The rock music industry operates on paranoia, madness and just sheer piss-taking. Here are just some of the zanier ones.
A = Assassination
A week after 33 year old Grammy-nominated charity-driven rapper Nipsey Hussle was shot outside a clothing store in his South LA neighbourhood this year, the story went viral that he had been silenced by the US government.
He was funding a documentary on Dr. Sebi, aka Honduran herbalist Alfredo Bowman, which would prove the government hid the cure for AIDS/HIV to weaken the African American community.
B = Breakfast in America
The 1979 album from Supertramp had a cover which predicted the 9/11 World Trade Center Towers attacks.
The Grammy-winning cover was a view from an airplane overlooking Manhattan. Late actress Kate Murtagh, dressed as a diner waitress plays the Statue of Liberty, holding up a glass of orange juice in place of the torch.
The towers appear in the distance.
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A 2016 report by TV show Dangerous Minds outlined the theory: breakfast indicated the time of the attacks (the first plane struck at 8:45 am), the waitress is indicating the towers as the place to target, the juice is the same colour as a fireball, and the back cover shows a plane flying towards the towers.
If you hold the cover in front of a mirror the “u” and “p” in “Supertramp” look like a “9” and an “11.”
C = Car
That’s what Paul McCartney died in, in a 1966 accident and replaced by a lookalike.
The other Beatles dropped hints like the “funeral party” of the Abbey Road cover and two Lennon lines, “he blew his mind out in a car, he didn’t notice that the lights had changed” from ‘A Day In The Life’ (not about Tara Guinness, heir to the Guinness fortune). And “I buried Paul” at the end of ‘Strawberry Fields’ which he claimed was “cranberry sauce”.
The impersonator explained the changes in Macca’s looks after 1966 and the drivel in some of his early solo albums.
D= Drowning
Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones died in his pool after an asthma attack but later suggestions were he was murdered by builder Frank Thorogood after or during a fight over money and accusations of theft by his builders working on his country pile Cotchford Farm.
Jim Morrison officially died in a bathtub in Paris of a heart attack. Marianne Faithfull in Mojo claimed her ex-boyfriend dealt heroin to celebs, and that’s what caused the Doors singer’s demise.
“He went to see Jim Morrison and killed him. I mean I’m sure it was an accident. Poor bastard,” she said.
A later theory has it Jimbo met His End in the toilets of the Rock’n’Roll Circus nightclub, but his body was moved back to his room by club bosses afraid of police attention, according to the 2007 book The End: Jim Morrison.
E = Eagles
The Eagles’ 1977 hit ‘Hotel California’ was not about the “materialism and excess of California” but battling the devil.
The cover photo of Hotel California, the pink Beverly Hills Hotel, led to theories it had been an old church taken over by devil worshippers, a psychiatric hospital, or an inn run by cannibals.
The gatefold depicting the band and fans standing in the courtyard of a Spanish villa included a shadowy figure on the balcony. It was sad to be Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, not a woman hired for the photo shoot.
F = Faked Birth Dates
Sounding too “old” to be a teenager, Lorde had to show her birth certificate (November 7, 1996) to prove she wasn’t really in her 30s.
She slipped up a couple of times, telling Vanity Fair she was 45 or Rookie that she enjoyed the 1999 film The Virgin Suicides “as a teenager”.
Nothing to do with the fact that she was just taking the piss. Loop offered 35 clues on the age fiasco.
Beyonce is a bigger liar. How dare she claim to be born in 1981 when her actual birth date is 1974. How else could she be the mother of her sister Solange, according to “a Beyonce cousin”.
G = Grown Up
Photos posted on YouTube “proved” how child beauty pageant winner JonBenét Ramsey (supposedly murdered in 1996 in the family home) grew up to become Katy Perry.
Others cited the close similarity in looks of their parents. One considered the similarity of JonBenét and Katy’s eyebrows ample proof.
H = Houston, Whitney
She, along with Beyonce, Jay-Z, Bono and Justin Bieber was said to be a member of the “Illuminati” which secretly promotes a New World Order by elites controlling the government, industry and media (https://u.osu.edu/vanzandt/2018/03/07/the-illuminati-conspiracy-theory/).
I = Iron Butterfly
The US heavy rock band’s bassist Phillip Taylor Kramer who rang 911 to say he was topping himself.
His body was found four years later in his van at the bottom of a Malibu ravine.
But some are convinced that he was kidnapped at LA airport where he was meeting an associate.
The aerospace engineering graduate who worked for the US Dept of Defence had to be hushed up as he’d pioneered transporting information and matter through space.
J = Justin Bieber
He is really a shape-shifting lizard.
This piece of genius surfaced in Australia in 2017 where people saw him turn into a lizard in public. A site claimed the Bieb was part of the “dominant reptilian-Illuminati bloodline” and showed footage of the singer being arrested in 2014 and “blinking like a lizard”.
K = King, Stephen
The US horror writer’s facial similarity to John Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman led to rumours he’d shot the ex-Beatle outside his New York home – presumably in the pay of the FBI threatened by Lennon’s high profile anti-war proclamations. T
his claim was made by a Steve Lightfoot, during a 2009 town council meeting in Sarasota, Florida, where King had a home. Lightfoot was escorted out of the meeting screeching that King is “the worst criminal the state of Florida has ever harboured!”
L = Lavigne, Avril
She actually committed suicide in 2013.
So her record company covered it up by using her lookalike Melissa Vandella – whom Avril had hired on previous occasions to confuse the paparazzi—to step in.
