When it comes to music, the FBI hasn't traditionally been the biggest supporter.
When jazz, folk, rock, and hip-hop were quenching the public's thirst for disruption, lots of
feathers were being ruffled in Washington — and some of the world's finest musicians
found themselves under investigation by the feds.
Everyone from Barry White to Blondie has had a crack at Richard Berry's 1957 calypso classic
"Louie Louie", but it's the Kingsmen's 1963 version that most people know — partly because
it prompted a whole heap of hysteric moral outrage upon its release.
That wasn't by design, however.
Singer Jack Ely had to contend with a mouthful of braces and a microphone that hung too high
from the ceiling while recording, and the band played a little too loud.
The resulting vocals were mostly incomprehensible, but just suggestive enough to send conservative
parents — and the moral-outrage-hungry FBI — into meltdown.
After two years in the lab and a 119-page report, the subsequent investigation yielded
diddly-squat in the way of anything concretely obscene.
"Louie Louie" is actually just a song about a sailor and a girl he really loves, but that
didn't matter — the track's subversive nature had already become legend.
Bands who covered it either mumbled their way through or made up their own lyrics, and
kids ended up hearing what they wanted to hear.
Best of all, there actually was a proper obscenity staring the feds right in their faces all
along.
About a minute in, you can hear a muffled four-letter word that was exclaimed by drummer
Lynn Easton after he dropped his sticks.
Honestly, it's a wonder teenagers around the country didn't pledge their allegiance to
Satan right there on the spot.
When John Lennon made New York his home during the early 1970s, the FBI wasted no time in
trying to send him back across the pond.
J. Edgar Hoover himself wrote to President Nixon's Justice Department in 1972, warning
of this so-called "former member of the Beatles singing group" and the potentially dangerous
revolutionary views he espoused.
Lennon opposed the Vietnam War and was fond of illicit drugs, so with Nixon's re-election
campaign on the horizon they all thought it best to just send that pesky British hippie
packing.
The former Beatle first found himself on the feds' naughty list in December 1971, when
he flew out to Michigan to perform at the Free John Sinclair rally.
Poet, peace activist, and former MC5 manager John Sinclair was serving a 10-year sentence
for the possession of two joints.
People had been lobbying for his release for years, but it was Lennon showing up to the
rally and performing the song "John Sinclair" that instigated immediate action; the Michigan
Supreme Court saw some sense and ordered Sinclair released within a week.
Unbeknownst to Lennon, there were FBI informants in the audience taking notes, and they weren't
about to let this one slide; the ensuing investigation went on for 12 months.
Though they failed to deport him, Lennon's activism, music, and even his marriage all
suffered as a result of their constant surveillance and harassment.
"They're after us because we want..
We stand for something.. we want peace, you know."
This investigation had less to do with who had the cooler acronym and more to do with
a certain sweary anti-police song that has since passed into hip-hop legend.
NWA's incendiary 1988 protest anthem heralded the dawn of the age of gangsta rap, and, shockingly,
bureau agents weren't exactly lining up to buy it.
The FBI reared their heads about a year after the track dropped.
Speaking on behalf of the whole bureau, the assistant director of the office of public
affairs sent a warning letter to the group's label, denouncing the song — or at least,
that's the assumption; he never actually mentions the track by name.
The FBI claimed the track was "degrading," and that it encouraged violence and disrespect
toward law enforcement, before making it clear the bureau wouldn't stand for that kind of
nonsense.
This never actually developed into a full-on investigation, and the feds even saw the need
to clarify that they didn't intend to stifle or censor anyone's mode of creative expression.
But merely landing in the bureau's steely gaze gave the group a sizable boost in popularity,
and according to Ice Cube it urged them to speak out more loudly against the forces of
tyranny and oppression — forces the group felt had gone unchecked for too long.
"It didn't crack us, break us, turn us into punks, make us bite our tongue, it just made
us stand up even more."
Before Ross and Rachel, there was Elvis and the FBI — one of the quintessential will-they-won't-they
affairs of the 20th century.
Presley and the bureau crossed paths a number of times for a variety of reasons over the
years.
Most of it was standard-issue stuff for Presley's protection, like when they investigated blackmail
attempts and death threats issued against him.
And then in 1970, he actually offered to be a government agent and met with President
Nixon to discuss the moral degradation of the country.
A decade earlier, however, Presley had crossed paths with the FBI for entirely different
reasons.
The singer's 683-page file dates all the way back to 1956, when J. Edgar Hoover received
a letter from a Catholic newspaper editor describing one of the King's performances
in Wisconsin as the "filthiest and most harmful production" the writer had ever seen.
The concern was that Presley's sexual magnetism was driving his fans mad with hormonal hysteria,
and this represented a genuine danger to the security of the United States.
This complaint was filed away but nothing much seemed to come of it.
Elvis didn't end up becoming a federal agent either, so that relationship remained sadly
unconsummated to the very end.
