The Loud Family

It didn't take long before the media made the connection between Jared Loughner and the band Slipknot. They were quick to point out that the song "Bodies Hit The Floor" by Drowning Pool was in heavy rotation in the scary, cold place that is Jared's brain. If there was any Britney Spears or Jack Johnson on his iPod, it certainly wouldn't have made any ripples, since that isn't the expected connection. Heavy metal songs of rage are what they were looking for and that's what they found. Of course Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold listened to Rammstein. That is what angry teenage boys' brains sound like. Even if you turn the music off.
I remember my own brush with Satan and the powers that force us to kill and kill again. I bought Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" when I was fifteen. I picked it up because it was already considered by many to be a classic of the genre, and I wanted to find out what that genre was all about. A few of my friends began whispering behind my back about how I had fallen into the clutches of "acid rock," and they weren't sure how I would be able to handle it. I did the only thing that a child of my generation could do: I turned it up. Loud. All that howling and screeching guitars and throbbing bass made me feel better. It was good to know that these sounds weren't just inside of me. I could hear others playing them, and it gave me a sense of community.
Did it promote my sense of alienation? Maybe a little. Did Black Sabbath become my favorite band? No. That distinction remained with Cheap Trick for years after that initial taste of Ozzy and the boys. The Trick wrote some pretty fierce songs themselves, including "Surrender," which is still one of the best teen angst songs going, and it sounds better loud, too.
A couple of years later, I brought home "Get Happy" by Elvis Costello and "DEVO Live." My girlfriend at the time was concerned that I might "get into that whole punk rock thing." For the record, it would be several more years before I ever purchased "Never Mind The Bollocks." I maintained a healthy respect and just a touch of fear for those leather clad safety-pinned enthusiasts. They were just a little angrier than I was.
But maybe the biggest difference is that my mother and father knew what I was listening to. Not just because it was easily audible through the floorboards of our house at times, but because they asked. There were some furrowed brows, and there was plenty of music that was deemed inappropriate for dinnertime, but part of what took the air out of my teenaged angst was having my mother listen to something, carefully scanning the lyrics, and saying, "I kind of like this." This was not wasted on me as I now sit down and listen to Linkin Park with my son. Or My Chemical Romance. Or Slipknot. Or Black Sabbath.