How ‘My Way’ became the deadliest song in music
Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ is barely even a song anymore.
It’s one of the most famous recordings of all time, and because of that, it’s a million different things. It’s a meme. It’s an anthem of self-reliance. It’s cringey, self-congratulatory boomer nonsense. It’s one of the most popular funeral songs ever made. It’s been given so much resonance that most people forget the core fact about the song. The real reason that it was given so much resonance. That it fucking rips and it still does to this day.
Seriously, though, when Ol’ Blue Eyes truly releases the hounds on that final chorus, is there anyone of any era that doesn’t get a shiver down their spine? ‘My Way’ is a perfectly produced pop song with all the style and class of the jazz age funnelled through one of the great vocalists of his generation. Yet there’s something so down-to-earth about it. Sinatra isn’t a Golden God striding through the world, he pulls off the song like your best mate done good. Fully admitting that, as the record shows, he did indeed take some blows and had his share of losing.
Perhaps that’s one of the key reasons for its popularity. Unlike other songs of similar popularity, like Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ or ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, anyone can see themselves singing it. It’s a deceptively difficult song, though. One that many people have a very close, personal relationship with.
That, in the most literal sense of the term, is a lethal combination that a startling number of people in the Philippines found out in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
What inspired the ‘My Way’ Killings?
First things first, karaoke is massive in the Philippines. It’s one of the country’s favoured pastimes and a fairly common way of blowing off steam at the end of a hard-working day. Now, any bartender will tell you that a crowded bar is something of a powder keg. It can either lead to the best or worst night of your life, and if you add music into the equation, a great equaliser that can bring emotions out of anyone, then things can either go incredibly well or… well, the other way.
The worst it could possibly go was for 29-year-old Romy Baligula, who tried his hand at ‘the Sinatra classic ‘My Way’ on May 29th, 2007. He started out the Sinatra classic well enough, but as the song rose in intensity, Baligula lost the key and, as he struggled in vain to get it back, one of the bouncers of the San Mateo bar he was singing at shot him with his .38 calibre pistol. The urge to make a “tough crowd” joke here is almost too much, but, y’know, a real-life person died. So I’ll just allude to it instead.
He wasn’t alone either. The same thing happened to karaoke-goers singing ‘My Way’ in 2017 and 2018. Those are just the reported ones, too; there have been whispers of similar events going back to the late 1990s. To the point where several bars have banned the song outright for fears of repeat offenders.
That said, if you love the song enough to do it at karaoke, that outro being the last thing you hear in this world was probably always the plan, just not quite like this.