First things first: this ain’t for the faint of heart. Should you be squeamish and averse to blood, guns, poison, and tattoos, I advise you to steer clear. Couple this with Killer Mike’s “Big Beast” video and it can induce vomiting, epileptic fits, and fill up Angola prison for the next six months. Amigo the Devil makes hyper-violent macabre murder folk. Don’t mistake this for a glorification of spousal abuse. Amigo gets his, double barrel pointed dead at his chest. Like Lou Reed said they would: the villains always blink their eyes.
Amigo is going to be big. I know this because I saw it with my own eyes at the show he played a few months back, when half the crowd sang along to every word of “Perfect Wife.” It’s not hearing the Palladium chant “kill people, burn shit, fuck school,” but it’s infinitely more haunting. You have a mad cult appeal if you can convince a room of people to sing along to smashing your wife’s face into a VCR for singing CCR. That’s the Ike & Tina version of “Proud Mary.” It’s cheap and reductive to say that Amigo’s doing it for laughs. He’s not. But he’s not trying to scrape for shock value either.
Fact is, wife beaters and murderers exist and there is a fine line between the Devil and Danny Kiranos. The latter is one of the most affable and polite gentlemen you’d have the good fortune to meet. The former is a throat-slitting outlaw in the vein of the badlands anti-heroes scripted by Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings. These are ballads of the battered and bruised, the woeful rage of the second degree murderer. Scary organ-curdling shit, but no amount of wincing should allow you to forget that this sort of stuff goes on every day across the country. Better to have it brought to you attention by a bad dude with a banjo spinning lurid stories sprayed with blood-red tabloid detail. It’s a lot more catchy than the 10 0′ Clock news.
Previously:
The Fallen Angel Folk of Amigo the Devil
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