From Hell's Heart, I Stab At Thee
Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the White Whale in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is arguably the most recognizable metaphor in Western literature: The obsession, the singular vision, the unattainableness, the consequential madness —all things that we have come to equate with that large white monster, and with our own respective pursuits. The transcendence and power of the metaphor is perhaps best illustrated in the fact that Melville’s novel is 209,117 words in length, and yet the wider culture seems to only know two things about this book: The metaphor and the elements therein, and that the novel begins with the narrator’s revelation of himself: “Call me Ishmael.” As for the other 209,114 words, well, go ask around, because as one of my literature teachers once wisely stated: “Moby Dick: The book that the most people pretend to have read.”
I have a creative White Whale of sorts. It’s not to be famous, or to make the bestseller lists. It is the Hilltop Killers.
My Ahab-level fury for the Hilltop Killers knows no bounds, and that is because I have no idea who they are. In 2009, I was in Nassau, the one-time pirate capital of the Caribbean. I arrived via a cruise ship, and as I wandered the island, I climbed a set of stairs that led me to a small gazebo of sorts. Into the wood of the gazebo was a carving: “The Hilltop Killers.” No context. No artwork. Just the words. Was it a gang? Was it a group of teenagers with an inside joke? Was it a band? Was it a literal group of hilltop-dwelling murderers that I was fortunate to have missed? Was the carving their calling card, or had I unintentionally stumbled upon their hideout? Did someone die in this gazebo?
As I said, I don’t know. But sitting on the deck of the cruise ship that night, I told my friend that I was going to write this group their anthem someday, some piece of musical exploration that may one day be listened to with no context of those I was singing about, that future audience never knowing that the composer himself had the same amount of context as they did.
Within a year, I had written a song bearing their namesake. And it sucked. So much so that I never recorded it, and it has since been lost to the cosmos, hopefully having fallen into some distant blackhole, never to be heard from again. I tried again in 2018. That song, “The Hilltop Killers,” appeared on my 2019 album, These Hills Are Gonna Rise.
The elements of this song do little for me in uncovering who these people were, even hypothetically in my mind, as I run through all the questions and possibilities I ran through a few paragraphs ago. No single interpretation feels sufficient. They are a story that doesn’t want to be told, like a white whale that doesn’t want to be caught. My hope is that I write about them again, that they may have the chance to become something more than they are —a lonely carving in a gazebo, on an island that used to be much more important than it is now.