Pop Culture Urban Legends / Music

• The Beatles:
  • Perhaps the most well-known classic rock urban legend of all time is the "Paul is dead" legend, which led people to believe that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in November 1966 on his way home from a recording session for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and, either to spare the public and themselves from the grief of Paul's "death" or to simply pull a sick joke, his bandmates, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, replaced Paul with a look-and-soundalike from Scotland named William Shepard Campbell (also known as "Billy Shears"), who had won an alleged "Paul McCartney look-a-like" contest. Supposedly, clues to this are sprinkled throughout the group's post-1966 work, especially their album covers, with the iconic Abbey Road cover being singled out the most due to Paul being noticeably barefoot in the photo (corpses are usually buried barefoot in some societies), in addition to people believing the album cover was depicting a funeral procession, with Lennon being the heavenly figure (his white suit), Starr as the undertaker (his black attire), and Harrison as the gravedigger (his denim and jeans), with McCartney as the corpse (his lack of shoes and walking out of step with the rest of The Beatles). The very-much-alive Paul parodied this with the cover and title of his 1993 live album, Paul is Live.
    • Although McCartney was indeed involved in two car crashes around this time, many witnesses and onlookers confirmed he was alive and well. Additionally, he was wearing sandals during the Abbey Road photo shoot, but he only took them off because they were getting uncomfortable. In fact, the whole Abbey Road cover wasn't planned; it was one of several photos of them crossing the street and was chosen as the cover because they happened to be stepping in sync for that shot. There's also no evidence of the contest taking place or a man named "William 'Billy Shears' Campbell" even existing.
    • A later rumor claimed that the original legend was created by Detroit DJ Russ Gibb as a publicity stunt. In fact, it had been circulating among college students in the Midwest for a few months, and Gibb only learned about it because someone called his show to talk about it before he became its main public proponent (with No Such Thing as Bad Publicity motives).
  • Then there’s the oft-repeated claim that "Yesterday" is the most-recorded song of all-time, with more than 3,000 cover versions. This is thanks to a poorly-researched Guinness World Records entry. There are much older pop standards that are known to have recorded renditions numbering in the tens of thousands.
• Elvis Lives: The second most persistent urban legend is that Elvis Presley intentionally faked his own death and is still alive somewhere. This came out of the fact that his death certificate had numerous inconsistencies, and for a period of time, various tabloids reported on people who claimed to have seen him alive after his death. Most of these claims have been dismissed as being results of distraught fans not being able to accept his death.
  • Elvis is far from the only musician to have a legend of faking their own death attributed to him. Others include Jim Morrison of The Doors (as his corpse was never autopsied) and Tupac Shakur (since a good number of posthumous albums have been made, with some believing the music to be hinting at a comeback). There's a probably semi-joking theory out there that Jim Morrison is not only still alive, but that he's Thomas Pynchon.
    • A variation on the idea of Tupac still being alive is that he took on a new identity as Akil The MC, a member of hip hop group Jurassic 5: The evidence basically amounts to Akil having a vague physical resemblance to Tupac, and the fact that Jurassic 5 released their debut about a year after Shakur's death.
    • Another variation is that both Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. are both still alive and sitting on a beach together somewhere like Bora Bora and laughing about the elaborate con they've pulled off. Kurt Cobain, who committed suicide two years before Tupac was murdered, is often mentioned as being in on it with them.
• The Mamas & the Papas:
  • When Mama Cass Elliot suddenly died, rumours grew about her dying from choking on a ham sandwich.^note  Even Austin Powers had a joke about this. She actually died in her sleep of heart failure. The rumour started after a half-eaten ham sandwich was found in the room she died in; a doctor who spoke with the press speculated that this sandwich could be the cause of her death. An autopsy later revealed that there was no food found in her windpipe.
    • Mama Cass Elliot's death also started a rumor about her being pregnant with John Lennon's child. This is not true, as she and John were never a couple and had only briefly met once. The autopsy collected no evidence to support claims of pregnancy.
