The morbid song that turned Ted Bundy’s confession tapes into a dark alt-rock anthem
Before modern news, we had murder ballads. And then came art with morbid fascination – art that repurposed off-hand comments, statements, or other parts of crime stories filtered into songwriting gold, narratives that spun it with poetic finesse, like The Killers when they wrote ‘Jenny Was a Friend of Mine’, a line hand-picked directly from the confessional tape of Jennifer Levin’s murderer. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, one name that’s captivated countless musicians in recent years is none other than Ted Bundy.
One quick search about songs inspired by Bundy tells you everything you need to know about his place in pop culture. A crime so heinous will always shake the core of society with questions of motive, of how anybody could be so callous, inspiring art that explores the same lines of darkness that pervade the underbelly of civilisation. There aren’t just a handful of songs borrowing from the story; there are countless, from Mötley Crüe’s ‘Just Another Psycho’ to Eminem’s ‘Stay Wide Awake’.
But one that takes this a step further, embracing the nuance and realism of the story while referencing legitimate documentation and on-the-record statements is Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Ted, Just Admit It’. Held on their appropriately titled debut, Nothing’s Shocking, ‘Ted, Just Admit It’ was clearly spearheaded initially by Eric Avery’s driving bassline and ethereal arrangements swirling around the sinister undertone hinged on a horrific tale none of us can seem to move away from.
After the whimsical intro, the words “Everybody’s so full of shit” coming in before a swirl of repeated, “Everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody…” the song launches into a recorded quote from Bundy himself, in which he says: “There’s gonna be people turning up in canyons, there are gonna be people being shot in Salt Lake City. Because the police there aren’t willing to accept, what I think they know. And they know I didn’t do these things.”
While most can attest to the moral dilemma of incorporating such sensitive material in art, those blurred lines present interesting questions about the nature of artistic enjoyment, and how Bundy seems to worm his way into different creative industries without remorse, like his inclusion in places like gritty true crime dramas and heavy rock seems to be a rite of passage, something everybody will cross at some point, merely because of how much darkness it holds at its own core.
But that’s also what Nothing’s Shocking was all about. Even with its heady contemporary relevance and obvious influence of all those who came before, much of this initial foray was about the beauty and magic of an overactive imagination, where many of the songs took you on a journey, ones that exist solely in their own place, even with direct references to something else. It didn’t matter if you didn’t immediately pick up on Bundy’s voice in the opening notes, because it was about how the emotion guided the entire experience.
Its whole purpose was to provoke, for better or worse. Just like one VP once said the album artwork was “the second-most repulsive cover I’ve ever seen,” songs like ‘Ted, Just Admit It’ wanted you to feel a certain type of way, good or bad, so long as it made you think about it long after. Listening to it now, there is a certain unease knowing what it was inspired by, but you can’t help the brilliance of the music, which, in the end, is the exact type of cognitive dissonance they were going for.
