In case the title didn’t tip you off to such, this article is going to a particularly heavy one, given the source material, so as much as I love getting reads and clicks, this one is a hard pill to swallow even for me. For those unaware, I am an educator by day, and so the subject matter of this video is difficult to talk about. But given my profession and my background, I feel compelled to talk about it, so here goes nothing.
Industrial pop duo SKYND is best known for making music titled after infamous real-life villains and serial killers. For this latest effort, “Columbine,” however, the group opted not to name the perpetrators of what was at the time the largest mass shooting in recorded United States history. Lyrically, the track focuses on the psychological state of the killers, with lines such as “no vendetta, seeking fame” and the haunting “ra-ta-ta-ta” of the pre-chorus.
It’s not particularly hard to enjoy this song from a purely sonic perspective, with its catchy hook, the heavy bass of the interludes, and the tinge of hip-hop swagger to the production and the beat. The eponymous vocalist SKYND plays two sides of a coin, one as an imposing would-be shooter, while in other moments her character is a frightened potential victim, faced with split-second decisions that mean the difference between life and death.
Getting on my soapbox again, while this video may seem excessive or without artistic value, the reality is that violence in schools is an epidemic that, until very recently, was a legitimate threat to students and faculty within American schools. The video is a damning of our inability to learn from the unimaginable tragedy of Columbine High. The fact that we have a stereotype of a “school shooter” without doing anything about curbing the chances that any of that happens again is shameful, and that there is a culture surrounding school shooters and - and I really hate going here - incels, rather than doing something about the mental health of our youth, or our populace in general… well, that’s how we end up with something like this.
It’s a great song from a critical perspective, but damn if it doesn’t put a pit in the stomach.
See the disturbing video for “Columbine” below [WARNING for scenes of violence which re-enact a real-life incident]:
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