In this episode of the Red Eye Report, we discuss Music & Murder. There are some messed up album covers out there! Also in the show, Ashtray flings his fat dad body off a janky tree stand and rope swing and Teddy rants about Covid. Here we go again!
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In this episode of the Red Eye Report, we discuss Music…and Murder. We break into an animal shelter just to laugh at the dumb fucks who got caught and as usual, we Bring the Noise. With me this week is the all seeing Oracle. A lotta people don’t know this but to pay his way through college, Oracle posed nude in a seedy underground skin mag called Beefarama. It was about as gay as the beach volleyball scene from Top Gun and it was only distributed in Prison Commissaries, but hey gotta pay the bills amiright? Next to him is the soot covered Ashtray. In a misguided attempt to upstage his cousin’s progressive and way too liberal parenting philosophy, he got his newborn a Hooker. Just kidding, it was a pornhub account. We’ve also got a fluffy Teddy Burr. Teddy once told us all in a drunken stupor that he licked a homeless woman’s asshole in an abandoned church. Oh wait, that was Ashtray. Thats right it was Teddy who got….you know what, nevermind. Last and least, I’m the Mistic. I once ate an entire bag of Doritos….out of a homeless woman’s asshole, in the back of a food truck called Beefarama, while Teddy spanked my…..you know what…Nevermind. This is the Red Eye Report.
Chuck, the Spider Monkey. Freeform Masturbation.
- “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads is a landmark track of the 1970s new wave and punk scene. Released on their 1977 debut album Talking Heads: 77, its jittery, paranoid energy perfectly captured the anxieties of the era, even though it was written years before the band even had a record deal.
The Origins
Frontman David Byrne wrote “Psycho Killer” around 1973 while he was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), alongside drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth. They were playing in an early band called The Artistics.
Byrne has said the initial inspiration was an attempt to write a song that sounded like Alice Cooper performing a Randy Newman ballad. He was fascinated by the idea of writing from the perspective of a serial killer, aiming to capture the inner monologue of someone whose mind is unraveling, rather than glorifying the violence itself.
The French Connection
One of the most distinctive elements of the song is the bridge and chorus, which feature lyrics in French (like “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”—”What is it?”). Byrne asked Tina Weymouth, whose mother was French, to help translate some of his lyrics.
The use of French served two purposes:
- Detachment: It emphasized the character’s alienation and fractured state of mind, jumping between languages as if his personality was splitting.
- Pretension: Weymouth noted that killers often have a delusional sense of grandeur, and the French lyrics made the “psycho killer” sound bizarrely dignified and pretentious while descending into madness.
The Son of Sam Coincidence
When the song was finally released as a single in December 1977, it accidentally tapped into a very real cultural terror. New York City had just endured the “Son of Sam” serial killer panic (David Berkowitz was arrested in August 1977). Because the song’s release coincided so closely with the murders, many people assumed “Psycho Killer” was written directly about Berkowitz.
The band always clarified that the song predated the Son of Sam killings by several years. However, the eerie timing forever linked the song’s tense, stuttering energy to the gritty, dangerous atmosphere of 1970s New York.
- The photograph on the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 debut album is one of the most famous and harrowing images of the 20th century. Known as “The Burning Monk,” the unedited photo was a deliberate warning shot from the band: they were bringing radical, anti-authoritarian politics into the mainstream.
The True Story of the Photograph
On the morning of June 11, 1963, a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức arrived at a busy intersection in Saigon. As hundreds of monks and nuns formed a circle around him, he sat quietly in the traditional lotus meditation position. Another monk poured gasoline over his head. Quảng Đức then calmly struck a match and dropped it onto his own robes.
Eyewitnesses reported that he never moved a muscle or uttered a single sound as the flames entirely consumed him.
He performed this ultimate act of self-sacrifice to protest the South Vietnamese government under President Ngô Đình Diệm. The pro-Catholic regime had been violently persecuting the Buddhist majority—shooting unarmed protesters and aggressively banning the display of the Buddhist religious flag.
Associated Press journalist Malcolm Browne was one of the few Western reporters who showed up to document the protest that morning. His stark, black-and-white photograph won the Pulitzer Prize, horrified the international public, and became a major catalyst for the eventual collapse of the Diệm regime. President John F. Kennedy later remarked of the image, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one”.
Why the Band Chose It
Nearly 30 years later, Rage Against the Machine was preparing to release a debut album fiercely attacking capitalism, police brutality, and institutional racism. Despite their militant, grassroots stance, they were releasing the record on Epic Records—a massive corporate label.