• Phil Collins:
  • The song "In The Air Tonight" has an urban legend which takes the first verse more literally. The most famous version of the legend claims that Phil and a friend are at a lake when the friend falls in and starts to drown. Phil is too far away to help, but sees someone closer and asks him to save his friend. The other person refuses and Phil's friend drowns. In response, Phil and his writing team write the song and Phil invites the man to his next concert. He sings the song directly to the man who then either gets arrested by the police or runs out of the concert and kills himself. (Other versions involve a man doing something horrible to Phil, his friends, and/or his family, and when the man ends up in danger of drowning, Phil remembers what the man did and refuses to help.) Phil himself says the legend is not true and he doesn't know where it came from.
  • On a lighter note, there are several theories as to where the title of "Sussudio" came from. Some claim that it was the name of a pony that Phil's daughter had, while others claim he got the title from someone (such as his daughter or an employee) mispronouncing the word "studio". The truth is much more mundane: it was a piece of gibberish that he improvised, and he liked the way it sounded. In layman's terms, it was actually meant to be a placeholder lyric until he found something better, but he never found another word that worked just as well.
• There's a rumor that the line "Wrong move, you're dead" from the Bell Biv DeVoe song "Poison" is actually "Rob Moore, you're dead", in reference to the former New York Jets wide receiver Rob Moore, who was rumored to have stolen Michael Bivens' girlfriend in college, and that this was a warning to him. Some people even think that the fact that Michael is wearing a Jets' hoodie in the music video backs this up. In truth, not only does Michael Bivens not know who Rob Moore is, but the song wasn't even written by him.
• There is an urban legend surrounding the song "Love Rollercoaster" by The Ohio Players. In the song, a high-pitched scream is heard (between 1:24 and 1:28 on the single version, or between 2:32 and 2:36 on the album version). It really was Billy Beck, but the legend goes that the scream was an individual being murdered live during the recording. The scream's supposed source varies from version to version. A lot of them involve Ester Cordet. This urban legend gets a subtle reference in Final Destination 3, which uses this song (including the part with the scream) in the roller-coaster scene.
• "Gloomy Sunday" is also known as the Hungarian Suicide Song. The precise nature of the urban legend is a little different depending on who you ask, but the basic version is that the song can cause people to commit suicide. While creepy and sad, the song certainly won't make you kill yourself— not to mention that Hungary, where the supposed song-caused deaths occurred, historically has a high suicide rate to begin with. The legend was given a nod in Danganronpa 3, where Monokuma runs a depressing video titled "Monokuma's Gloomy Sunday" and is the direct cause of the blackout deaths, hypnotizing its viewers into killing themselves. There's also a nod in the final episode of Babylon Berlin Season 2, in which Sorokhina, performing at a cabaret in Paris under the pseudonym "la Contesse en noir" sings a version of the song in Russian before (fake) cutting her throat with a razor.
• Backmasking has resulted in a few of these, most famously the Subliminal Seduction claims that "Revolution No. 9" by The Beatles secretly contains the phrase "turn me on, dead man" (tying in with the aforementioned "Paul is dead" rumor), "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin contains "here's to my sweet Satan," and "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen contains "it's fun to smoke marijuana." None of these cases are true, and most apparent corroborations come from people being primed to interpret what amounts to nonsensical gibberish as a specific phrase.
• In fundamental Christian circles, it's popular to tell the story of an artist admitting to being approached by the devil and signed a contract to become famous musicians, under the condition of giving up their souls and/or putting subliminal satanic messages in their music to corrupt the youth. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath (or just Ozzy Osbourne himself), Judas Priest and Mötley Crüe are the most popular targets of this rumor. Probably taken from the famous tale of Robert Johnson. The legend also inspired the infamous Jack Chick comic "Angels?".
• Some fundamentalist Christians like to say that AC/DC stands for Against Christ/Devil's Child or Assault Christians/Destroy Christians (actually, simply taken from the "alternating current/direct current" label on the back of the Youngs' sister's sewing machine) and KISS stands for Knights In Satan's Service (the band states it's Exactly What It Says on the Tin).
