If there’s one thing that September symbolizes for me, it’s a return to school. Following the summer months of June through August (though it’s become trendy to include May in it), it’s a time when education picks back up. Some may start at the tail end of August, but by now those who will be expecting to learn anything should be up and running. I know that 2020 is a special case with most going online, but the sentiment still stands. We are officially in school season, and I figured that I would celebrate it with a song that’s all about school life.
That may be a loaded statement when you think about it. There are definitely a lot of better songs about school to draw from, and yet I found myself turning to one I used to hear on KROQ 106.7 every now and then. I’d be in middle school and they used it as this comic punctuation between their serious songs. When you’re young and don’t know the world too well, it plays a lot better. And yet, the more you know the weirder it is to come to terms with the legacy of a song that has ebbed and flowed over the decades (and still has some breaking developments as of 2014). To modern generations, its title alone will likely throw up red flags, but I assure you at some point it was a funny song.
Back in 1983, Julie Brown released “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun” as a B-Side for “I Like ‘Em Big and Stupid” on Bulletz Records. While she was a comedian, not every song on her second album, “Trapped in the Body of a White Girl,” was a parody. In later years she would be given an MTV show called What Julie Says where she made fun of music trends of the time (notably Madonna). In 1983, she turned her attention to something that places her in a very different camp. She looked at the teen tragedy songs like Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve” and decided to make a campy update, full of ribald guitar and valley girl shallowness.
It’s the type of work that would make John Waters proud, believing that bad taste humor is something every human has. While I haven’t done thorough research, I do believe that Waters’ work in films like Female Trouble (1974) informed a generation that they could be tacky and offensive, provided the joke was funny. I can even see traces of it up to the likes of Adam Sandler. Of course, there was also the budding career of Dr. Demento, whose status as a comedy tastemaker continues to endure to this day. Well, he liked Julie Brown’s song and thus it began its journey into the lexicon.
The story is straightforward. The Homecoming Queen, Debi, randomly goes on a murdering spree. Things get out of control before she reveals to the narrator (Brown) that she did it for Johnny. There are endless questions as to who Johnny is, with the narrator suggesting that it’s this song’s Citizen Kane (1941) Rosebud moment that will never be answered. Debi ends in a shootout with the cops, and that’s life. On one hand, it’s not a parody of teen tragedy songs because it ends the exact same way. The only thing that makes it different is the use of valley girl humor, feeling some relief that the math teacher’s dead so the narrator doesn’t have to take a test next week. Also, there’s no love lost for the glee club.
It’s dark humor at its most direct. The joke isn’t so much murder, but the narrator’s blasé attitude towards losing most of the Betty Ford High faculty. Brown really delivers it in a way that suggests that this should never have been a big, defiant hit. It should’ve been this goofy novelty that wades around the same circles as Waters. But, it’s so wrong and perverse that it’s impossible to ignore once it gets going. Once you add in the music video, those with even a shade of dark humor in them may laugh once or twice.
Which isn’t to say that this is an endorsement. Keep in mind that this was 1983, later released on an album in 1987. If you ask Brown herself, it was a more innocent time where consequences weren’t as sensitively discussed. In light of The Columbine Shooting in 2000, she mentioned some regret about the song and felt uncomfortable singing it. There is awareness from the creators that this joke may have not aged well, especially to those who have had to deal with school shootings during the 21st century.
It’s such a prevalent problem that I understand any concern. For instance, I feel uncomfortable watching John Wick (2014) because it features mass shootings in night clubs and churches, all of which felt too familiar to the news. At some point, gun violence goes from being a fantasy and into something uncomfortable. But, whereas most can justify enjoying John Wick due to it focusing around hitmen shooting each other, “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun” may be a bit more difficult to justify.
As a reaction video from Sincerely, K.S.O. will point out, the song is a bit flimsy. She uses the example of Carrie (1976) to explain how Brown fails to build character. We don’t know a lot about Debi. She has no motivation nor is there any context for who Johnny is (some think it’s a reference to S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders”), and it ends without much of a resolution. Debi is dead and everyone goes home, not experiencing an ounce of trauma. While it is a wacky scenario, the lack of context feels surreal in a time where school shooters are more prevalent and having ANY idea what the motive is would seek to make any difference in treating it.
The fact is that we’re living in a time where the president endorses teenage murderers who drive to Kenosha, WI to bother innocent protestors. That is how out of hand things are. If you find “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun” to be offensive and tasteless, that is fine. There is no bigger point to the joke other than Brown rattling off her own confusion (is Debi just having a bad period?). In any other context, this would be a genuine fear. You are not a “snowflake” for finding mass murder offensive. You’re normal and I’m sure deep down Brown is a genuinely decent person. I don’t think this song launched the next “Charles Manson Race War” candidate. It’s just that attitudes change due to circumstances.
