of speech, but they’re now actively rewarding socially conservative, anti-trans journalism with special tools and attention. Substack even announced this partnership in proper Rot terms, insisting that “the Free Press is old school in the best way, with meticulous editorial standards that it upholds through in-depth reporting, fact-checking, editing, original photography, and more.”

NO. This isn’t even remotely true. This is the “Charlie Brown had hoes” of publishers’ statements. Not only has The Free Press printed debunked lies,³ it isn’t even interesting or well-edited: it’s just another well-funded right-wing propaganda rag, indistinguishable from any number of well-funded right wing propaganda rags. They certainly don’t need more money and more access (if anything, they need a personality). The only reason for Substack to form a special partnership with contrarian trash like this is to announce that they love a winner, and that they think they know the winning side.

As a loser myself, it’s probably time to decamp. But I need to do some research on whether it’s better to publish this newsletter through Ghost or Beehiiv or one of the other options, and then find the time and energy to implement the change. It shouldn’t be that bad, I just don’t have much extra bandwidth at the moment. But yeah, sorry to my new (and old) followers, I hope to make the transition as streamlined for everybody as possible. And I may switch up the subject matter here a bit. I know people have liked the longer political essays, but I want to return my focus, at least some of the time, on the things that are not the Rot, but are real and true and good.

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Speaking of which: the murder ballads. Like many people I’ve been obsessed with the story of Luigi Mangione’s (still technically alleged) shooting of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the broader public reaction to it. As of right now, you can buy a Luigi Mangione saint candle at Walmart (it seems to be through a third-party seller). Graffiti and defaced billboards supporting Luigi have sprung up all over the country and even in Venice, where it seems they’re proud of the man with the most Italian name imaginable. TikTok is awash in brand-new murder ballads, some of which were initially taken down, but the rest of which have been allowed to stay (until TikTok itself is maybe taken down??? I can’t follow what’s happening there.)

Anyway, I present to you my top five favorite murder ballads on the subject of our new folk hero Luigi Mangione, which you may want to download before they (and maybe he) cease to exist. There’s probably still a trace of the Rot here—it’s impossible to separate any creative or even destructive act from the like-share-subscribe economy, and the fact that basically all artists have to sell themselves on corporate platforms. But there are still real artists making real art: in this case, blending the old tradition of murder ballads with current events and different styles to make something genuinely new, and startling.

1. Joe Devito, “Deny Defend Depose.”
   This is my favorite of the Luigi murder ballads, maybe because it was the first one I heard and it just blew my hair back. The original version of “Deny Defend Depose” was at least temporarily taken down from TikTok and can be found uploaded on Bluesky here. I actually like the initial draft better: it’s less rushed, and the way Devito draws out his gorgeous lyric “be a thorn upon the rose” really sells it. The newer version is also available on Spotify.

2. Jesse Welles, “United Health”
   This one is just perfect, an absolute classic of the murder ballad genre. Welles’ grim expression, especially at the end, really sells it. He also manages to throw in Richard T. Burke, a crucial figure in the story of how American healthcare got to be like this, calling him “the Jeff Bezos of fear” which is just an extraordinary line.

3. Dragon of the West, [Untitled?]
   Rap is a perfect genre for the murder ballad. It also lends itself to interesting perspective choices: it seems like most folk/country murder ballads are narrated in a distant, bardic third person, but rap tends to be more personal and immediate.⁴ Dragon of the West decided to rap from Luigi Mangione’s point of view, and it works brilliantly. His flow in this track is incredible; I hope he posts a new version soon with slightly crisper production.

4. Joseph Terrell, “Deny Depose Defend”
   This is another great murder ballad with a terrific melody, but the lyrics are slightly weaker than some of the others. Still, the production is very nice, and it’s also available on Spotify.

5. Matthew Newell, [Untitled?]

   The lyrics are more than a little on the nose, but that cowboy hat, paisley shirt, and cowboy-country vocal drop? You simply have to stan it.

A final bonus shoutout to this Spotify playlist titled “POV: Taking out a CEO” which the algorithm is now apparently recommending at random to random white-collar professionals. Who’s the Rot now, baby???

1. I also remember “the Rot,” used in pretty much the same sense as mine, appearing in a short story in a women’s magazine about 20-25 years ago. (This was back when women’s magazines still ran short stories—it was Vanity Fair, maybe?) Anyway I distinctly remember that one of the offered examples of “the Rot” would be a rapist athlete getting welcomed back into his hometown with cheers and a parade. Timely! Maybe the Rot has been here longer than we realize.

2. Or maybe you can’t say “truthiness” anymore because of woke!!!!!!!!!!!! Substack, you can mail that Good Journalism check directly to my door.

3. Marisa Kabas’ piece above has a good rundown of some of the anti-trans bullshit that the Free Press has peddled. I cannot emphasize the extent to which the Free Press is simply a bad, boring publication, and most of its content could be written by algorithm.

4. s/o to my own personal folk hero Adrian Rennix, who introduced me to the classic murder ballad “The Pursuit of Farmer Michael Hayes” which is in first person.