Can a catchy composition kill? Could a tune turn your luck sour? Maybe, maybe not — but you'd better not take a chance on these infamous songs.
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00:00Can a catchy composition kill?
00:03Could a tune turn your luck sour?
00:05Maybe, maybe not.
00:07But you better not take a chance on these infamous songs.
00:11A legacy of tragedy began in 1970 when Peter Ham and Tom Evans,
00:15both members of the Welsh band Badfinger, merged two songs about their respective
00:19relationship woes into a single heart-wrenching ballad called Without You.
00:23At the time, Badfinger was poised to become the next great rock band,
00:27having been mentored by the Beatles and signed to Apple Records.
00:30But then everything fell apart.
00:32Apple Records crumbled after the Beatles
00:34disbanded, leaving Badfinger adrift. Desperate,
00:37they signed themselves over to the management of American fraudster Stan
00:41Pauly. The band soon fell victim to Pauly's criminal mismanagement,
00:44which left them practically penniless despite writing several hit songs.
00:48In the midst of this chaos,
00:49singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson heard Without You at a friend's house.
00:53Nilsson loved the song so much that he
00:55recorded his own chart-topping version.
00:57Although pushed by his producer to sing
00:59at the upper limits of his vocal range on an arrangement he despised,
01:02he quickly grew to hate it.
01:04Nonetheless, it became an international hit for him in 1971.
01:08Ham and Evans, meanwhile, saw little success from their creation
01:11and remained mired in financial and legal struggles.
01:14As a result, both died by suicide at young ages.
01:17The song's curse seemingly struck again
01:20when singer Mariah Carey covered Without You in 1994.
01:23Just days before her chart-topping
01:25version debuted, Harry Nilsson died of a heart attack.
01:29As the British rock band The Who learned,
01:31some song curses are quite selective with their victims.
01:34In a 2015 interview with Howard Stern,
01:36Who singer Roger Daltrey claimed that their trouble began when drummer Keith
01:40Moon couldn't get the beat right on a song called Music Must Change.
01:44Moon's unconventional style wasn't meshing with the song's standard time signature.
01:48At the time, he was also struggling with severe addiction issues.
01:51As a result, the band ended up hiring a session musician to record drums
01:55for the song, which was released on 1978's Who Are You?
01:58Then on September 7th, just a month after
02:01the album's release, Moon died of an accidental overdose.
02:04Following his tragic death,
02:06the remaining members of the band played Music Must Change only a handful of times
02:10before placing it into early retirement.
02:12While certainly a grim reminder of the darkness surrounding Moon's final days,
02:16the song's curse goes even deeper.
02:18When The Who finally decided to resurrect Music Must Change for a 2002 tour,
02:23bassist John Entwistle died just one day before the band was scheduled to hit
02:27the road. This was enough for Daltrey to lay the song to rest forever.
02:31Well, I kind of got a weird feeling about it because it is about how it's got to move on.
02:38Oddly enough, Old Blue Eyes' 1969
02:40anthem My Way is considered a song of ill repute in the Philippines.
02:44In fact, the song incites such rage there
02:46that it inspired a slew of murders known
02:48as the My Way killings at a number of karaoke bars, which are highly popular
02:52in the Philippines. The anger mostly centers around how particularly awful
02:56a song sounds sung out of tune, which, if you're familiar with karaoke,
02:59is kind of a common phenomenon. In one notable incident in 2007,
03:03a man named Romy Balagula was belting out My Way at a San Mateo karaoke bar
03:08when security guard Robledo Ortega hollered at him that he was badly off key.
03:12When Balagula carried on singing,
03:14Ortega whipped out a gun and shot him dead.
03:17At least five other similar killings have taken place,
03:20with many lesser My Way infractions ending in violent fistfights.
03:23As for why this song specifically rubs people the wrong way,
03:26some have pointed to its cocky lyrics.
03:29Butch Albarracin, owner of a singing school
03:31in the Philippines, told The New York Times,
03:33I did it my way, it's so arrogant.
