Start A Fire: Murder Rap Masquerading as Art
September 11, 2025
by Jaymie Johns
The Timing
In the chaotic aftermath of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University, a San Diego hip-hop collective calling itself The Neighborhood Kids released a track that is not protest art — it is an open call to political violence. The song, Start a Fire, was posted online within hours of Kirk’s killing and contains repeated exhortations to literal harm. The record’s language, timing, and context make plain that this is not rhetorical overstatement; it is instruction and celebration of bloodshed. That is why the track is despicable, and why the backlash has been swift and justified.
The Members
The group is comprised of five members: Verde, lead rapper and founder; Amon the MC, vocalist and lyricist; Niko Rosy, the producer and keyboardist; Gatoz Locoz, guitarist and beat-maker; and JG, the turntablist and DJ.
Although all members of TNK are males, the lead “artist,” Verde, and Amon, the MC, prefer to use female pronouns; as all of WMG’s articles are rooted in fact, we will use the correct, male, pronouns.
Incitement
Produced with distorted guitars and a heavy trap backbone, Start a Fire masquerades as an anthem of resistance. Yet its verses leave no ambiguity. Consider the line:
Deny, defend, depose,
I just might dispose
Of these CEO's
They just got to go
This is not metaphor. The wordplay on “depose” and “dispose” moves seamlessly from overthrowing power to eliminating it — with no suggestion of peaceful transition.
Just a few lines later, it continues to:
Molotov in my hand
Make them all scared again
That is not imagery of resistance; it is a literal description of arson with the goal to instill fear.
The pattern repeats across the track: invocations of unity quickly shift into calls for blood. One particularly grotesque couplet states:
I don’t know how to balance a budget,
but I know how to take every last ounce of blood
out of your stomach
The juxtaposition between fiscal language and graphic mutilation is jarring — and deliberate. TNK isn’t using metaphor to critique budgeting priorities; they are endorsing butchery as substitute for governance.
Targets Named
What makes Start a Fire so much worse than previous shock-rap is that the targets are not abstract. They are named.
First things first free Gaza,
I need Elon’s body dropping
I need TNT in Congress
I need Luigi in my roster.
These lines not rhetorical flourish or tough-guy posturing — it is a literal demand for the murder of a public figure. The band voices a desire for Elon Musk’s death, then immediately pairs that wish with calls for bombs in Congress and an endorsement of a known killer. “Luigi” is an apparent reference Luigi Mangione, charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024; in rap slang, a “roster” means one’s crew, so the lyric reads as an open endorsement of a confessed killer.
Taken together, the verse is not figurative rebellion; it is a manifesto of targeted violence and a direct incitement to murder.
Elsewhere the song mentions another specific name:
Walk in with a stick,
Hit Zuck from a stones throw
“Zuck” here refers explicitly to Mark Zuckerberg. That is not ambiguous slang; it is a direct name-drop of a living public figure. Paired with other lines calling for assassination, explosives, and arson, the invocation of Zuckerberg’s name demonstrates a deliberate pattern of singling out real individuals for harm.
Another line drives the point home:
I’m a big fan of dead leaders
The band is not hiding its admiration for assassination.
Recruitment
TNK attempts to frame the track as performance art — rage turned into rhythm. On Instagram, they claimed: “This is art reflecting rage against fascism. We’re not calling for violence; we’re calling for justice.”
But the verses betray them. When a lyric says:
"Go 187 on a piggy
if you wanna make a difference”
it is not an allegory. “187” is code for homicide, especially killing a police officer. There is no interpretive dance here. It is direct instruction: if you want change, kill a cop.
When you layer these lyrics together, the mask falls off: Start a Fire doesn’t merely blur the boundary between art and calls for violence; it completely disregards them and struts proudly into not only incitement, but instruction.
The Consequences
The backlash has been immediate and justified. Clips paired with footage of Kirk’s assassination racked up millions of views on TikTok before moderators began pulling them down. Spotify removed the track in several regions. Public figures across the spectrum condemned the song: conservatives calling it “terror rap,” civil-rights advocates warning of damage to the broader LGBTQ+ community, and musicians themselves divided between free-expression defenses and blunt denunciation.
But the most important verdict comes from the lyrics themselves. Words matter. And when words glorify assassinations, endorse cop-killing, and celebrate bloodbaths, those words are not protest. While the band maintains that the song is protest music, it is obviously and incontrovertibly a song to recruit others to extreme violence.
It’s A Pattern
TNK has dabbled in provocation before — past tracks were accused of anti-Semitism, and others flirted with violent imagery. But Start a Fire is different. It intersected directly with real bloodshed, released in the shadow of Kirk’s assassination, and immediately named new targets. While the band may insist it belongs in the lineage of protest anthems, its lyrics reveal it to be something else entirely: recruitment rhetoric for those already flirting with violence.
The Stakes
In the wake of a political assassination, the country is raw, on edge, and divided; the song seeks only to amplify this. Defenders may insist that art should be disruptive. But history teaches that when movements blur the line between rhetoric and violence, violence follows.
Cultural subversion has always been part of hip-hop’s DNA, but even in its angriest forms, the genre has long distinguished between metaphor and mandate. Start a Fire erases that distinction. Its lyrics are not coded dissent; they are explicit orders.
Accountability
The responsibility here is shared: the creators who wrote and released these lines, the producers who mixed and amplified them, the promoters who pushed clips into trending feeds, and the platforms that allowed the content to spread unchecked at scale. Accountability does not always mean criminal charges, but it does mean public consequences: demonetization, deplatforming where appropriate, and a sustained public reckoning about the cost of normalizing violent language in political music.
We are not naive about the complexity of cultural production. Music has radical, subversive power and has historically been a vehicle for justice. But power without responsibility is reckless. At this moment — in the hours and days after a political assassination — the community should be holding fast to the idea that speech which invites more killing is itself culpable. Start a Fire meets that standard.
Verdict
The truth must be stated clearly: Start a Fire is a direct call to political violence. It is not courageous, it is not protest, and it is not art worth defending. It is reckless, inflammatory, and despicable. Any platform or promoter that amplifies it bears responsibility for further harm.
