Read the Lyrics to Emmure’s “Bring a Gun to School”

There’s been a lot of brouhaha over a song on the new Emmure album which was originally called “Bring a Gun to School” — so much so that the band actually changed the name of the track to “Untitled.”

Lambgoat has now obtained the lyrics to the song, so we can all take a look and see whether or not they’re actually offensive. Although I still haven’t heard Emmure latest’s, Eternal Enemies, a reliable third party source has verified that these are the real lyrics.

Get it through your fucking head
All your friends are fucking dead
Yeah they got what they deserved
Stop acting hard you know it hurts
Your loved ones living in the dirt

Holy fucking shit
I’m having too much fun
Killing everyone
That you’ve ever loved

All your friends are fucking dead
Yeah they got what they deserved
Stop acting hard you know it hurts
Your loved ones living in the dirt

Okay. Well, those lyrics are certainly dumb (Frankie Palmeri has a Whitney Houston-esque tendency to just write a few lines and then repeat himself over and over and over again), but I’ll say before what I’ve been saying all along — this is really no more offensive than Slayer’s “Angel of Death,” to say nothing of any number of death metal songs about events both real and imagined. I’m sincerely way more offended that the album has a DJ on it than I am that they chose to write a song about school shootings.

(And, yes, I remember the Cold Soul merch controversy, and I remember that I was pretty cranky about it. But this is an entirely different situation. Song lyrics– which are poetry, good or bad — usually leave some room for the listener to interpret the writer’s meaning. Only an insane person would hear “Bring a Gun to School” and assume Palmeri is actually endorsing murder, the same way only an insane person would use Cannibal Corpse’s “Fucked with a Knife” as a guide to dating. But the visual images used on the Cold Soul shirts filled in that interpretive void, and the lack of a contrast between those images and the text on those shirts made them feel as though they might actually be endorsing violence. There’s a reason Slayer never made a shirt with Mengle actually on it.)

Again, can’t believe I’m fucking defending Emmure here. But if we’re not put off by the fact that one of the most popular modern death metal bands out there is named after a real-life crime, I don’t know why we should be put off by this shit.