And after all the "news" is done, the reporters run out of things to report, the story slips off of front pages, and we're left with nothing to do but the real labor of trying to understand why this happened, and figuring out how to keep it from happening again, it's easy to predict what two of the central threads will be. One, although this one is familiar enough that it will devolve into meta-debate almost immediately, will wind itself around the role of violence and related seditions in entertainment. The second will concentrate, with an intensity disturbingly akin to that with which reclusive thirteen-year-olds draw imaginary fortress blueprints, on arming and armoring schools, gun control, and various permutations thereof. Nobody will find it especially ironic or disturbing that the reactions will tend to be couched in even more military rhetoric than the problem. Numerous metaphorical wars will be declared, the phrase "take the fight to the streets" will be invoked through determinedly gritted teeth, as if we've had "the fight" in mothballs in the attic or something, and for every desperately ancillary symptom we can identify, somebody will propose an ornate and intrinsically ineffective poultice. And we will get nowhere, because the real problem is too pervasive to strike. The Pope, whose pronouncements after events like this tend to have the same reflexive cadence as the insufferable talking Austin Powers cutout at the record store I go to, said the only thing I've read, so far, that to me hints at insight, encouraging us, as CNN translates it, "to promote respect for the dignity of human life". And this is where the music we listen to and the games we play and the heads we mount on spikes around our public schools all become part of the same issue, to me. On one level, I don't think it's insane to demand that Marilyn Manson and the programmers of Doom and the producers of movies whose entertainment value is measured in body counts assume some responsibility for the world they influence. Doom didn't make those two boys walk through the maze of their own high school, shooting people too terrified to run, but it isn't helping, and I'm pretty sure there are much better uses to which the time and effort invested in making it, and playing it, could have been put. Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor didn't create misanthropy and violence, but they do glamorize it. They are symptoms, not causes, but diseases often require that we treat both.

But if my understanding of this social dilemma is anything like correct, these encrustations of human ugliness would promptly take care of themselves if we could get our hands into the true source of evil. The most telling detail, to me, in all the coverage of the shootings in Colorado, was the supposed fondness of the boys' clique for swastikas and Hitler. I am willing to bet that none of them had read and internalized Mein Kampf. I am certain of this because I had to read it, myself, for a course in college about what happened to art and artists during the Third Reich, and it is tedious, incoherent, and wildly lacking in drama, and doesn't offer, in teenage terms, a hundredth of the defiant allure of a single Marilyn Manson song. Wearing swastikas, therefore, cannot be an informed political statement, it must be, like Satanism in other similar contexts, simple rebellion, couched in a vocabulary provided by the moral establishment. Find a seventeen-year-old who can inventory the founding principles of National Socialism, and you've found a kid who isn't going to walk into his high school with a gun and a pipe bomb. Kids yelling "Heil Hitler" at their cafeteria nemeses are merely saying the words they've learned their community finds most inflammatory. In other towns they're dressing in drag, or building rockets, or writing suicide poetry. A community determines the form of its discontent. The most horrifying, insensitive, offensive truth is that Littleton, Colorado created murderers, that all of our towns are allowing natural rebellion to fester, and then channeling it into violence. By the time the culture produces Marilyn Manson, the big harm has long since been done. Don't blame the niches of culture in which the persecuted take refuge, blame the forces that drove them there, and the irresistible erosion that carved the niches in the first place. Blame over-budget commercials for slow-motion lives no real person can lead. Blame 90210 and the Backstreet Boys for making normal kids feel awkward and inadequate. Blame the cheerleaders and the athletes that snubbed their peers, and send them scurrying back to their bedrooms and to virtual worlds in which they can control their own status. Blame their churches, for turning noble impulses into numbing ritual and nauseating conformity. Blame their parents, blame their schools. Blame everybody who sits in front of their television, sucking greedily at pictures of carnage. Blame everybody who dotes on the comfortably vicarious horror of somebody else's airplane crash. Blame the storytellers from Homer to George Lucas who have set slaughter to stirring soundtracks. Blame me, blame yourselves. We've created a culture, whether through our actions or our complicity, in which suicidal massacres in public spaces are unavoidable. The shootings in Colorado didn't have to happen to tell us that, their inevitability could be easily deduced, as could all the lessons we've now given fifteen more lives to be reminded of. Our culture is unhealthy. The Pope is right, we do not value human life. We fear death so much we forget to itemize the alternatives. We construct elaborate taboos against sex, which only succeed in engendering such a superficial obsession with it that we're left with the intimate emotional fluency of a helium party balloon. We tolerate smoking, and drive trucks when we could walk, and support a hundred dehumanizing industries a day. Our environment is overwhelmingly garish, soiled, artless and unloved, and we put up with it. We surround ourselves with blaring messages that nobody believes, that deny our souls, that tell us, over and over, that magic is for sale, and then take our money and hand us back crap. It's amazing more people don't snap. If we don't take our own lives seriously, why would anybody else?