Considering the band's most well-known song is, in part, a sincere ode to the miracle
of magnets, the ICP faithful are a surprisingly devoted bunch.
Juggalos have attracted their fair share of ridicule over the years, warranted or not,
and it's probably been suggested more than once that being a fan of the band should itself
be a criminal offense.
And thanks to the FBI, it actually kind of is.
Since 2011, the FBI has classified the Juggalos as a "loosely organized hybrid gang."
That doesn't mean the feds are going to bust down your door for spinning "Hokus Pokus"
one too many times, but the duo have claimed that fans have experienced legitimate discrimination
by employers, the military, the courts, landlords, and law enforcement as a result of that gang
designation.
It even got so bad that ICP sued the FBI in 2014 in an attempt to set things straight.
The suit was initially dismissed, then successfully appealed in 2015.
They then filed a new lawsuit, but that one was thrown out in December 2017.
"That has big repercussions man that’s not just something they said one day, its died
down but we’re still not off that motherf----r."
There probably aren't many situations where you can comfortably say Violent J and Shaggy
2 Dope are the most reasonable adults in the room, but that does seem to be the case here.
There are always going to be a few bad clowns in the clown car, but to saddle a whole fan
base with a label this damaging seems like yet another instance of the long arm of the
law poking around where it doesn't belong.
It's pretty weird to think that, sometime in the late '80s, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch
Nails was walking around blissfully unaware of the ongoing FBI investigation into his
own death.
But it's true.
The original video for Nine Inch Nails' "Down in It" has Reznor playing a man who climbs
a tall building, slips, and falls to his death.
While shooting this portion of the video, a camera attached to a helium balloon filmed
Reznor's "dead" body from above.
Unfortunately, the balloon broke away from the ropes holding it in place.
The camera was later found by a farmer in Michigan, hundreds of miles away, and the
farmer interpreted the footage as scraps from an actual snuff film.
He reported it to authorities, who called the FBI, who launched a brief investigation
into Reznor's supposed death.
After the feds determined the identity of the "body," Reznor's manager eventually found
himself having to explain that the singer was, in fact, still of this earthly plane
— and probably suggested tuning into MTV now and then to save some time in the future.
Throw a pair of penny loafers in any direction in '60s New York and you'd probably hit a
politically active folk singer — but Phil Ochs might have been the most resolute of
them all.
The fact that he's mostly an unknown figure in today's musical and cultural landscape
is a real shame, but maybe not all that surprising considering the long, dark shadow the FBI
had cast over his tragically short career.
Ochs was convinced he was being monitored by the FBI for years, but people just thought
he was paranoid and delusional.
Sadly, he was also an alcoholic, which some thought lent credence to that line of thinking.
But he was absolutely right; the feds had been keeping an eye on him since the early
'60s, when he would perform his politically charged music at protest rallies.
On top of all that, he was also mugged and strangled in Dar es Salaam in 1973, losing
some of his vocal range as a result — and always suspected that the U.S. government
had been behind that one, too.
Mindless paranoia?
Well, he was right about everything else.
Unfortunately, Ochs took his own life in 1976 at the age of 35.
The feds investigated him right up to the end, but he never once committed a federal
crime.
The Monkees always seemed like just the kind of clean-cut, wholesome boy band you wouldn't
mind introducing to your parents.
But in 2011, the FBI released a short file on the group that had been kept confidential
for three decades, revealing a slightly more dissident and politically conscious mindset
than people might have expected.
The heavily redacted file describes an agent's investigation of a Monkees concert in 1967.
He reported that the guys were dressed as so-called "beatnik types", and that they projected
"subliminal" messages of a "left wing" nature on a screen.
These included images of anti-Vietnam War protests, as well as images of the riots in
Selma and Berkeley.
And honestly, that's not bad for a group often thought of as little more than a prefabricated
version of The Beatles.
The file is brief, but the majority of it remains classified — so we can only guess
what other dissident monkeying around they were really getting up to.
The FBI's counterintelligence program sought to preserve the status quo by any means necessary
back in the day, sniffing out and quelling anything that even vaguely resembled dissidence
or communist sympathy.
Black liberation and civil rights groups were hit particularly hard, and a number of sympathetic
jazz musicians found themselves with a target on their backs.
Duke Ellington was one such undesirable, and he was dogged for a remarkably long time despite
a relatively benign track record.
Essentially, Ellington was investigated for performing at progressive benefits the feds
deemed suspicious, starting with the All-Harlem Youth Conference in 1938.
The focus of the conference was unemployment, and President Roosevelt had expressed support
for it, but the FBI still saw fit to label it a "communist front" — and Ellington a
potential threat by association.
In reality, Ellington was adamantly anti-communist and made no bones about it, even penning a
magazine article titled "No Red Songs for Me" in 1950.
But that didn't seem to make a bit of difference in Uncle Sam's eyes.
Ellington would go on to be monitored for almost four decades.
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