Hey Joe, Where You Goin' With That Gun In Your Hand?

That was the musical question posed by Jimi Hendrix way back in 1967, to which the standard reply was "I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady. You know I caught her messin' around with another man." The "standard answer" because the song had been around for some years before that, covered by many different artists, including The Byrds and They Surfaris before Jimi made it his own. Eventually, Rolling Stone magazine recognized this story of a man on the run, hunting down the woman who done him wrong as number 198 in their list of the 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time. Monster honkin' blues riffs, and a compelling story of spousal abuse. I never thought much about the lyrical content. Until recently.
Now I'm hearing "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People on the radio. It tells the story of a kid who is having homicidal thoughts, and it suggests that you probably won't outrun his bullets. It's part of a tradition of delusional youth songs that can be traced back through Pearl Jam's "Jeremy," The Boomtown Rats "I Don't Like Mondays," Warren Zevon's "Excitable Boy," all the way to The Beatles' "Maxwell'ls Silver Hammer." The list goes on and on, but I'm getting old and cranky, and as a result I am feeling the rust on the wheels of my brain. Is it a good thing to have a pop-dance tune about kids shooting one another? In this day and age?
The phrase "in this day and age" sticks out in my mind because of the the incident I caught on my local news the other night: A fourteen-year-old boy was shot and killed on Sunday night in South San Francisco, and another was wounded. I have a fourteen-year-old son. I know a bunch of fourteen-year-old boys, and I am hard-pressed to think of what they might do that would be worthy of being killed. Sent to their room. Maybe even bounced around a little by their siblings or the neighborhood bullies, but killed?
To a dance beat? I'm getting old.