• Various bands have been accused of bringing various animals (usually puppies or kittens) to a show and having them thrown into the audience and stating they weren't going to start the show until all the animals were dead. KISS, Marilyn Manson, and Ozzy got this one the most. The rumors seem to stem from a real incident that happened during an Alice Cooper show, when fans threw a chicken on-stage and Cooper, having grown up in urban Detroit, threw it back under the assumption that it would fly away, only for the flightless bird to fall into and get torn to shreds by the audience. ^note Alice's manager Shep Gordon later admitted he brought the chicken. This played off their stage show, but it went bigger than Shep thought. When the news media exaggerated the incident, including the claim Cooper had sacrificed the chicken on-stage as part of a Satanic ritual, Frank Zappa asked him about the incident, and upon hearing the true story, told them, "Whatever you do, don't tell anyone you didn't do it." Another band, Coven, did hold Satanic masses on-stage during their lifetime, but none of them involved animal sacrifice. Another possible source is the notorious incident in 1977 where John Cale, in order to troll vegetarian band members and the audience, chopped a chicken up with a cleaver on stage in London, although in that case the chicken was already dead. The rumors about it being Ozzy were so widely-believed he was cautioned by many local police about not doing animal sacrifices. His own real antics (biting the head off a pigeon, accidentally biting the head off a bat thinking it was rubber) didn't help this rumor at all.
• George Clinton may or may not have told Eddie Hazel to play the first half of the solo that runs throughout the whole of Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" as if he'd just heard his mother had died, then play the second half as if he'd then heard the news of her death had turned out to be false. The truth will likely never be known; a lot of drugs were involved, and Hazel can no longer confirm or deny anything on account of his death.
• After Michael Jackson's death in 2009, reports that a guilt-stricken Jordan Chandler — the first person to publicly accuse him of child molestation back in 1993 — issued a statement claiming that he was forced to lie about the abuse by his greedy father began to circulate online. Snopes quickly debunked this one, and Randall Sullivan's biography Untouchable traces it back to an email a fan sent to Jackson's mother shortly after his death. Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped his brother Jermaine and rabid fans from continuing to spread the legend (in truth, none of his accusers have taken back their claims)^note That said, none of the accusations have, so far, held up in a court of law..
• The band KMFDM's initials standing for Kill Mother Fucking Depeche Mode. Stems mostly from fan speculation that resulted in a reporter asking if it was true, and them in turn saying: "Sure, Let's Go with That." In reality, it stands for "Kein Merheit fur die Mitleid" (roughly "no mercy for the masses" or "no pity for the majority" in really poor German). The urban legend is referenced in their song "Sucks", when they state that they "hate Depeche Mode" among other pop artists, and the song "Kunst", where the chorus is "KMFDM: Kill Mother Fucking Depeche Mode". Of course, the band's full name can be found in the liner notes of their first album.
• Kurt Cobain wrote at least part, if not all, of Hole's second album Live Through This. Kurt denied this while he was alive, Courtney Love and the rest of the band have denied it since, early demos and live performances of some songs on the album were recorded before Kurt and Courtney were even dating and there's no real evidence of it anywhere (other than that he sang and played along with a few songs in their rehearsals during recording). Essentially, it boils down to people who just don't like Love, and want to deny she has any real talent (since the first Hole album, Pretty on the Inside, written before Kurt and Courtney's relationship, is critically acclaimed and is agreed by most to be really good). The most involvement Kurt is confirmed to have with the album is 1) singing uncredited backing vocals on a few songs, and 2) co-writing a B-Side called "Old Age"^note the latter may have started, or at least helped along, the rumors- the song was initially credited to Courtney Love alone, with her vaguely admitting in an interview it was adapted from someone else's unfinished song without naming whose. Bootlegs would reveal she had loosely adapted the Nirvana outtake "Old Age", keeping the chords and the chorus but rewriting most of the lyrics and somewhat altering the verse melody.
• There's an urban legend among Britpop fans that Damon Albarn of Blur wrote most or all of the self-titled first album by Elastica, the band led by his then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann. Again, there's little to support this except dislike of Elastica and/or assumptions that women can't write music (Elastica took a notoriously long time to write a second album, but there are well-attested reasons why), and the songwriting is quite different from Albarn's usual style.
