Examples of Ripped from the Headlines in music.
- The Beatles had two in the same album: Paul wrote "She's Leaving Home" after reading about a girl who hit the road, and John wrote "A Day in the Life" based on two news articles (the car accident and the holes found in a road; The Film of the Book in another stanza is probably How I Won The War, in which he worked).
- This was common during the Protest Song movement of the early 1960s. Singers like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs would write songs, often using old folk melodies, about current events. Three of the best examples of this are Dylan's "Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll
," about the real-life killing of a poor black maid by a bored aristocrat. "Hurricane", about black boxer Hurricane Carter, who was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for killing several patrons at a bar (he was later exonerated and set free). And "Who Killed Davy Moore" about the boxer who died in the ring. Phil Ochs' "Outside A Small Circle of Friends" commemorates the Kitty Genovese murder, where a supposed 38 witnesses did nothing (not entirely true) because they "didn't want to get involved." Ochs (who studied journalism) called himself a "singing journalist" and titled his first album "All the News That's Fit to Sing". - Dylan and Ochs both followed the footsteps of Woody Guthrie, who wrote songs like this; "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" are probably the most famous.
- His son Arlo Guthrie belongs here as well, the littering incident from "Alice's Restaurant" made the local newspaper before he wrote the song.
- At least a couple David Bowie songs were inspired by current events. The immensely-acclaimed "Time Will Crawl" was inspired by Bowie's hearing of the Chernobyl Disaster on the radio in Switzerland, while the title track of Black Tie White Noise came from Bowie being a firsthand witness to the 1992 race riots in Los Angeles. A somewhat milder (yet also more extreme) example of this trope can be seen with the album Heathen, on which are several tracks that were rather heavily influenced by the September 11 Attacks.
- The idea for Stone Temple Pilots' song "Plush" is, according to singer Scott Weiland, partially taken from an article he read in the paper one day about a woman's murder.
- Nirvana's "Polly" was based on the kidnapping and brutal rape of a girl who eventually escaped from her attacker. Cobain later found out that two boys ended up singing the song while raping a different girl, inspiring the song "Rape Me", making this a rare case where one "ripped from the headlines" work ended up leading to the creation of another.
- "18 and Life" by Skid Row was written when guitarist Dave Sabo read a newspaper article about the event.
- Superchic[k]'s "Hero" seems in response to claims of bullying in schools and/or teen suicides.
- Trivium features four such songs on The Crusade; "Entrance of the Conflagration" (about the murder of four children by their mother Andrea Yates), "Unrepentant" (about Nazir Ahmad's murder of his four daughters), "Contempt Breeds Contamination" (about the racially-influenced killing of a Guinean immigrant by four cops in New York), and "And Sadness Will Sear" (about the hate-driven torture and murder of Matthew Shepard).
- The murder of Matthew Shepard also inspired Melissa Etheridge's song "Scarecrow."
- "Blasphemous Rumours" is a song that's actually about the lead singer's sister.
- The song "Maria Navarro" by Was/Not Was. Maria Navarro called 911 because her estranged husband had threatened to kill her. Dispatchers ignored the call and Maria died.
- The Decemberists' "12/17/12" was written as a way for Colin Meloy to cope with the conflicting feelings between his happy personal life and the suffering of the victims of the then-recent Sandy Hook shooting.
- To an extent, the song about Tom Dooley.
- The 1993 Duran Duran album track "Sin of the City" (from The Wedding Albumnote ) was basically a recount of the 1990 fire at the Happy Land, a nightclub in The Bronx, that killed 87 people (though the lyrics state, "89 dead").
- Another song inspired by the Happy Land fire was "Happy Land" by seminal New Wave/punk rock musician Joe Jackson.
- Gordon Lightfoot wrote and recorded two noteworthy songs about true events; his hit single "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" was in fact about the 1975 sinking of the American Great Lakes freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald, and "Black Day in July", a 1968 song about the 1967 Detroit race riots.
- Brenda Ann Spencer's 1979 shooting rampage that killed two people and injured nine others was the inspiration for The Boomtown Rats' song ''I Don't Like Mondays." The title of the song was what she stated was her reason for doing it.
- Bruce Springsteen's "American Skin (41 Shots)", from the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo by four New York City police officers.
- Living Colour also do live covers of this song.
- Springsteen's "Nebraska" is about the Charles Starkweather murder spree.
- Rush: The song "Heresy" from the album Roll the Bones was written about Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
- The song "The Way" by Fastball is based on a news story from 1997 about an elderly couple from Salado, Texas, who disappeared on their way to a local event being held in Temple, and were later found dead at the bottom of a 25 foot cliff just a few miles outside of Hot Springs, Arkansas (more than 500 miles from their destination). Lead singer Tony Scalzo was inspired to write lyrics about a presumably middle-aged couple who just got fed up with their lives and reality, and abandoned their children and everything else for a chance to find paradise. The refrain still makes it clear that they've reached Heaven, but their ghosts can still be seen wandering.
