THE MANIFESTATIONS OF AN ANTICHRIST
A father told a Senate committee that his son committed suicide after listening to songs about violence, sex, drugs, and death. "He was a good boy," Raymond Kuntz of Burlington, N.D., said of his only child, 15-year-old Richard. "The music wasn’t symptomatic of other problems," Kuntz told the committee, which is gathering information on how violent themes in music affect children. Richard Kuntz, a 10th-grader, took his life because lyrics in Marilyn Manson’s song, "The Reflecting God" told him to kill himself, his father said. Shock-rocker Manson’s album Antichrist Superstar was a favorite of his son, who seemed trapped in depression as he wrote about the band for an English class, Kuntz said. "Marilyn Manson shows that it is possible for Christian society to produce someone who is against everything it stands for," the boy wrote. "Believing that what he is doing is good and promoting it through music, he gains followers by epitomizing children’s black thoughts of rebellion." Producers should be forced to attach labels to their albums to warn public officials, store managers and parents about lyrics, Kuntz said. Such labels now are voluntary. Music-industry spokeswoman Hilary Rosen said music was not to blame for the boy’s death, and that his parents should have been monitoring him more closely. Rosen said that much of the alarm about today’s music is reminiscent
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