03:36The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer,
03:39as if you're somebody when you're really nobody.
03:41Others claim that the general machismo
03:43and aggression prevalent in Filipino culture is to blame,
03:46and argue that My Way just happens to be a popular choice for karaoke singers.
03:50Or at least it was.
03:52The accursed song is now banned in many of the country's karaoke bars.
03:57Best known for their hit Surf City and the Little Old Lady from Pasadena,
04:00California surf rock duo Jan and Dean were a big deal in the 1960s.
04:05But one of their most popular songs,
04:061964's Dead Man's Curve, ended up being eerily prophetic.
04:10In the song, the duo sings of racing
04:13in a Chevrolet Corvette Stingray on a winding section of a Los Angeles road
04:17called Dead Man's Curve, somewhere near Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street.
04:20As you might expect, it doesn't end well.
04:23The song's last verse describes a terrible crash that leaves the narrator dead.
04:27Two years later, life imitated art.
04:30On April 12th, 1966,
04:32Jan Barry crashed his own Stingray while driving too fast on Sunset Boulevard,
04:36just six miles away from the song's setting.
04:39Unlike his protagonist, however, Barry survived his car crash,
04:43although he suffered lifelong severe brain damage,
04:46partial paralysis and speech impairments.
04:48The accident also derailed Barry's career at the peak of his popularity.
04:52Born into a Black family in 1900s
04:55Mississippi, legendary blues musician Robert Johnson lived a hard life.
04:59He found solace in music, however.
05:01Escaping the life of a plantation worker,
05:03he eked out a living as a musician and married his sweetheart.
05:06But his wife's religious family never approved of his chosen trade.
05:10In fact, when she died in childbirth,
05:12they attributed the tragedy to his affiliation with the devil's music.
05:15Johnson then devoted himself wholeheartedly to the blues,
05:19returning to the scene with seemingly supernatural musical abilities.
05:22He said he's going to make some records.
05:25According to music journalist Paul Trinka in his book Portrait of the Blues,
05:29Johnson told fellow blues musician Son House that he had met a dark man
05:32at a crossroads who had tuned his guitar for him.
05:35A common euphemism for selling one's soul to the devil,
05:38Johnson faced hardships throughout his life, all the way up to his untimely
05:42and painful death by poisoning, and many attribute his life of misfortune
05:46to a powerful curse brought on by his devilish pact.
05:49The so-called Crossroads Curse allegedly lives on, bringing tragedy to anyone
05:53who covers Johnson's 1936 song Crossroad Blues.
05:57Both Robert Plant and Eric Clapton lost young sons after covering it.
06:01Members of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers died in accidents
06:04after performing it, and Kurt Cobain was considering recording it before dying
06:08by suicide. The curse even seemed to impact John Mayer,
06:11who covered the song shortly before falling out of mainstream favor.
06:15Song curses aren't just reserved for the devil's music, of course.
06:19In the 19th century,
06:20many classical musicians believed in the dreaded Curse of the Ninth,
06:24in which composers were fated to die after completing their ninth symphonies.
06:28And it wasn't a baseless fear.
06:30Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert,
06:32Ralf von Williams and Antonin Dvořák all died after their ninths.
06:36Following the death of Beethoven,
06:38one ultra superstitious composer, Gustav Mahler, attempted to defeat the curse.
06:43As he wrote his ninth piece of music,
06:45Mahler found a semantic loophole by simply not calling it a symphony.
06:49Unfortunately, the curse wasn't fooled.
06:51While composing his tenth symphony in 1911,
06:54Mahler was stricken with pneumonia and died before it could be finished.
06:57Composer Arnold Schoenberg later waxed poetic about the curse in his book
07:01Style and Idea.
07:03He wrote, It seems that the ninth is a limit.
07:05He who wants to go beyond it must pass away.
07:08It seemed as if something might be imparted to us in the tenth,
07:11which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not yet ready.
07:22Of course, many composers, including Mozart, escaped the curse unscathed,
07:26but trepidation around the curse of the ninth has survived into the modern age.