The band needed an album cover that proved they weren’t softening their message for commercial success. Guitarist Tom Morello later explained that they wanted a visual that matched their music, which was intended to be “an uncompromised and uncompromising expression of our world views as musicians and as activists”.
By using Browne’s photo—simply cropped to a square with their ransom-note-style logo stamped in the corner—they aligned their music with the ultimate symbol of radical resistance, personal sacrifice, and absolute defiance against an oppressive government. It was a visual translation of the band’s ethos, ensuring that a record featuring abrasive political anthems like “Killing in the Name” and “Take the Power Back” would never be mistaken for standard corporate rock.
- Sonic Youth’s 1990 major-label debut, Goo, features one of the most iconic and frequently parodied album covers in alternative rock history. The artwork pairs a cool, detached aesthetic with a shockingly dark true-crime backstory.
The Artist
The cover was illustrated by Raymond Pettibon, an artist already legendary in the underground punk scene for his raw, ink-line artwork for bands like Black Flag and the Minutemen. His stark, comic-strip style provided a visual bridge between Sonic Youth’s noisy avant-garde roots and their new mainstream visibility.
The True Crime Inspiration
Despite looking like a generic pair of stylish, sunglasses-wearing British mods, the subjects are drawn directly from a 1966 newspaper photograph. The real-life figures are Maureen Hindley and her husband David Smith. They were the key witnesses in the infamous “Moors Murders” trial in the UK, whose testimonies led to the conviction of Maureen’s sister, serial killer Myra Hindley, and her accomplice Ian Brady. The original news photo captured the couple looking stoic in shades as they traveled to the courthouse.
The Fictionalized Caption
To amplify the pulp-noir aesthetic, Pettibon added a block of disturbing, fictionalized text to the right of the couple:
“I stole my sister’s boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat, and flash. Within a week we killed my parents and hit the road.”
The juxtaposition of the stylish, disaffected illustration with the violent, sensationalist caption perfectly captured the subversive energy Sonic Youth was known for. Today, the image remains deeply embedded in pop culture, with its recognizable layout constantly adapted into tribute shirts and parodies featuring characters from movies, TV shows, and other bands.
- Pungent Stench – Been Caught Buttering (1991) While Sonic Youth stylized true crime into pop art, Austrian death metal band Pungent Stench went straight to the morgue. Their 1991 album cover features a macabre image of two severed heads kissing. The photograph, titled “The Kiss,” was taken by the controversial American fine-art photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. Witkin had taken a single, real human cadaver head, sawed it perfectly in half, and arranged the two halves to face each other.
- The Dawn of Black Metal
Formed in 1984, Mayhem aimed to be the most extreme band in the world. As the guitarist and driving force, Euronymous was instrumental in creating the harsh, raw sound of Norwegian black metal. He opened an Oslo record shop called Helvete (Hell), which quickly became the central hub for the “Black Metal Inner Circle”—a militant, cult-like group of young musicians who actively promoted an anti-Christian, misanthropic ideology.
Dead’s Suicide and the Infamous Album Cover
In 1988, Mayhem recruited a Swedish vocalist named Per Yngve Ohlin, who called himself “Dead.” Dead took the band’s morbid aesthetic to new extremes, pioneering the use of “corpse paint,” burying his clothes so they would rot, and cutting himself with glass on stage.
In April 1991, Dead died by suicide in a house he shared with Euronymous. When Euronymous found the body, he didn’t immediately call the police. Instead, he went to a store, bought a disposable camera, and rearranged the scene—including the shotgun—to take photos of Dead’s corpse. One of these gruesome photos was later used as the cover for Mayhem’s infamous bootleg live album, Dawn of the Black Hearts. Euronymous also allegedly collected pieces of Dead’s skull to make necklaces for musicians he deemed “worthy”.
What’s Sexy
Oracle: Good ole campfire
Mistic: Disgraceland
Teddy: five year anniversary
Ashtray: Joining that camp bandwagon.
Fuck What You Think
Oracle: Go Wild
Mistic: Lake Murica.
Teddy: God damn covid
Ashtray: Crazy Apocalyptic flood in Nepal
by u/KindheartednessIll97 in Dammcoolbingo
Crazy flash flood scene in Nepal
by u/JuicySpark in PublicFreakout
Flash Flood in Tibet and Nepal
by u/SuchWillingness3800 in DisasterUpdate
In all Seriousness: Go fuck yourself Thurston Moore.
That’s our show, we’re gonna be here every Thursday night at 10pm central, make sure you join the conversation at theredeyereport.com or facebook.com/redeyereport…..you can also twittle us @redeye_report….like us, share us, or fuck us, we’re down for whatever. I’m Mistic…………….and this is the RED EYE REPORT!!!!!