In this post, I’m going to argue that there was an aggressive nationwide police campaign to discourage homicide in the 1980’s, and this caused an unexpected effect on the population in the US, and that when citizens committed manslaughter or were in the area of complete accidents that caused another’s death, they began to attempt to cover up the circumstances surrounding the death as much as ineptly possible. Then, when investigators connected these people nevertheless to another person’s death, the cover-upper became aware of the awkward reality that when you obscure the facts of an accident, to detectives it looks like you covered up a murder.
Police then eventually sussed out through numerous police interviews that all these Americans covering up the circumstances of other people’s deaths were only afraid of the murder charge, and so there was a media campaign throughout the country to teach people through television entertainment the investigative reality that engaging in a cover up makes it looks like the crime, IF any, was worse than it was. It actually was a common media theme of that time period, with lots of variants, but in ALL of them, the person or person’s involved in altering the scene of a death would be caught and then accused of murder. Yikes!
As far as a macro-scale analysis of what probably happened, extremely forceful public information campaigns are a lot like Newton, who said for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But when talking about the public mass’s response to a major information campaign, for every action, there can be an unexpected reaction.
The 1980’s got tough on crime because of the surge of drug abuse as well as inner-city street violence, and so the police everywhere were generally uncompromising on drug crimes as well as homicide, so much so that it spurred people who happened to be randomly connected to other people’s deaths to hide the fact they were around at all, or even hide the fact there had even BEEN a death. It’s likely they also solicited the help from people they could trust, such as significant others in their relationships, to ‘Oh f*ck! You gotta help me deal with the body! I can’t believe this!’.
Anyway, there is this musical genre almost twenty years old or so called Synthwave. It is based on the synthesizer beats of the 1980’s, and came about from people’s nostalgia of the 80’s, and synthwave is popular to both people who were actually alive at the time, as well as younger people who were not that dig the music and fashion.
Kavinsky, who is based in France, is one of these artists creating synthwave, and in 2010 he released an album called ‘Nightcall’, which had a track by the same name. The song Nightcall was rather famous on the internet back then in the weird online circles people share obscure and niche stuff.
Now, at a first listening, it just seems like a really chill beat to listen to while driving at night or something, but the track is MUCH darker than is readily apparent, and it took me listening to it maybe around 80 times before I really began to understand what it was about. Let me break it down to you in a way that makes it obvious:
If we think about what is in a modern MP3 track, you basically just have musical sounds, lyrics, as well as supportive sound effects or samples of acted things to help tell the story that attempts to accurately communicate the meaning the creator intended of the song.
In ‘Nightcall’, the musical sounds aren’t important for the most part because it is only synthwave. Instead, the meaning of the song is communicated with just 60 individual words from the lyrics, 3 sound effects, 2 effects filters applied to the music, and 1 period of silence.
At the beginning of the track, you hear someone inserting quarters into a payphone, pressing the payphone buttons RATHER CALMLY of the number he is calling, and the dial tone. You can also hear crickets in the background, as well as a howling wolf, and so you know it is night.
Then the lyrics begin, and in 60 words, you hear the perspectives of the male caller and the female he called who is presumably his girlfriend, and they are:
MALE
“I’m giving you a nightcall;
Tell you how I feel,”
“I want to drive you through the night;
down the hills,”
“I’m gonna tell you something you;
Don’t want to hear,”
“I’m gonna show you where it’s dumped;
But have no fear.”
FEMALE
“There’s something inside you,”
“It’s hard to explain,”
“They’re talking about you boy,”
“But you’re still the same.”
Okay, so what’s the big deal here?
Well first of all, there is one effects filter applied to the male lyrics, and it could be interpreted as one of those infamous and legendary voice scramblers from popular culture. I actually do remember from childhood and watching another ‘Cover up an accident’ theme on TV, and the one I saw was a satirical variant of two people going a little too over-the-top in their cover up, and using telephone voice scramblers as one of their hastily acquired security measures. Like, where do you even get those, ’cause I want one.
Sooo, the guy called his girlfriend using a voice scrambler, and apparently they make arrangements for him to pick her up to help hide a body. Wonderful.
Now the female is thinking to herself about how her guy is kind of an enigma. She has also heard about whatever her boyfriend got involved in from the media uproar, and she is trying to reconcile the description of the death, the unknown suspect the police are seeking, WITH the man she thinks she knows.
This is an actual psychological phenomena I’ve heard about before, and it happens to people adjusting to the facts that a person they thought they knew well were actually involved in deeds and crimes they never suspected. Often this is expressed by friends and family of a criminal that these people they thought they knew led a ‘double-life’, or that they had a ‘secret side’.
Whether these explanations are actually true, I don’t know, but I think that when you are around people that ordinarily treat you amicably enough because you don’t know what crimes they’re involved in, then if you DO find out later, you have to try to process the fact that you were purposefully kept out and unaware of all sorts of things they were doing, and all you saw was them cleaning their house or going out to buy groceries.
For the female lyricist, she is hearing about whatever happened on TV and radio, and makes the really bad choice to decide that because of the way the details of whatever happened are being presented to the public, she thinks she actually knows her boyfriend, and since the way they are describing him without knowing even who he clashes with her impression of him, it means they are wrong.
And so she gets in a car with her boyfriend and they drive off to the middle of nowhere. The male and female lyrics repeat, and then another effects filter occurs, and this time the female lyrics are muted and ‘wavy’. Then, at the end of that segment, there is a period of sudden silence that occurs after a single loud snare. After that, the music continues but without music, but the music remains up a few octaves, because this is how the music changes whenever the female sings.
What does this all mean? To put it directly, the boyfriend killed her because she was the last loose end in order to cover up his connection to the first death. The muted and wavy filter over the female’s last lyrics is her losing consciousness. Then the sudden space of silence is when she dies. At the end, the music continues playing without lyrics but still several octaves higher, and this is symbolic of the memory of the female who became the last victim of this man, and this completes the tragedy.
This all means that ‘Nightcall’ is a different twist on what was a popular culture phenomenon back in that time period, which was this theme that was visited again and again about getting accused of murder if you attempt to cover up an accident. But, in Kavinsky’s varient, it is about getting killed yourself for helping someone you know and trust cover up a death.
Unsupported Speculation 
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