• A famous singer/musician, Always Male, having to have his stomach pumped from blowing too many guys at a party. Usually Rod Stewart or Elton John, though in modern times it's been attributed to Clay Aiken, Ricky Martin, and Justin Bieber.
• There's a rumour that a famous young pop singer/rapper was once raped in a limousine in the '90s or early 2000s, usually by a bodyguard. This is most famously attributed to happening to Lil Bow Wow, but there is no evidence that this ever happened.
• When 1000 Homo DJs (a Ministry side project) did a cover of Black Sabbath's "Supernaut," they were asked to remove vocals Trent Reznor had recorded by his record label at the time. The urban legend is that, instead of re-recording the song with a different singer, Ministry's Al Jourgensen added additional distortion effects to Reznor's take and only claimed to have re-recorded the vocals himself. Jourgensen always maintained he sang it himself, even when there was no longer any potential for legal action ^note Reznor's former label, TVT, eventually bought out 1000 Homo DJs label, Wax Trax!, and even officially released the "Trent Reznor Vocal Version" of "Supernaut" as part of a box set. By listening to the Trent Reznor version followed by the Al Jourgensen one, one can tell that Al was somewhat mimicking Trent's performance, which might be where the myth gained traction.
• Frank Zappa: The very first chapter of Zappa's autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book debunks two rumors often told about him. No, he is not the son of Mr. Green Genes from Captain Kangaroo, just because the album Hot Rats (1969) happened to have a track titled that way. Similarly, he never ate feces on stage during a concert— that was GG Allin.
• Actor and radio/TV presenter Bob Holness is reputed to have played the saxophone solo on Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street. This is a legend that spun off from a joke made by DJ/author Stuart Maconie when he wrote for the NME. Adding even further layers of mythology, responsibility has also been claimed by another British DJ, Tommy Boyd, who claims he invented it for a 'True or False' quiz, and by Raphael Ravenscroft, the actual saxophonist, who was tired of being asked if he had played on the record and said it was Holness because he had recently worked with him on a TV commercial.
• Overlapping with Live-Action TV, two different generations have a variation on an urban legend that a Former Child Star grew up to be a Shock Rocker:
  • In The '70s, rumors spread that Alice Cooper had played either Eddie Haskell or the eponymous character on Leave It to Beaver. In reality, the Beaver was played by Jerry Mathers and Eddie Haskell was played by Ken Osmond. (Alice's birth name is Vincent Furnier).
  • Meanwhile, in The '90s, a more popular legend spread that the incredibly nerdy Paul from The Wonder Years was now Marilyn Manson^note Not that everything added up anyway, since the real actor was younger than Manson by almost a decade. In reality, Paul's actor, Josh Savino, quit acting after the show ended to become a lawyer but is amused by the rumor since kids think he's cool as a result. Mr. Manson... not so much.
• On the subject of Marilyn Manson, that's hardly the only one to circulate about him. Other popular ones include claims that he had two ribs removed so that he could more easily suck his own penis (this is actually more attributed to Cher, though not the autofellatio part obviously and it doesn't apply for her either), that he gave away free drugs at his shows, and that he injected heroin into one of his eyeballs in order to get his heterochromia (the look actually comes from contact lenses). He's also one of the many musicians attached to the aforementioned legend about throwing puppies into the crowd for them to kill. He is, however, an honorary reverend in the Church of Satan. The ribs one is given a nod in the Neil Cicierega album Mouth Dreams, where three tracks next to each other read 'Get Happy', 'Ribs', and 'My Mouth', with 'Ribs' sampling Marilyn Manson.
• It's been widely rumored that Charles Manson auditioned to be in The Monkees. While this isn't as implausible as it might initially sound, since Manson was on the fringes of the Los Angeles music scene in The '60s, pursuing a career as a singer-songwriter and befriending Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys (with the group even recording a rewritten version of a Manson song), the auditions took place in 1965, and Manson was in prison at the time for trying to forge and cash a U.S. Treasury check. He didn't get released until March of 1967.
