So What?

The song's samples are from "The Violent Years", a juvenile delinquency film about an all girl gang who do all sorts of bad stuff (including raping a man they rob). The leader of the gang is a spoiled rich kid who's dad is always working (as a newspaper editor, ironically crusading against juvenile delinquency) and her mom is a vapid socialite who doesn't give a crap about raising Paula in terms of teaching her right and wrong.

The line/title "So What?" is a mantra/arc word of the film. The gang members use it as their standard reply when asked a question. The film ends with the girls getting involved with a police shoot-out and all but the main gang leader die, with the gang leader herself getting arrested and it being revealed that she killed a cop during said shoot-out. The above mentioned rape gets her pregnant too and she dies giving birth to the child, who then is put into foster care because a judge decides that the editor and the socialite are unfit parents given how they raised a monster.

The song goes deeper though and in a lot of ways, mocks the message of "The Violent Years"; Al's lyrics imply a more violent, nhillism that is tied into the whole idea "being born too late"/"make us saints". The idea that we are all inherently self-destructive and murderous and that society tries to use sedatives or sports and sex ("anal fuckfest/thrill olympics") to make kids channel this rage into other less destructive outlets, to which "so what" becomes less of a mantra and more of a rejection as far as him singing of a young man who is sicken by the hypocrisy of "killing is wrong" and longing to have been born in an era where men could kill and be saintified for their violence and him telling the world, at the end that he's giving into his urges and screw everyone else.

Which makes the monologues from "The Violent Years" more or less a stock reply of sorts: what the media and moral guardians would say about Al's character in the song; rather than actually try and find out why he is so violent, they blame the parents and brand him a thrillseeker/thrillkiller and seek to exploit his crime spree to guilt parents into spending more time with their kids to make them not become killers.

I think Marilyn Manson said it best in the song, 'Rock & Roll Nigger': 'We are your shit, you should be ashamed of what you have eaten.'

"You have had all that money can give you, but that wasn't enough. You became a thrill-seeker. Kill for the thrill. (assassin) This thrill-seeking became the one great thing in your life, planning one thrill on another until the murder. Kill for the love of killing. (guilty) Kill for the thrill. The thrill-seeker comes from all walks of life. He comes from the home, a home where the parents are to busy to treat their children with respect."

"Kill for the thrill. (assassin) Some people think newspapers exaggerate juvenile crime. All that is defined mostly to the large cities, juvenile delinquency is underlined. Thus parents think something is going wrong with the environment. Adults create the world, children live it. Juvenile delinquency is always rooted in adult delinquency. And in this process, parents play the key role when children grow up among adults who refuse to recognize anything that is fine and good, or worthy of respect."

bad parenting makes bad kids, and eventually somewhere down the genetic railroad track a child is made so bad he becomes a thrillseeker, example- the columbine pair, and hell good ol Al himself

this song in no way relates to the columbine pair..it was written years before ...thrill killing in general doesn't relate to the columbine pair...

thanks to the person above who put the rest of the song... the song is pretty self explanitory, parents point the finger at society because they dont feel the need to treat there kids well and raise them, fed only negative, they gain bad thoughts, no one listens, and they take action.

to be honest i think you're both wrong, if it was simply about bad parenting how do you explain the final verse? I do think its about bad parenting, but mainly about the problems facing the youth today, one of the samples says "Adults create the world children live in it" Its kind of a mochery on society and how (especially now) society always criticizes the youth for delinquencey and such when it is ultimately society (adults) and the government's fault so when kids are not taught what is really good much like today where kids are mainly just brought up to fit into society and make money, thus comes the resistance part, and the ultimate message i think is that if things dont change society will collapse

The first two verses are about the narrator being disgusted with his 'bread and circuses' environment, up until "I only kill to know I'm alive" where he reveals an underlying sense of powerlessness and alienation. The final two verses reveal that the narrator's belief system has become warped to the point that degeneracy is his virtue; this irony culminates in the line "no one listens to reason, it's too late" which could have equally been said by the ones whom the narrator percieves as enemies.

"No one listens to reason". Quote by Assata Shakur": Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.