07:30Shortly after debuting his own in 2012,
07:33composer Philip Glass told the Los Angeles Times,
07:36Everyone is afraid to do a ninth symphony.
07:39As a precaution, Glass composed his ninth and tenth symphonies together,
07:43and it seems his trick worked better than Mahler's.
07:46Regis Charest's somber 1932 piano ballad was originally titled The World Has Ended.
07:51Inspired by a bad breakup, it was already a pretty glum song,
07:55but it was the version with lyrics by poet
07:58which describe a man who becomes suicidal after his lover's death that caught on.
08:02It eventually became known as the Hungarian suicide song.
08:05The song was translated into English
08:07and later famously covered by Billie Holiday as Gloomy Sunday in 1941.
08:12But its popularity came with a troubling problem.
08:15A shocking number of people who heard it ended up taking their own lives.
08:19Hundreds of suicides were bizarrely linked
08:21to the song, with one girl even found clutching the sheet music.
08:25In response, many networks banned it.
08:27Tragedy also befell the song's creators.
08:30Holiday herself died at age 44 in 1959,
08:33and years later, in 1968, the song's original composer, Charest, died by suicide.
08:39Speaking about his creation with Time magazine in 1936, Charest had lamented,
08:43This fatal fame hurts me.
08:45I cried all the disappointments of my heart into this song,
08:49and it seems that others with feelings like mine have found their own hurt in it.
08:52While all of this is certainly disturbing,
08:54a 2007 article published in Omega notes that the increase in 1930 suicides likely
08:59had more to do with the ongoing Great Depression than the song itself.
09:04Russian composer Alexander Skryabin was known for his innovative and progressive style.
09:08In 1911, however, he wrote a piece of piano music so intense he actually scared himself.
09:14Skryabin described his sixth sonata
09:16with such unflattering words as nightmarish, unclean and mischievous.
09:20In fact, he was so afraid of his own creation that he never played it in public.
09:24And when he played it for friends, he appeared visibly frightened.
09:27The power of Christ compels you!
09:31The power of Christ compels you!
09:34Skryabin's biographer, Fabian Bowers,
09:36logically attributed the song's darkness to its haunting minor thirds
09:39and unsettling fourth and fifth harmonies.
09:42Still, in addition to describing the song
09:44as satanic, Bowers had this to say about it.
09:46Its dark and evil aspect embraced horror, terror and the omnipresent unknown.
09:50Its mood directly inherits the inchoate,
09:53incomprehensible, unformed chaos of the dark beginning, the void.
09:57On April 27th, 1915, after composing four more pieces, Skryabin died of septicemia
10:03caused by a mysterious sore on his lip at the height of his career.
10:06He was just 43 years old.
10:09Some words just weren't meant to be sung.
10:11Take the curious case of Pakistani singer
10:14Amanat Ali Khan's biggest song, for example.
10:16The lyrics of Inshaa Ji Utoh were originally a poem written by Pakistani
10:20author Ibn-e-Inshaa in the 1970s.
10:23In it, Inshaa tells the story of a disenchanted man who decides on a whim
10:27to leave his city and his lover for good.
10:30Inspired by the poem's dark take on urban life, Khan received Inshaa's permission
10:34to put it to music and make it into a ghazal, a type of classical song based
10:38on Arabic poetry. After he sang it on television in 1974,
10:42it became a huge hit.
10:44But just months after its success,
10:46Khan died suddenly of appendicitis at age 52.
10:49Four years later, on the exact date of the song's release,
10:52Inshaa, the poet who penned its words, died of cancer.
10:56One day before his own death,
10:58Inshaa attributed Khan's passing to the song.
11:00He wrote to a friend,
11:01How many more lives will this cursed poem take?
11:04At least one more, as it turns out.
11:07Khan's oldest son, Asad, also died at age 52,
11:10not long after singing his father's famous song at a 2006 concert.
11:14It was one of the last songs he would ever sing.
11:17If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
11:20please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988
11:24or by calling 1-800-273-TALK.
11:27That's 1-800-273-8255.