Makes sense. After all, would the girl who sang ‘sk8ter boi’ have blown her street cred by marrying whatshis from Nickelback?
M = Marley, Bob
The dreadlocked one, didn’t die in May 1981 from malignant melanoma due to a toe infected during a soccer game.
No, the CIA wanted the reggae-meister out of the way because of his disturbing calls for peace and love. Using an agent posing as a fan, they presented Marley with a pair of boots with poison-coated copper wire in the toe area.
N = Nicki Minaj
She doesn’t sing on her records. Minaj uses sped-up vocals from Jay Z who created her as a character.
O = One Direction
Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson aka “Larry Stylinson” have been a couple for years.
But it was hushed up so their huge female fan following could live out the fantasy they could one day be Mrs Styles or Tomlinson.
The duo’s affairs with women and having children? Made up by their management. Oh, of course.
P = Pink Floyd
If you sync up Dark Side of The Moon after the first MGM lion roar of the movie The Wizard Of Oz, the screen action and album’s songs work together spookily.
The theory was put out there by Charles Savage, who penned an article for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette on August 1, 1995.
The suggestion took off worldwide. But the album’s engineer Alan Parsons pooh-poohed it. “There simply wasn’t mechanics to do it,” he said. “We had no means of playing videotapes in the room at all. I don’t think VHS had come along by ’72, had it?”
Q = Queen
Apparently the Bohemian Rhapsody movie became a billion-dollar hit not because it was frightfully good but Queen had made a pact with the devil.
A fan posted a video which balances out the devil references to the Christian ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrC_cTQLbAQ
It also shows that a photo of guitarist Brian May in a 666 T-shirt is in fact showing 46664, Nelson Mandela’s prisoner number.
There are also freemason accusations, fuelled by the appearance of a freemason ring sported by “Freddie Mercury” in the flick and the real one’s penchant for signing into hotels under the name “F. Mason”.
R = Reverse
American tele-evangelist Paul Crouch claimed in 1982 that if you played the “bustle in your hedgerow” part of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’ in reverse, you would hear “Here’s to my sweet Satan/The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan/He will give those with him 666/There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.”
S = Sports Illustrated
In 1977, Kiss decided that for the Super Special Kiss comic book, it would be cool to mix their blood with the red ink in the printing press.
Gene Simmons recalled, “We got into a DC3, one of those big prop planes, and flew up to Buffalo to Marvel’s printing plant, where they pour the ink and make comic books.
“A notary public actually witnessed the blood being drawn.”
Alas, there was a mix-up, and the Kiss blood was used in a Sports Illustrated run instead.
T = “turn me on dead man”
That is what you’ll hear when you listen backwards to The Beatles avant-garde collage ‘Revolution No. 9’ from their double white album and a voice chants “no. 9, “No. 9” amidst the sound effects of a car crash and crying.
There are more instances of hidden messages from the usual suspects like Slayer, Cradle of Filth, Frank Zappa and Marilyn Manson and the not so usual suspects as ELO, Cheap Trick and Queen.
U = Uncut Magazine
It began the tale that Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode is a vampire.
Gahan sparked the story himself, telling the magazine in 2001 he had a fascination for vampires around the time of the Devotional tour.
He apparently put a curse on a British journalist by biting him on the neck and later admitted, “Even the bed I slept in in Los Angeles was in the shape of a coffin – a huge double bed shaped like a coffin! Ha ha!
“My whole life was Spinal Tap at that time.”
V = Volkswagen
The VW Beetle parked on Abbey Road in the hour the cover of the Beatles album was shot is another cryptic clue by the other three that the real Paul had died in that infamous car crash.
The car’s number plate is LMW 28IF… as in McCartney would have been 28 if he’d lived.
However the photo was taken on August 8, 1969 at 11.35 am, and McCartney celebrated his 27th birthday some weeks before, in June 18.
W = Wyatt, Lorne
He was a New Jersey high-school student who famously claimed in his college paper that it was he who wrote Bob Dylan’s 1963 tune ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’.
The answer, my friend, came in 1974 when Wyatt admitted he wanted to make up a tale so tall that it made “Pinocchio look like he had a pug nose.”
X = X-amination
The Seattle Police Dept had determined that Kurt Cobain killed himself and there was no foul play.
But that wasn’t good enough for some dimwits to claim his widow, Courtney Love, had him killed.
Apparently, they claimed, she feared he was about to divorce her and cut her out of his fortune.
A 2014 documentary Soaked in Bleach which looked at these accusations was set for cinema release in the US.
Love’s lawyers fired off a stern cease-and-desist letter by pigeon post and everyone involved ran for their lives.
Y = Yesterday
The movie set in a world where Beatles didn’t exist, was pre-empted by The Beatles Never Existed website.
Through specific photos of height, eyebrows, teeth, and ear photos it came to the conclusion that the Fab Four were an elaborate hoax using an endless roll-call of actors.
Z = Ziggy Stardust
The cover of David Bowie 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, features the name K. West on the wall.
West ran a shop (tailor or furs) in Heddon Street in central London where the shot was taken.
But it was really Bowie’s premonition of Kanye West’s rise and possibly explains his goofy post-Kardashian godlike behaviour of late.
In the album’s opener ‘Five Years’ Ziggy realises that Starman has to come in five years to stop the end of the world. Kanye was born on June 8, 1977, five years later. Ziggy Stardust was released in Britain on June 16 1972.
On his final album, Blackstar, Bowie seems to be repeating his claim that Kanye is his real heir.
On the title track, he sings, “Something happened on the day he died. Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried, ‘I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar!’’