• The Vapors' hit "Turning Japanese" is believed to be about masturbation. This is cited as true but the band has said that it isn't. In reality, there's no official meaning behind the song. In fact, it's just one of many songs frequently stated by the public to be secretly about masturbation, and in nearly all cases the artists confirm that they're not (Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" is another example).
• The La's song "There She Goes" is widely believed to be song about heroin addiction due to the questionable lyric "Pulsing through my veins". The song has nothing to do with heroin; it's just a Silly Love Song.
• There was a demo cassette from Los Prisioneros that was given from Jorge González to a fan with various demo songs from all albums as well some live recordings and unreleased songs (especially from the Fake Band "Gus Gusano y sus Hemofílicos Necrofílicos"), which was cataloged as an Urban Legend by the fans and only mentioned in some of the group's biography books. Just like other bootleg discs that were lost, this trope became averted since finally the disc was Rereleased for Free on the internet by the fan who owned the cassette under the name of Raspando la Olla ("Scratching the Pot", a Chilean slang about getting the leftovers), after the final breakup of Los Prisioneros in 2006.
• A rather bizarre and easily disproven legend asserts that this "Ghost Song," which apparently popped up online in 2011 with no real information available about it, was written and recorded by an anonymous musician who was Driven to Suicide a week after recording it. Except it wasn't. It's "Horses", a track by (currently) still-living former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, created for his 1999 soundtrack to interpretive dance group Ultima Vez's performance In Spite of Wishing and Wanting.
• Beyoncé is the center of a few urban legends:
  • She was heavily rumored to have used a surrogate to carry her oldest child, Blue, and faked being pregnant herself in 2011. This started when she made an appearance on an Australian talk show. When she sat down, a video taken at an odd angle made it look like her belly had folded over. However, several years later during the short film that accompanied her album, Lemonade, she put the rumor to rest when she interpolated some video of herself wearing only a bra that proved she had really been pregnant.
  • There was a longer running rumor that she was actually older than she claimed, having been born in 1979 and not 1981 like she claimed. Some went as far to say she was actually her sister Solange's mother, though Solange was born in 1986. This was later proven false when the state of Texas released a slew of old documents to an ancestry website with her birth certificate among them with a 1981 birthdate.
• There's a persistent rumor that Andrew W.K. is a creation of his studio, and is actually played by several different actors rather than being one person. Not helping is the fact that W.K. seems to either be partially responsible for creating the rumor, or at least loves leaning into it (although he has outright denied it in the past).
• One 2006 rumor claimed that one of the girls appearing in the "Lean wit It, Rock wit It" music video accidentally broke her own neck while trying to do the dance. No credible reports of this have surfaced, making this claim dubious at best.
• The Lou Reed song "The Kids" contains the sounds of children screaming and crying out for their mother, starting an urban legend that the children used for the recording were told their mother had died in order to make the screaming and crying sound genuine. In reality, the children in the song were the children of the song's producer, Bob Ezrin, and were told to pretend to scream and cry - and they did it so well, listeners thought it was real.
  • The back cover of his Transformer features photos of a man and a woman - rumor had it that, tying in with songs that referenced a trans woman ("Walk On The Wild Side") and a transvestite ("Make Up"), the woman and the man were portrayed by the same person. In reality, the woman is 1960s British model Gala Mitchel, while the man is Ernie Thormahlen, a friend of Lou Reed.
• Gene Simmons is widely said to have had a cow's tongue grafted onto his own tongue. Even if such a thing were possible with 1970s medical technology, there's no way a cow's tongue could have fit in his mouth.
• There are several classic rock guitarists whom Jimi Hendrix is alleged to have described as the best guitarist in the world, including Phil Keaggy of the Christian rock group Glass Harp (who for his own part claims it is impossible for Hendrix to have heard his playing because his band only recorded their first album two weeks after Hendrix's death), Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top (Hendrix did make a passing reference to Gibbons in an interview and described him as a young guitarist whose playing impressed him shortly before he died, which has inflated in grandiosity with the passage of time) and Terry Kath of Chicago (usually represented as Hendrix claiming "Terry Kath is a better guitarist than me" or "Terry Kath is the best guitarist in the universe", the provenance of which is not entirely clear). What is known is that Hendrix had acknowledged Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck as important influences on his own playing in the mid-1960s, and expressed admiration for many others, but it's not definitively clear if he highlighted a particular musician as the world's best on the instrument.