To be honest, it’s the type of thing that makes it tough to admit that I sometimes find the song amusing. It’s enough escapism for me that I can give in to the fantasy. There are moments where I’ll chuckle because of how ridiculous it is. I laugh at it for the same reason I laugh at Female Trouble: it’s so over the top that you couldn’t believe it ever happening. However, my affection for this type of humor has died down over the 2010s, as events like Sandy Hook or Aurora, CO has become more than freak accidents. It forces me to ask “Why am I laughing?”
But as I mentioned earlier, this story doesn’t end in 1983 or even when she got her MTV show. Not even close. Even the mention of Columbine isn’t enough to have her grab a shovel and start burying the song, placing it in the past. For someone who has had an extensive career full of other noteworthy achievements, it’s strange that she keeps coming back to this song, this one that she herself recognizes has been continually less and less pleasant in the zeitgeist. It isn’t the idea that she still performs it live every now and then. It’s that in 2008, the next chapter took a wildly unexpected turn.
In October 2008, Brown returned with a rewritten version called “The Ex-Beauty Queen’s Got a Gun.” Listen, whereas I can find something to defend about the parodic nature of the original, this one reeks of desperation, of playing on very easy targets that haven’t aged well. BUT, if you ever wanted to mix mass shootings and Republican politics, then boy do I have a story for you!
The ex-beauty queen in question was Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Nowadays remembered as a singing bear on The Masked Singer, she used to be taken seriously as a party candidate. People like Tina Fey got traction out of imitating her off-kilter comments “I can see Alaska from my front door”). Does Brown have the same luck? Well, as you can guess, her big revelation is to do Palin jokes as she runs rampant, commenting on her daughter’s pregnancy and even making fun of her folksy niceness.
But does she still have a gift for the lyrical prose? Does she do for the conservative market what she once did for valley girls? Well, I’ll let you figure out for yourself:
You're not that hot, I hate to be rude.
OK you're better than Dick Cheney nude.
It’s dated and terrible in a totally different way. Sure it skewers her whole political agenda, managing to reflect her own homophobia and religious values, but it’s still a song so rooted in stereotypes that it just feels lazy, going so over the top that you can feel Brown laughing over her own song. It’s silly that Palin would have a gun and kill the entire Republican party. It’s so silly, isn’t it? Well, whereas the original at least sounds like a legitimate song that can be taken seriously, this is just tacky and uninteresting once you realize that she settles for jokes such as calling The G.O.P. the “Gullible Old Party.”
To Brown’s credit, this is on par with Boris Pickett updating “The Monster Mash” with “The Monster Rap.” It exists solely to act like these already memorable novelty songs could find a new “hip” generation. Still, there is a reason that homecoming queens are still fun targets to write songs about while Sarah Palin faded into a bear suit.
Is that the end of the road? Had Brown learned her lesson just yet? Well.. there’s still a little bit of road ahead. In the 2010s, Broadway has given into more of a nostalgic lens for their jukebox musicals. Some examples include Rock of Ages, Head Over Heels, Mama Mia!, Jagged Little Pill, and Ain’t Too Proud. If you have a songbook of over 30 songs, chances are you’ll have somebody wanting to adapt it into a story.
The truth is that I don’t know a lot about Brown’s version of this. This ends on a bit of a wonky note because of that. Still, I heard that in 2014, Brown collaborated on a stage version called The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Musical. On the one hand, this COULD fix Sincerely, K.S.O.’s problems with the song by adding context around it. After all, Brown has gone into interviews suggesting that this will explore what happens before that fateful night. There will be plenty of 80s songs and wacky fun.
As far as I know, its run in Silver Lake, CA is over. I don’t know how far it got. What’s especially amazing is that a song that every rational person would suggest should just go away and be a relic of its time has not. Brown continues to endure, even if she never quite got the same level of success that she did through the 80s and 90s. Still, she keeps trying to make it happen, realizing that the song was a joke and that she was using it to push boundaries. She claims it’s also a horror story, like the great Evil Dead musical. It should not be taken seriously. It’s goofy, okay?
Which I guess is fine. Again, liking the song is more a thing of taste than a question of your morality. If we can like John Wick while condemning gun violence, then we can appreciate Julie Brown for reflecting on how flippantly some people take violence. Is it funny? Is it offensive and be buried in a shallow grave? I guess so. In the big picture, it’s not a big deal of how you look at it.
What’s more important is how you look at people like the teenage murderer in Kenosha, WI. It’s not a joke if you support him. Frankly, you’re insensitive and need to check your priorities. Nobody deserves to be murdered for peaceful action. I wouldn’t like it. You wouldn’t like it, so why would you do it to your fellow man? Don’t let inhumanity and paranoia inform your decisions. Be kind, listen, and maybe we can keep people like Debi from feeling so misunderstood that her only action is to shoot up a place. Let’s work towards that if just to make this song a fantasy again, a parody of tragedy instead of the definition of.
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