Unfortunately, even if you agree with me that the problem is obvious, the solution is not. How do you promote respect for human life? Not by standing at a suburban lectern and saying, somberly, "Life is precious". Not by lining school hallways with National Guardsmen, so our children grow up under siege. Getting rid of all the guns is a fine idea, and could hardly hurt, but it's impractical, and post-facto enforcement is a fundamentally futile approach, anyway. Maybe we can make the cafeterias safe, but at the end of the day the kids leave the building, and eventually they stopping coming to school at all, and then how have we prepared them for the world outside the cafeteria, which we can never secure? Will you frisk every human before you let them out of their own front door? Short of that, how will you make anywhere truly safe? This, I think, is where music comes in, and art in all its forms, even the ones as unsophisticated as video games and spectator sports. Art gets inside houses, and inside heads. One song can reach a million times as many people as one police officer or one priest. Effectively, art can frisk every kid before they leave their house. The trick, however, is that kids will rebel, and in fact, the people who struggle against a culture are the very ones responsible for its survival, so not only do we need art that recasts misfits as heroes, but we also need art that disgusts people in productive ways. The reason the pervasive co-opting of counter-cultural idioms is so socially destructive is that it constantly pushes rebellion towards extremes. Wearing swastikas is one of the few remaining ways to conclusively assert that you're not in a soda commercial.

And this is why my recent tardy survey of the ABBA back catalog, prompted by its US reissue, seems particularly well-timed. For one thing, I've come to think of ABBA as a powerful faith-restorative. The clanging piano cascades of "Dancing Queen", the boys' gruff background muttering in "Take a Chance on Me", the cheesy synth-bass and Fisher-Price guitar riffs of "Does Your Mother Know", the exaggerated giants-tiptoeing caution of "Two for the Price of One", the syrupy yearning of "Fernando", the hilariously overblown trills of "Super Trouper", the shameless lowest-common-denominator melodic pandering of "Waterloo", the broad musical-theater mannerisms of "Money Money Money", the Valkyrie rounds giving way to breathy mock-gospel frailty on the choruses of "Name of the Game" -- none of these things makes me forget the horrors humanity is capable of, but they remind me of the wonders, at the other extreme, that we often make without necessarily even understanding the syllables we're singing. ABBA's music, to me, is profoundly life-affirming, if for no other reason than it seems oblivious of evil, an object lesson in living a life uncontaminated by hatred. Even the later ABBA songs into which they allowed traces of their personal acrimony to creep never got much more than cozily maudlin. ABBA showed up in stupid outfits, but the gleam in their eyes, of belief in their own transcendent beauty, is too dazzling for me to concentrate on anything else.

