Tinfoil Hi-hats: The five strangest music conspiracies
It’s a bitter irony that in the age where information is supposedly easier to access than ever, the rates of people subscribing to conspiracy theories are skyrocketing.
It’s an easy enough reflex to understand. The world is an unending, nonsensical void of chaos that absolutely no one can understand or predict. People fear unpredictability, so they look to others who can explain why everything is so terrifying. The facts are that basically no one is in control of anything; naturally, the only comfortable answers come from misinformation and conspiracy theories. Things that are doubly seductive, as they also give scared people an enemy to root against, the majority of the time.
That is an intoxicating combination. Everyone, to a letter, is one bad day away from subscribing to these theories, yourself included. Everywhere you look, people are speculating about the shady people controlling everything behind the scenes. Most often this is in politics, but this is talk that’s gone so mainstream it’s gone into discussions about film, TV, fashion, economics and music.
These are some of the weirdest, funniest and in some instances, darkest cases in music where people have decided the facts just don’t add up. That two plus two doesn’t in fact equal four, it actually equals a cabal of music industry cronies who’ve taken your favourite pop star and replaced them with an alien/clone/cyborg/delete as applicable.
Listening to these people may prove infuriating, but it’s always worth understanding them. Into the rabbit hole we go…
The strangest music conspiracy theories:
Supertramp predicted 9/11
Many are credited with predicting the terrorist attack that still defines the 21st century as we know it, but the truth is, the World Trade Centre was one of the world’s most recognisable buildings and a symbol for New York City’s power and influence.
Yet there is still something rather unsettling about the album cover for Supertramp’s 1979 album Breakfast In America, and not just because of the whole “diner waitress outside your airplane window like The Twilight Zone got stuck in Happy Days” thing. No, look behind her, at the New York City skyline. Look at the towers. Look at how they cut into the bottom of the letters U and P in the band name, making them look like… Y’know.
Jim Morrison faked his death and changed his name to Rush Limbaugh
The death of the hippy dream didn’t come at Woodstock, Altamont or anything else that happened in the late 1960s and early ’70s. No, it happened in the ’80s, when the hippies grew up, cut their hair and became the face of corporate America, showing their ideology of peace and love to be nothing but a con to get ass and grass. Absolutely nothing could show this with more poetic elegance than Jim Morrison faking his death to become the late right-wing grifter Rush Limbaugh.
It certainly would be more elegantly poetic than anything a drunken buffoon like Morrison could ever come up with, but this is more than just a neat idea. In fact, if you line up the face of a young Rush Limbaugh (without throwing up) with the face of Jim Morrison just before he passed, you can see a quite frankly astonishing resemblance, right down to the pattern of moles to the left of their nose. The kind of thing that once you see, you can never unsee.
There are a fleet of Andrew WKs
For years, you could reasonably justify saying that there was only one Andrew WK. A fierce force for positivity who was simultaneously the purveyor of the dumbest of pop-metal jock jams, while also being a classical piano prodigy. He was a complete outlier who was unafraid of being himself. Sometimes to a fault. But if you’ve ever been in a rock club when the vocodored words “when it’s time to party we will party hard” plays over the PA, I defy you not to mosh with a grin as big and as stupid as that riff on your face. However, there’s also a very real chance you’d be completely wrong about that statement.
Pretty much immediately after the breakthrough of ‘Party Hard’, people started looking into the too-good-to-be-true nature of Andrew WK. That the man who seemed purpose-built in a lab to be the ultimate 21st-century rock star might have been that level of corporate creation. One that Dave Grohl, Rick Rubin and people with names like Steev Mike might all be involved in. The reports are that no less than three people have fronted the project as “Andrew WK” and that every aspect of him is the work of a team of stylists, producers and songwriters. Andrew himself has been asked about this conspiracy, and while he scoffs at it, he never outright denies it…
The Replacements (not them)
In the wake of Jim Carrey’s appearance at the César Awards in Paris, there’s been a resurgence in a tried and tested conspiracy chestnut. That the person we once knew as Jim Carrey has been secretly replaced by a lookalike. In Carrey’s case, the speculation is that they’ve cloned him. However, the cloning thing is a modern wrinkle in a thoroughly traditional conspiracy theory.
I mean, come on, this goes back to the original music conspiracy theory that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in the mid-1960s and was replaced by at least one lookalike. Depending on the version of the story you’re hearing, it can be up to four. Macca’s not alone, however. Everyone from Beyoncé to Miley Cyrus has been accused of being replaced with a new model at some point, but few people have got it worse than Avril Lavigne, who has been accused of being her body double, Melissa Vandella, since 2003.
Gangsta rap was invented by the prison-industrial complex
This one is a fucking minefield. The conspiracy theory goes that in 1991, a meeting was held that was half bigwigs in the music industry, and half bigwigs in the prison industrial complex. The music industry half of the table had recently purchased shares in the private prison industry, and the meeting was about how these people could make the most out of their investment and promote music that would encourage young people to pursue criminality. They left the meeting with the blueprint of what would become gangsta rap.
If you look deep enough, you can find connections between record labels and private prisons based on their parents companies. The thing is, though, everything in the world is owned by, like, eight families. That’s just the delightful mix of feudalism and unchecked capitalism the world runs on. The idea that the very idea of gangsta rap, an art form that arguably was made mainstream at least four years before with the release of Straight Outta Compton, an album about the way the American Police force unjustly targets young Black men, was built to put young Black men in prison? Ludicrous.
