There's a cycle in gossip mags: every few years, someone will brave the wild north woods to chase down Stephen King in his natural environment. You know the ones. "America's Master of Horror", that kind of thing. Bring the camera, throw a few pictures of the writer, preferably on an overcast day with a black iron-trimmed Gothic house in the background somewhere.

I'm a sucker for these articles. Stuck in the doctor's office with a stack of old magazines spread on the table, inevitably the cover picture they choose draws me in.

I don't think I'm the only one. Stephen wrote this ritual into one of his books, "The Dark Half", and not as a joke, either. That scene in that book might start out feeling like a joke; Thad and his wife, the characters in the middle of it, even treat it that way. By the end, though, it's a different story entirely.

That sort of article is what sticks in my mind when I read this article on Eminem by Rob Harvilla at the Ringer. The article starts with that kind of title that I can't quite pass by, and then gets rolling with the theme throughout. It's, dare I say it, gothic.

Which is why, when Rob discusses the song Just the Two of Us/97 Bonnie and Clyde (lyrics warning if you've never heard Eminem, and let's face it for quite a few of the rest of the links to follow in this article), my mind turns to murder songs. And isn't that an old tradition in the American tradition?

Start with the gender-flipped point of view. Janie's Got a Gun by Aerosmith, and before that, the Bobby Russell song The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (that's the Reba McEntire version, but Vickie Lawrence had the first version to hit the charts in 1973). These two in particular build the story around the killer's motivations, but the end place is the same.

In the brutalist vein Eminem is always associated with, there's Used To Love Her by Guns N' Roses.

Go back further than the American tradition, and there's that perennial, Whiskey in the Jar, a staple of coffee houses the world over. Thin Lizzy and Metallica doing it up loud and proud makes me giggle, especially now whenever I hear an acoustic version and see people scratching their heads over it.

I don't know that it's the oldest song in this line, but there's also "Delia's Gone" (note: historical inspiration here going back to at least Blind Willie McTell, the wiki on Delia Green gives a good overview). The most well-known recent version is Johnny Cash's, always worth a listen, but a fun version I'll link to instead is by Wyclef Jean.

heh: The Long Black Veil, recorded by Lefty Frizzell and written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin seems like it ought to be older, doesn't it? 1959 though, so it's in the same sort of thing, though the death is (deliberately?) mistaken identity in this case.

I remember an old quote that sort of sums all this up. Johnny Cash again, he said there's really only three subjects important enough to write a song about: God, love, and murder. And yeah, Cash did end up putting together an album collection titled "Love, God, and Murder"...