Hello and welcome back to the most amazing channel on the internet, I am your host Rebecca
Felgate and I love music.
I really do.
My favorite band is Radiohead, but I am also into classical music, jazz, funk, soul, rap….
You name it….
I love a good beat.
There are, unfortunately, some beats out there that should never be listened to for fear
of grave consequences.
That’s right, we are back with the Top 10 cursed songs you shouldn’t listen to part
2….
You guys seemed to enjoy part one so much I thought I would bring you a second helping,
although don’t be tempted to listen to these tracks or look too deeply into these courses.
If you do…well…don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Comment with your favorite song!
10- Heavy Metal Suicide Solution In the in the 1980s, heavy metal was at its
height in popularity and rock legends like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were busy swinging
their hair and biting bats, but that wasn’t all they were doing, apparently!
According to sensationalist media and some parents, these rockers were writing satanic
cursed melodies with subliminal messages that encouraged kids and teens to kill themselves.
Osbourne’s smash track Suicide Solution was blamed for a number of self-harming teens,
as well as the death of the depressed teen, John McCollom.
Ozzy was even taken to court over it.
You might be alright listening to this, but you are NOT alright composing this, we have
the infamous Curse of the Ninth…which obviously is coming into number 9.
In the world of classical music, there is a huge superstition around the ninth symphony.
It is widely believed that great composers only have nine symphonies in them and, once
it is written, they will never complete a tenth.
Seemingly it all started with good old Ludwig Van Beethoven who died three years after completing
his seminal ninth symphony, unable to complete his tenth.
Other victims of the ninth have been Gustav Mahler, Franz Schubert, Antonín Dvorák,
Anton Bruckner, Kurt Atterberg, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Sessions, Egon Wellesz, Alexander
Glazunov and Malcolm Arnold.
The most recent victims of the ninth were Vaughn Williams in 1958 and Alfred Schnittke
in 1998.
A lot of composers were nervous of the curse, Schoenberg even wrote: "It seems that the
Ninth is a limit.
He who wants to go beyond it must pass away.
It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet
to know, for which we are not ready.
Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter."
8 - Dead Man's Curve Strangely, this cursed song written by Jan
and Dean seemed to pre-empt Jan’s fate two years ahead of time.
The pair wrote a song called Dead Man’s Curve in 1964, but in 1966, Jan ran his stingray
corvette car off the road at a point on a stretch of road in Los Angeles called….
You guessed it….
Dead Man’s Curve.
Spooky.
Jan Berry spent months in a coma and was partially paralyzed, suffering permanent brain damage.
He did semi recover by 1978 and performed a few shows with Dean Torrence, but he was
never the same.
Perhaps the song was a warning rather than a curse, but it was a warning that sadly was
not heeded.
7 - Ring Around the Rosie We all know the dark story surrounding Ring
Around the Rosie, right?
We have different versions of it in different countries I think, but in the UK it goes like
this: ring around the Rosie, a pocket full of posies, attttiissshhhoo atisho, we all
fall down.
Some people sang – ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
The seemingly innocent kid’s playground song is actually a dark little ditty about
contracting the plague and dying.
The ring of Rosie refers to the marks plague victims would contract, the posies were flowers
people would keep in their pockets to smell – as back in those days, they thought the
disease was spread by a bad smell.
The atishooo part was the sneezing sick people would do, or the ash was a reference of burned
bodies… the all fall down part is death.
Soo…when kids are all singing this and throwing themselves on the floor, they’re pretending
to die.
Freaky.
Not as freaky as imagining a plague doctor singing though.
Have you ever seen those beaky fellows?
I don’t think you have too much to fear from this song, though…plague isn’t quite
what it used to be.
This next song also made a composer nervous, we have Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonata
No. 6 Russian Composer, Alexander Scriabin was a
bit of an eccentric, to say the least.
The pianist was influenced by Chopin and he loved an atonal, dissonant style.
Like many late 19th, early 20th century composers, Scriabin had an artists soul and loved the
concept of synesthesia – associating colors with sounds.
Anyway, the composer wrote Piano Sonata Number 6 in 1911 and was TERRIFIED of it.
He was so scared of his creation that he wouldn’t play it.
He said he was afraid of its darkness and didn’t want to expose himself or his audience
to the horrifying atonality.
According to his biographer The Sixth Sonata is a nether star.
Its dark and evil aspect embraces horror, terror, and the omnipresent Unknown.
He also said that when Scriabin would play the music for friends he would seem frightened
and stare off into the distance.
Freaky.
5 - "Babylon" by David Gray If you are hearing David Gray’s soft rock
1998 ballad, Babylon, you might be in trouble.