- "The Modest Revolution" by Enter The Haggis is based entirely on articles from a single issue of the Toronto Globe and Mail. The second track ""Can't Trust The News"" is based on a woman who, after some horrible couple years climbed the highest peak on each continent. In her 60's.
- A significant number of their other songs are based on true stories.
- The Gazette's song "Taion" is allegedly based on the murder of Junko Furuta, a seventeen-year-old girl who was kidnapped and tortured for an entire month before her abusers killed her.
- "Bind Torture Kill" by Suffocation, off their Self-Titled Album, is loosely inspired by the serial killer Dennis Rader, who was arrested about a year before the album's release. The lyrics themselves are more about the mindset of a serial killer than any of Rader's specific murders, though.
- "Hey Man Nice Shot" by Filter is about the politician Budd Dwyer, a Pennsylvania state treasurer who was accused of corruption. Vehemently claiming his innocence until the end, in early 1987 Dwyer called a press conference during which he read half of a prepared statement and then shot himself. The song was released in 1995 and its timing and subject matter lead many to speculate it was written about the similar suicide of Kurt Cobain but it was written in 1991.
- Pearl Jam's single "Jeremy" from Ten is about the suicide of Jeremy Wade Delle, a 15-year-old boy from Richardson, Texas. On January 8th, 1991, Delle shot himself in the mouth with a revolver in front of his teacher and his classmates, and so Eddie Vedder was moved to write the song both as an anti-bullying anthem and as an anti-suicide anthem, and is now one of their most well-known songs.
- The music video for "Learn To Fly" by Foo Fighters was inspired by an incident where the Drug Enforcement Agency discovered cocaine stashed away inside the nose cone of a commercial jet. The band took this idea and ran with it, featuring Jack Black and Kyle Gass of Tenacious D scrambling to hide away some cocaine before they're caught. They stash it inside the coffee maker, which results in everyone getting high as balls, including the flight crew. This leaves the band members themselves, who had already been served other drinks before-hand, to make an emergency landing.
- The Bee Gees "New York Mining Disaster 1941". (To be picky, it was inspired by the Aberfan Mining Disaster 1966, according to the other Wiki.)
- The Trammps' song "The Night the Lights Went Out" was created to commemorate the electrical blackout that affected New York City on July 13–14, 1977.
- The Title Track of Five Miles Out by Mike Oldfield is autobiographical - the unexperienced pilot of his machine directly flew into a storm, and they all survived only with a lot of luck.
- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had "Ohio", a Protest Song penned by Neil Young about the 1970 Kent State shootings.
- The Soft Cell song "Sex Dwarf" was inspired by a headline which Marc Almond read in the (now defunct) British tabloid The News of the World. Ironically, the duo found themselves on the wrong end of tabloid headlines after the song's video was reported to the police because of its sexually explicit content.
- "Miracle Man" by Ozzy Osbourne is based on Jimmy Swaggart, a televangelist with whom Osbourne had butted heads who was caught in a prostitution scandal in 1988. Seems Osbourne couldn't resist the urge to call out "Jimmy Sinner" on his hypocrisy. Similarly, the previous year saw Ray Stevens release "Would Jesus Wear a Rolex?" in response to the sexual and financial scandals that brought down PTL Network founder Jim Bakker.
- Being a punk band, Rise Against has a number of songs like this. "Make It Stop (September's Children)" was based on a number of prominent suicides of gay youths that were rooted in a history of harassment and bullying; the song even recites their names.
- "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1994 song "Headline News", which was added to his greatest hits collection Permanent Record, is a parody of the song "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" by Crash Test Dummies. It adapts the real stories of Michael Fay (an American man who was caught committing vandalism in Singapore and ended up caned), Nancy Kerrigan (an American ice skater who was injured by a man hired by rival skater Tonya Harding while preparing to qualify for the 1994 Winter Olympics), and John Wayne Bobbitt (whose penis was cut off by his then-wife Lorena as retaliation for infidelity and abuse).
- His earlier song parody Another One Rides The Bus briefly alludes to the 1979 The Who concert disaster in Cincinnati.
- Stereophonics: "Local Boy in the Photograph" is based on the newspaper article of a kid Kelly Jones knew who died by jumping off of a train.
- On the song "Burn" by Killer Mike, rapping about a number of injustices going on, also suggests "get yourself a shotgun/so then they come to evict/you can make 'em run". When questioned about these lyrics, Mike pointed out that that line was based on a news story where a homeowner had resisted foreclosure by brandishing a shotgun.
