Instagram's Dark Rocker Queen On Quelling The ‘Fireball'
By CAT BOTH FOR: 65,000〡PUBLISHED: June 21st, 2026
Black Death Jody Burns
SUBSCRIBE to US on SUBSTACK to SUPPORT MORE WORK LIKE THIS and GET VIP CONTENT
Jody Burns sits criss-cross in front of a stack of amps, bathed in overhead lighting, an electric guitar in hand. Every video on her Instagram page, @jodyburns8661, follows the same formula. Her black hair is frazzled. Her leather tank top is low-cut. Her chest takes up most of the frame, but then her music takes over. She starts shredding, wandering, playing impossibly rapid riffs. Scary masks are hung up on the walls behind her, but the real jumpscare happens midway through the Reel when a pudgy chihuahua emerges to sniff around with his balls out.
Her hovel seems quaint—as quaint as a hovel can be—stuffed to the brim with cursed tokens, objects accumulated over Jody’s lifetime of sorrow, joy, or indifference. Who’s to know? Jody never speaks a word in her videos. Those exposed to her siren song become intoxicated with questions. She rarely answers any of them, save for the occasional comments about her technique, gear, or trans identity.
There are only a few glimpses into Jody Burns’ past online, like newspaper clippings and pixelated recordings of her performing as the band Black Death in the ‘90s and 2000s. A younger Jody is shown on stage in one 2002 recording. She looms in her skimpy, black attire as her guitar screams.
But the old video clip doesn’t answer enough. Her new digital fans speculate wildly about her past. Some say her husband shot her point-blank in the face during a domestic altercation, and that one of the masks on her walls is not a mask at all, but his decapitated head on full display. But the rumor is untrue, based on a 2013 article about a completely different Jody Burns in Michigan.
Other stories are fully fabricated, like one that says she got facial reconstruction after fighting in a warzone, one of the last survivors, killing over 500 men in battle. Another says that she was in a terrible boating accident involving a shark.
I had to get the story straight—if not for the sake of her baying fans, then for my own sake. Who is Jody Black Death Metal Burns? What is Jody Black Death Metal Burns? And why is she so god damn SEXY???
On the other side of the phone was a voice that did not have a smoker’s cough, nor was it a demon growling from the pits of the damned. It was the voice of a chill neighbor in southeastern Pennsylvania—someone you’d spot at the grocery store and exchange a warm but sheepish smile with—but she said things like, “Playing guitar feels like going into battle. It has that same intensity and purpose. It’s like, you’re a Viking, and your guitar is your sword.”
Jody moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when she was 9 years old. It was the ‘70s—a formative era for her. She voraciously read comics from the series Eerie Publications that she picked up from a local gas station. “[They] would have these guys getting their heads chopped off, and vampires, and demons,” she said. The comics became the catalyst for her lifelong love of horror.
WANT to WRITE FOR 65,000? CHECK OUR SUBMISSIONS PAGE.
Then she discovered Black Sabbath and Van Halen. These bands, among others, inspired her to get gear and hardware that allowed her to experiment with different styles of guitar playing. Her neighbors weren’t thrilled about it, though.
“We moved a little walk away from the airport,” she said about the time. “Big jet planes would make loud noises all night, so I always thought it was weird that everybody was always telling me to turn the music down. ‘You’re playing too loud,’ but then they let these jets fly above.” She laughed at the contradiction, “As soon as you play the guitar, everybody starts staring at you.”
She was just shredding all the time. “It was my thing. All the guitar players in the ‘70s were playing pentatonic scales. I was into hyper-speed shredding. I always thought, like, I invented this. But then the ‘80s came around, and everyone was doing it.”
Shredding was still novel when Jody formed her first band in the ‘70s—a garage band called Metallic Steel that “looked like Motley Crue,” she said. The members were ordinary rockers of their time—big hair, denim vests, tight jeans. She watched them take drugs. They wanted to do nothing but watch Gilligan’s Island and get super high.
“I mean, they were so lame, it was unbelievable,” Jody said. “Dave—the bass player—he was pretty good, but we just never practiced. I would knock on his door and say, ‘Let’s practice,’ and he’d be like, ‘Ahh… y’know, it's Gilligan.’ I’d be like, ‘Come on, man, you’re so freaking lame. You wanna watch Gilligan’s Island? Fucking unbelievable.’ I was trying to get the band together, but I had all these people holding me back.”
The final straw was when she left her amps and expensive equipment at the Metallic Steel garage HQ. All of her stuff was gone when she returned, pawned off without her knowledge to fund their degenerate addict lifestyles. There had been no band all along, just a gang of thieves with bad morals and no respect for the queen.
“That's what they do. They pretend they're a band, and get other people to come in, and they just steal their equipment and go out and buy drugs with it.”
Jody said she was never into drugs. “It’s weird ‘cause people look at me and they're like, ‘Oh, there are drugs involved.’ There are no drugs involved. I'm not against drugs—I think they should be legalized—but you see addiction, all these people lose their lives to it.”
Music was a fulfilling enough outlet for her. Shredding remains her drug of choice to this day.
While her first band unraveled, so did her father in Florida. She said he was once a professional swimmer, but he would dishonestly boast that he had won an Olympic gold medal for it. It’s unclear what the actual breadth of his fame was. Regardless, swimming was not enough financially.
Jody said his occupation was “contractor,” which was true, but the way she described his predatory business practices over the phone made it seem more like he was a career tyrant than anything else.
Jody said he exploited drug addicts, promising them pay for working on his estate, and then he wouldn’t pay them. After he decided he had had enough of one crew, he would fire and replace them with new laborers to prevent insubordination. He had a "grandiose sense of entitlement and lack of empathy for other people.”