And the other half of the equation is that ABBA were so resolutely shiny and trivial that if you insist on turning your back on them, there are a hundred useful directions in which you can head. This is the same reason I've come to believe that the Spice Girls are OK as role models: they are philosophically compact. They take up very little mental space, so when you start to find them cloying, they're easy to escape. They are training idols, nurturing while you learn, but meant to be outgrown. Which is also why, I think, I've ended up fixating on this live album, not any of the eight ABBA studio albums, even though the clunky performances here are clearly not these songs' True Selves. It helps to hear these songs wrong. It helps to know that ABBA didn't fully understand what they were doing, or what they accomplished. It helps to hear all the ways in which these songs could have been better. It helps to hear a couple treacly ballads and be reminded that even when you distill ABBA's career down to fourteen songs, there's still some filler. ABBA, to me, are an aesthetic signpost, simultaneously proving that we are traveling in the right direction and exhorting us to press on, because there must be unimaginably greater things ahead.

Is it grotesque to actually talk about music, in the wake of this event? Maybe I should declare this a week of silence. But no, too much silence is how we got here. The music isn't denial, it's part of our insistent counter-argument that life is worth living. So: Have a Nice Day is the first Roxette studio album since Crash! Boom! Bang!, in 1994. Two- or three-year gaps between Roxette albums were always normal, and there were two compilations, two new singles, a reissue, a Spanish-language remake and a Gessle solo album to keep us company during this wait, but still, five years was long enough for me to worry, just a little, about how far out of touch Roxette might drift. Have a Nice Day shows that they've actually paid pretty close attention. There are basically two archetypes of Roxette songs, the bouncy dance-pop song and the languid romantic ballad, and these fourteen tracks are approximately equally divided between them, but the proceedings are split, too, between reverent atavisms and earnest modernity. "Crush on You" pulses and sputters with techno dance-percussion and wiry analog-synth hooks, but the vocal oscillation between Per's insistent verses and Marie's soaring choruses is trademark Roxette. "Wish I Could Fly" has the grace of "It Must Have Been Love", but grounds Marie's aching lead on a simmering rhythm track, with a composite effect not that much unlike Madonna's "Frozen" or "Drowned World". "You Can't Put Your Arms Around What's Already Gone" opens with a few beats of teasing DJ scratch, but then eases into a goofy strut with Per at his chirpiest. Marie's "Waiting for the Rain" is half Beatles sing-along, half big-band Beach-Boys drama. "Anyone" is schmaltz unapologetic enough to put Celine Dion to flight. "It Will Take a Long Long Time", rising from acoustic candor to string-buoyed pomp, seems like an attempt to bridge the gap between Alanis Morissette and Patty Smyth. Most of "7Twenty7" could be arena Devo (or studio-recluse Golden Earing), but then there's a bridge in the middle with a descending piano figure borrowed straight from ABBA. "I Was So Lucky" is quiet, jazzy and wistful, Marie sounding a little like Tracey Thorn until the impassioned chorus, a creamy sax part tossed in to get the attention of soft-rock programmers, but "Stars" is full-speed dance-pop on the order of Madonna's "Ray of Light", with a children's choir to humanize the beepy synth runs and drum-machine thump. "Salvation" is haunted and sentimental, like a half-speed rendition of Aztec Camera's "Oblivious". "Pay the Price" is galloping power-pop, all delirious harmonies and Per's pealing guitar solos. And the symphonic finale, "Beautiful Things", weaves together scraps of ABBA, Marillion, Bowie and Bacharach, as if that's how garments are always constructed. My favorite of these songs, though, at least so far, is for the most part the album's simplest track, "Staring at the Ground". A clattering, tympani-ish drum loop (played on drum cases, according to the credits) cycles under expansive acoustic-guitar chords, winding bass, Marie's effortless singing and Per's sighing harmonica. On album Roxette tend to be maximalists, reserving their sense of proportion for use on acoustic b-sides and live recordings, but here, for once, they let a song alone, filling it with the power of life using no tools more complicated than lungs or hands. Ways to kill, reasons for enmity: we know far too many of those, and far too little about how we're able to breathe so much joy into such simple sounds that I can think, wildly, for just a moment, that three small minutes might know the right words to comfort a century.