Bob Dylan

As early as 1962, Greenwich Village vagabond Bob Dylan happily spread the colourful deception that he had jumped into the carny life as a teen.

Broadcast days before his eponymous debut, Dylan spoke candidly of his youth assisting the travelling fare on Cynthia Gooding’s Folksinger’s Choice show on New York’s WBAI radio. “I was with the carnival off and on for six years,” he declared. “[I was doing] just about everything. I was a clean-up boy. I used to be on the main line on the Ferris wheel, just run rides”.

Truth is, Dylan was living a wholly unremarkable suburban life in Minnesota’s Hibbing back when he was known as Robert Zimmerman, in a close Jewish community and pursuing a road to music upon hearing rock and roll’s white flash just like any other kid of the 1950s. So what? Knowing the universal appeal of storytelling, Dylan’s fanciful obfuscations of his roots no doubt added to his folk mystique when he first unleashed those God-given songs at such a young age.

Jim Morrison

Ironically, The Doors shared a disquieting proximity to the US military during their heady, countercultural peak.

As frontman Jim Morrison was lambasting the ongoing Vietnam War as much as any dissident young artist was at the time, his father, George, was a Rear Admiral in the Navy, commanding operational task forces against communist belligerents in North Vietnam and assisting South Korea with skirmishes along the country’s DMZ. Commanding the fleet during the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, Morrison’s father was witness to the Vietnam War’s pivotal escalation.

However, it was the home life that triggered Morrison’s later ruse. Subject to an authoritarian childhood and the recipient of many a ‘dressing-down’ from his military father, Morrison began telling his student peers at UCLA that his parents and siblings were all dead.

Estranging himself from his family upon leaving home for the Los Angeles university, the allegedly emotionally oppressive childhood he endured served as a cruel lie he’d uphold most of his short life, exacerbated by his father’s disapproving bewilderment with his son’s rock career. The myth was so committed to Elektra Records that it even publicised Morrison’s supposed orphanhood when promoting The Doors’ debut album in early 1967.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Composing and performing to the roaring applause of the Holy Roman Empire’s royal elite, it’s easy to think that Beethoven was destined for Viennese nobility by birth.

Born in Bonn in the Rhine country, his father’s Flemish heritage passed down the ‘van’ in his surname, a sign of blue-blooded aristocracy in the majority of the German Nations during the 18th century, aside from Flanders, where the name was as common as Jan or Josef. Beethoven’s father, Johann, himself a musician, died an alcoholic; Beethoven supposedly never mentioned him for the rest of his life.

Beethoven was in no rush to downplay the prestigious pretence of his all-important middle prefix. Eager to distance himself from his relatively humble beginnings, Beethoven keenly allowed the popular rumour that he was the illegitimate child of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II to entrench itself in his lore for decades.

The true nature of his origins was revealed during a custody battle for his nephew Karl, forced to admit to the Imperial Royal Landrechete his scant noble heritage when pushing for the young Karl to enter the exclusive Theresianium music school. When pressed, Beethoven reportedly pointed to his head and heart: “My nobility is here, and here!”

Lou Reed

Lou Reed never hid his array of lies to the press over the years.

Sometimes out of sheer boredom, often from the contempt for promotional obligations when pressured to flog an album, Reed often peppered interviews with far-fetched embellishments and downright mistruth to amuse himself.

Apparently encouraged by Andy Warhol during his Velvet Underground years, Reed would spin yarns from once pointing a rifle at a man’s head, to shocking a room of reporters that he’d arrived in Rome to have a sexual encounter with Pope Paul VI.

”I’ve lied so much about the past I can’t even tell myself what is true any more,” Reed told Mojo in 2003. One such dark myth is the alleged abuse he endured from his father, as well as the reasons for his electroconvulsive therapy. Reed had always claimed his father was an emotionally cruel and violent bully, and that the psychiatric punishments were meted out for suspected homosexual feelings, but this has been disputed by his sister, Merrill.

Putting the ECT sessions down to the medical trends of the day aimed at helping his depression, she further expressed her unfamiliarity with any supposed abuse in a 2015 Medium post: “I must say that I never saw my father raise a hand to anyone, certainly not to us and never to my mother. Nor did I see a lack of love for his son during our childhood. Like his son, my father could be a verbal bully but he was loving and inordinately proud of Lou and bragged about him in later life to anyone who would listen”.

Kid Rock

You would think that redneck rapper Kid Rock is a regular, blue-collar southern boy.

Finding fame during the nu-metal era before embracing a more rustic yet modern take on country, his former drape in the Confederate Dixie Flag and cartoon The Dukes of Hazzard style videos somehow thrust Kid Rock to a supposed successor to the likes of ZZ Top or Lynyrd Skynyrd.

At the start of his career in the late 1980s, however, Kid Rock was a hardcore hip-hop head from Detroit, opening for Boogie Down Productions and even touring with Ice Cube as a teen.

People can change, sure, but it’s the lies by omission regarding his upbringing that caused Kid Rock embarrassment later in life. While playing the working-class hillbilly, it was revealed he was the fortunate son of affluence, hailing from Macomb County, far north of Detroit’s mean streets, in a luxurious estate worth over $1.2 million.

A property boasting an impressive 5.5 acres, the Devil Without a Cause rapper and MAGA chud grew up in a neo-Georgian mansion complete with an indoor jacuzzi, a large guest house, horse stables, and a massive apple orchard. Remember that the next time he’s riding a middle-finger prop in some cringe, anti-woke rap dross.