Jody and her brothers labored alongside the indentured addicts, and although her father made gains in his master manipulation tactics, the household struggled as a whole with little support from any adult guardian.
“It wasn't stable,” Jody said. “We were knockin’ on people's doors asking for cans of food and stuff. I’m like, 14 years old, and the law says you have to support your family. He was like, ‘Well, I don't. Laws don't apply to me.’ It was like he formed every law, every norm, everything.”
Her father was later incarcerated in 1989. She declined to comment any further, only stating that what he did was “highly illegal.”
Her father’s prison sentence forced her to relocate to the Philadelphia suburbs to live with her grandparents in the early ‘90s, where she remains to this day. The move got her out of the landscaping business and also granted her access to an alternative metal scene filled with similarly inclined musicians (something she never found in Florida). They helped lift her music out of the ideation stage.
That’s when she formed her solo project, Black Death. She played a copious number of shows at dives and Gothic safe havens in the area. That was when she developed her trademark stage persona, the leather-clad Jody Burns. She created a full setlist of original songs.
Costumes were a huge part of the project, and she handmade her leather BDSM garb, even utilizing scraps from upholstery material. She fully devoted herself to Black Death: the aesthetics, the performance, and especially the music itself. She started to make a name for herself in the new town.
“People would come out, watch, and get really into it,” she said. “Fans would come up and talk to me after. There was definitely an audience there. This one song, ‘Search and Destroy,’ I used to crack a whip. I’d open shows like that, and everybody would go wild.”
Jody brought in a lot of money for the clubs, but she said not much of it came her way. “Sometimes I’d get like $50, maybe once or twice. Most of the time, nothing … It was frustrating because you knew people were paying to get in, but you weren’t seeing that money.”
She found financial support through other means. She started teaching guitar and got a job at a Halloween costume shop. Most of her pay was recycled back into the shop; she would purchase her favorite horror masks to use at her next Black Death performance.
Jody still loves to collect horror masks. “I must have at least ninety of ‘em, but half of ‘em are lost ‘cause they're all shriveled up. They’re scattered all over the place: witches, demons, guys melted from radiation. They're scattered all around.”
The masks stare deep into the camera in the background of her Instagram Reels. Jody never moved out of her grandparents’ home. She stayed after they passed and filled it with ghouls and cadavers. It became Jody’s personal lair. The basement became her refuge, a closed-off world where she could harness her power through the rituals of shredding. Her stories over the phone rarely mentioned the outside world. Just her home and the seedy Delco clubs she sought refuge in.
SUBSCRIBE to US on SUBSTACK to SUPPORT MORE WORK LIKE THIS and GET VIP CONTENT
She didn’t visit Florida often. One time she did, and she ran into a ghost from her past: Dave, her old Gilligan’s Island-obsessed bass player.
“I was playing in the south of Florida, and I ran into him, and he was like, ‘Oh, dude, that was great!’ He acted like my best friend, and I was like, what the fuck?”
Jody lived her days in Florida as an outsider who yearned to express the depth and intensity of her inner world. Dave was a bad reminder of her creative imprisonment. Back then, she wanted to join the army instead of pursuing music. She was drawn to the idea of being part of a vast global struggle. She lifted weights, trained with her professional boxer grandfather, and was quick to fight. But she found that it wasn’t a violence in her, more like an intensity—a “fireball,” she called it, that she hoped to unleash on the battlefield. Instead, she channeled her fireball into music and performance. “The guitar is a machine gun,” she said.
Jody also believed that, as a young trans woman, she would have faced much discrimination in the army.
She said the music scene was far more accepting. Goths in the Philly-Delaware underground “could never move economically to be at the level of corporate suits,” so they withheld judgment on her gender identity.
“Transness is who I am. It has nothing to do with the music. My love for metal is innate. Even if I wasn’t presenting that way, I’d still be doing the same thing, playing the same music.”
It’s not clear when Jody stopped performing live. Her main outlet now is Instagram. She began posting in 2024, and her Reels have steadily grown in popularity since. In January 2025, she hit 8 million views on a Reel with the caption, “Shredmania.”
Her content is a collage of recurring motifs: the blistering, wild shredding, her striking visage and figure, the cramped room, the masks, the leather, the name “Black Death Jody Burns.” None of these elements alone explains her appeal. Together, they form a mystique that is difficult to scroll past. Once upon a time, Jody Burns had to rely on passersby stumbling into a dingy Philadelphia club. Today, those passersby arrive by the thousands, funneled into the same concert by their Explore pages.
WANT to WRITE FOR 65,000? CHECK OUR SUBMISSIONS PAGE.
Jody admits that her age plays a part in her virality, too. “I get a lot of comments, like, ‘Maybe you should give up because you're too old.’ I'm like, you know, Mick Jagger, he's 82, and everybody says, ‘Ah, keep playing, Mick!’ I still feel strong.”
It seemed like Jody still had to rid herself of something—something from her past that she wouldn’t reveal outright.
Or perhaps, Jody just likes to channel dark magic for the hell of it. She plays for that spark of energy that beats all stimulants, dopamine hacking, violence, fury, pain, and time.
Jody loves her fans, and she says that her relationship with them is symbiotic. Her priority is playing music that pleases her first and foremost, but the joy of posting comes from seeing her audience pleased as well. She hopes that, through digital channels, she can quell the fireballs burning in others.
“It causes problems in your everyday life,” she said about the fireball. “You're going to get into depressions, but I'll tell you, the same negative energy can turn into high energy when you play. It’s a natural cocaine of the brain.”
“If you feel steady with what you create, most likely other people will too. If you're just trying to follow a trend or whatever, people can detect the wack energy. You have to please yourself, and then you can please other people, y'know? If you feel energized from your thing, other people will too.”
Then I asked Jody a question often repeated in her comments—“Are you single?”