It seems the unassuming 20-year-old track is used as a torture song at Guantanamo Bay
prison.
The track was chosen because of its religious undertones – Babylon is a biblical reference.
The idea behind music torture is that it invades a persons mental space – breaking in their
thoughts with constant sound, leaving a captor no place to hide.
It is pretty dark.
In part one we also talked about how the military uses Barney as a torture track….which is
also pretty disturbing.
Another one to scare musicians – we have the infamous 27 Club at number 4
The 27 Club is kind of the rock n roll version of the 9th Symphony curse and refers to rock
legends dying in their 27th year.
At first, it seemed like a bit of a coincidence.
Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin died when they were 27.
But then people started to look back through history and realized a lot of musicians of
note died at age 27 – Robert Johnson, Nat Jaffe, Rudy Lewis had all died at age 27.
Then Jim Morrison of the Doors died at 27 and the legend began to solidify.
Along went Dave Alexander of the Stooges, Pete Ham of Badfinger, Pete de Freitas of
Echo and the Bunnymen….and of course, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.
More recently the club claimed Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, Amy Winehouse
in 2011, Richard Turner of Friendly Fires, also in 2011 and the band Viola Beach in a
horrible accident in 2016.
A lot of people point at drinks and drugs, but a lot of the members of the 27 club died
in freak accidents or were murdered.
There are a lot of crazy conspiracies out there, including that the musicians sold their
souls to the devil.
Sure!
The horrible tale of Operation Wandering Soul at number 3
This is pretty awful on behalf of the American’s in the Vietnam war.
The war went on from 1955 to 1975 and both sides of the fight used torture techniques
to try and best their enemies.
The Americans employed the use of spooky song to scare their enemies.
Back then, a lot of the Vietnamese believed that their dead needed to be buried in their
homeland, and if they were not buried according to the correct ritual, their souls would be
doomed to wander aimlessly.
US sound engineers used their advanced technology to record eerie sounds and played them around
enemy lines with the purpose of scaring the enemy into fleeing their position.
Helicopters were sometimes flown around to broadcast recordings to the Vietcong.
The music and soundscapes were for tactical purposes, but many believe that by messing
with the legend of the spirits, the Americans, in turn, cursed themselves when they played
the sounds.
Who knows.
Robert Schumann was driven mad by his music at number 2
German composer Robert Schumann went stark raving mad, and many believe the reason lay
in his final works, now called Ghost Variations.
What we know is that Schumann woke on a cold February night in the 1850s driven by a force
that compelled him to write a number of hymn-like piano variations.
As he tried to get his melody down on paper, he said he was dictated by angels, or perhaps
even the ghost of himself.
His religious-like fervor had taken a turn by morning and he said he heard demonic tigers
and hyenas in his music.
These ghost variations, or Geistervariation in German, were the last thing that Schumann
wrote before being committed to an asylum.
He died two years later at age 46 and some people in the classical music sphere are varied
wary of the music even today.
Finally, we have a modern day cursed song that has apparently been sending kids mad…or
worse.
Lavender Town - Any Pokemon fans out there?
You might already know this, but the music that plays in Lavender Town In Pokemon Red
and Green allegedly sparked an alarming number of child suicides in Japan.
The music is undoubtedly spooky, horror blog Bloody Disgusting hailed it as one of the
most terrifying childhood memories for gamers.
The music has a number of jarring chords but is weirdly calm…I think we can all agree
we wouldn’t want to listen to it on a loop for too long.
According to a creepypasta that surfaced in 2010, the music compelled 100 Japanese children
to kill themselves, leaving others with weird behavioral outbursts and others with physical
ailments such as nosebleeds and headaches.
Sicknesses and suicides became known as Lavender Town Syndrome.
Legend has it that the high pitch binaural beats tapped into the brains of children in
a way that could affect their moods.
Whether or not this is true, it seems Pokemon were worried.
They rerecorded the music for the 2017 Pokemon Go Halloween Event.
Suspicious.
Maybe don’t listen to this one.
I just want to read some comments from my recent videos, the Top 10 People That Came
Back from The Afterlife.
It was a creep fest of a video….
And you had lots of interesting things to say.
Mike Peugeot said: My dad died for 18 seconds when he had a heart attack.
Did I like the video.?
The Comedy Fun Club had quite the story.
They said: My great grandma was told that my great-grandfather had died in the war my
great grandma found out he wasn’t dead because a few days later he turned up at the front
door?
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Most Amazing …. Did any of you listen to any
of these haunted songs?
If so…you okay?
What is your favorite song?
Like, share, notification bell.