• There is a rumor that the first verse of Bobby Brown's Grammy-winning "Every Little Step" was actually sung by an uncredited Ralph Tresvant, of his former band New Edition. The story goes that Bobby was too strung out on drugs to make it into the studio and Ralph stepped in to record the verse. While this was backed up by Brown's former manager, both Brown and Tresvant have remained coy about it; only going on record to say that the song had switched hands between NE and Brown during the recording of their respective albums.
• Among British alternative fans, the single release of New Order's "Sub-Culture" is notorious for its bare-bones packaging, being a generic black sleeve that deviated from band collaborator Peter Saville's meticulously calculated designs. Because the single release used a divisively-received remix, rumors started to circulate claiming that Saville hated what producer John Robie did to the song and refused to design a cover as a result. This wasn't debunked until April 17, 2020, when Saville clarified that he simply wasn't commissioned to design artwork for the single.
• A common rumor is that singer/songwriter of "Don't Worry, Be Happy", Bobby McFerrin, eventually killed himself. McFerrin is still alive as of 2023.
• It's often suspected that T. Rex's single "Get It On" was retitled "Bang a Gong" in the USA due to prudish American music industry figures not approving of the original title's sexual meaning. In fact, it was retitled because it came out at almost the same time as a completely different single called "Get It On" by the American jazz-rock band Chase (the legend probably developing as hardly anybody in the UK had ever heard of Chase).
• For twenty years, R&B fans claimed Al B. Sure! was singing the vocals on Guy's 1988 album cut "You Can Call Me Crazy", and not the credited ex-member Timmy Gatling. In a 2008 interview breaking down the album, Teddy Riley semi-confirmed the rumor: The song was written and produced by the group for Sure! in the first place, but taken back the orders of their manager. Though the lead vocal was all Gatling, he didn't finish recording his parts before leaving the group, and they ended up keeping Sure!'s overdubs and ad-libs in the final cut.
• On the soundtrack album of Jerry Goldsmith's music for Rudy you can hear a voice singing along with the choir in the "Main Title" - it's been long-rumoured to be Goldsmith himself. (You can't hear it on the 2022 Deluxe Edition release.)
• When 311 first started having mainstream success, they were dogged by a rumor that their band name was a coded reference to the Ku Klux Klan - the idea was that 311 would be the eleventh letter of the alphabet three times, or "KKK". In fact 311 is Omaha police code for public nudity, and they named themselves as a Creator In-Joke about their first guitarist getting arrested for skinny dipping in their home state. The KKK rumor gained enough traction that fans were getting suspended from high school for wearing shirts of the band's logo, and the band started writing a song specifically condemning the Klan before deciding to rewrite the lyrics to promote tolerance and unity instead ("Electricity", which had the Working Title "Fuck the KKK").
• A rumor spread online among Soundgarden fans was that the lyrics to the Single Stanza Song "I Awake" came about when the member who wrote the song, Hiro Yamamoto, handed Chris Cornell a lyric sheet written on the back of a note from his girlfriend, and Cornell mistook the note itself for song lyrics. This is half-true: The lyrics really were based on a note Kate McDonald, Hiro's girlfriend at the time, left for him - she's therefore credited for co-writing the song; but the band didn't use those words by mistake, and presumably just thought it would be interesting to re-contextualize them as lyrics.
• It's often claimed that Rakim ghostwrote the lyrics of DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince's "Summertime", due to Will Smith's new flow sounding very similar to his. Rakim repeatedly denied writing Smith's verses, but jokingly said Smith still owed him money for using his flow. Smith, for his part, admitted to mimicking Rakim's flow, but confirmed Rakim had nothing to do with the songwriting.

---